Hospitals & Asylums
Winter Solstice
Dissolution of Hospitals & Asylums (HA) Political Party Relating to the
Mayan Long Count HA-21-12-12
By Anthony J.
Sanders
We
are the rhythm of the Earth;
We are the soul of the Sea;
We are the spirit on
Fire;
We are the Air we
breathe!!
Element Chant
Ish na’whil – we are
one.
Mayan saying over
galactic spiral handshake.
Table of Contents
1.
Doomsday and Cosmic Party Prophecies Relating to the Progression of
the 5,125 Year Mayan Great Calendar
2.
North American Observation
3.
Food and Environmental Quality as a Civil Right
4.
Tea Party and Occupy Recession Protests
5.
Center for Alcohol, Tobacco and Marijuana (ATM)
1.
Doomsday and Cosmic Party Prophecies Relating to the Progression of
the 5,125 Year Mayan Great Calendar
The end of the…Mayan Great Calendar occurs on
the winter solstice on December 21, 2012 (Clow ’95: 4, 5). The Mayan Calendar was the
center of Maya life and their greatest achievement. According to the correlation between the 5,125 year
Long Count and Western calendars accepted by the great majority of Maya
researchers (known as the Goodman-Martinez-Thompson, or
GMT, correlation), this Mayan creation date 4 Ahaw, 8 Kumk’u is equivalent to
August 11 (my birthday), 3114 BCE in the proleptic Gregorian
calendar we use today. December 21, 2012 is the day that the calendar
will go to the next b'ak'tun, at Long Count 13.0.0.0.0. The date on which
the calendar will go to the next piktun (a complete series of
20 b'ak'tuns), at Long Count 1.0.0.0.0.0, will be on October 13, 4772. The Hebrew Calendar was established in 3,760 B.C. There are not exactly 13 Moon cycles in one
year, but every 18 years the Moon returns to its same location on the ecliptic
metonic cycle. The Caesars, by
superseding the Hebrew calendar and starting time all over at Zero Point, gave
birth to Christ. Once Julius Caesar
attained control of Rome, he abolished the lunar-based Etruscan calendar, and
he set up the solar based Julian Calendar.
There have been various calendar manipulations, such as the Ecclesiastical
Calendar set up at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. that set up the Roman
Catholic Church as the official dispenser of the Eucharist and the Gregorian
Calendar established by Gregory XIII in 1582 (Clow ’95: 120, 147). For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the
end of a whole cycle. Inspired by the shadow of the serpent descending the
Temple of the Sun and sun descending along the edge of the stone box on the
roof of el Caracol at the ruins of Chichen Itza during equinox 1994 I have been
publishing the Hospitals & Asylums (HA) newsletter yearly, equinox and
solstice (yes), without interruption since 2000, online, with another monthly
newsletter, since December 2004. Some
astrologers have predicted cataclysm, others a Cosmic Party. I want HA to continue to be published on the
equinox and solstice. Since three
personal acquaintances ran for local political office, without any political
party affiliation, and my namesake, Senator Bernie Sanders, is the only
independent in Congress, I am toying with the idea of Hospitals & Asylums
Political Party 2013 (HAPPY). It is an
auspicious time for HA under Moses’ command.
According to the International Meteor Organization (IMO) the Perseid
meteors of August 2012, with a peak of around 120-130 meteors per hour, edged
out the Leonids of November, with 110-120 meteors per hour, and is the largest
meteor shower since 600-700 Geminids fell per hour December 2011. In reality,
despite the cold from my last brush with civilization, my health has improved
dramatically since I stopped renting a “rheum”, with my less than $666 a month
disability (for three extra years), soon without foodstamps because of money
saved, and without any home to incite federal “homicide” in my community, I am
prepared to serve the public as their archivist, and I want for them to
know. Barring accident, I want us to
live beyond 100 years like some healthy indigenous cultures such as pre-contact
North American Indian tribes. Because
the lesson we have to teach the major political parties is dissolution and we
want to be nonviolent and healthy, at all times, so the arts might flourish,
and social networking remains out of reach (the athletic-scholar), our form of
reunion shall be dissolution, for six months of formal study of the Party line
(depending on your State), until you may be registered as a HA party candidate
with your election board.
2012 TARP Winter Shelter Photo Contest Entry
Credit: TARP Winter Shelter Close-out HA-31-12-11 Note: Freshman
political science principle - Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY).
Politics is mostly a matter regarding the
freedom of expression. I ask, how can we
be HAPPY if I own the exclusive rights to the balanced federal budget and
reorganization plan and am denied the freedom of the press by a monopolistic
media advertently protecting the Democratic-Republican (DR) two party systems
we must dissolve, if we hope to succeed as a people? Political candidates present an excellent
opportunity to introduce the people to the HA website and teach them the spirit
of a law that is well documented enough, and of good enough cheer, to uphold
the scientific method in a civil law system of agreement with hand written
briefs that cite the civil code, denied by the Democratic-Republican (DR) two
party system and their concession to the quasi common law system, for you, the
public. However, politics are peculiar
and whereas Andrew Jackson was the only President to pay off the federal debt,
the danger posed by reenactment of his Indian Removal Act at this stage of
denial regarding the balanced federal budget, imbues the reader with a
responsibility to insure the author against damage and loss under 24USC(10)§422(d) and Art. 14 of the Constitution
of Hospitals & Asylums Non-Governmental Economy (CHANGE). HA political
candidates at this time would probably want to link their websites to the
balanced budget because they feel the public should be informed of the
existence of HA as a civil law system that operates exclusively by agreement
with written briefs that cite the civil code and literature for the benefit of
scientific knowledge. If candidates wish to run for political office on the HA
ticket, they are asked to read CHANGE, submit a brief to
HA explaining their political aspirations and either agree to pay dues if they
are rich or write responsible legal briefs that cite the civil code and
literature for publication by HA, on a quarterly basis, like the actual friends
I would like to cultivate to take over my work as Secretary, when I have gone
to the Great Library in the Sky. But
that time has not yet come. I feel good,
healthy and unashamed. I have practiced
the highest art-form of a people totally occupied by food gathering in nature -
the brush shelter – constructed a TARP winter shelter to host a winter solstice
party with which to ask the public authority for permission to camp, pay $47
billion for the entire Housing and Urban Development (HUD) budget FY 2013 and
retroactively return around $300 billion in repaid TARP loans to the General
Fund to sustain the Federal Budget Balanced to Prevent Debt from
Exceeding 100% of GDP FY 2012
HA-13-7-12.
It will not be easy to get into this
Party. The bar on written briefs is set
infinitely higher than the politicians we are given to elect, organizations
they proliferate or the contemporary legal practice defending the rights of the
criminally accused. You must make it
your goal to meditate on the issues presented in the HA newsletter during
solstices, equinoxes and new and full moons.
In 1998 A.D. the Age of Pisces moved into the Age of Aquarius. Deepak Chopra wrote, ‘Photons come out of
nowhere, they cannot be stored, they can barely be pinned down in time, and
they have no home in space whatsoever.
That is, light occupies no volume and has no mass. The similarity between a thought and a photon
is very deep. Both are born in the
region beyond space and time where nature controls all processes in that void
which is full of creative intelligence’. We are aware that, as the solar system
moves fully into the Photon Band, radioactivity will be disseminated through
the Solar System and beyond unless a civil law system is implemented to make it
safe to exchange written briefs in the free spirit of the scientific method –
observation of the real world – non-fiction.
The heart and emotions are acutely sensitive to radiation. The degree to
which the World Management Team get away with murder on your planet is in
direct proportion to the degree to which you do not trust yourselves to be
creative (Clow ’95: 5, 6, 41, 100, 101, 102).
Notwithstanding, a seemingly infinite arsenal of academic chemical and
biological weapons, unwashable cardio-toxins and carcinogens being of most
concern, it seems prudent to inform readers of the radiation hazard posed by
(easily removed) CD-ROM drives when hi-jacked to release medically significant
doses of radiation exceeding 100 mSv cardio-sensitivity after 10 hours behind
the relatively safe Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) of a computer, especially when
mechanically defective, as noted in Radioactive
Polygraph HA-3-6-11 I must also warn prospective
HA party members there is a cruel joke regarding heart attack (ha) amongst
obviously sedentary scholars of merit, that precludes any preconceived notions
of membership in the life or death struggle to dissolve the atherosclerosis
(coronary artery disease) by vegan diet, daily cardiovascular exercise and to
cure the common auto-immune prognosis of constant chest pain with a 25 percent
chance of dying over 10 years from rheumatic heart disease caused by Group A Streptococcus pyogenes take
antibiotics. Miracle drug that
antibiotics are Candida albicans and Clostridium difficile are common causes
of antibiotic resistance and probiotic supplementation is highly recommended
during a course of antibiotics and daily for two weeks thereafter. To avoid
vitamin B12 and Phosphorus deficiencies in vegans, without any reliance on
animal products for healthy stool, supplementation is needed over the long-term
for optimal GI health consuming appropriate Medicinal
Herbs and Probiotics HA-31-10-12.
All dimensions are ruled by laws of free
will. How then can I use my will to form
my new galactic self? As I use these great powers welling up in my soul and
body that radiate my new magnificent sense of self, how can I express this
thundering self non-violently? Besides prohibiting the actual use and presence
of weapons by writing, the non-violent person must also be cautious of the
private motivation employed in the adversarial system espoused by the American
legal system, more than the State inquisitorial system. Evil is live reversed.
We must not betray our friends – the social worker is sworn not to testify
against their clients – or HA adds, to make secondary transmissions of their
work to the Democratic-Republican (DR) parties and solicits especially to the
social worker to be elected state traffic, civil, mental health and substance
abuse court judges; funeral director for Probate. We must not become dependent upon asking an
authority for more power than we have.
As self-determinant Americans we must rely upon our own judgment. If you ever have a karmic relationship with
someone who is trying to influence you without your agreement, set up a mirror
somewhere in your altar room that will mirror this energy back to the
person. No person has the right to
invade your space, ever, unless you agree.
Scientists have a responsibility under paragraph 11 of the Nuremberg
Code to discontinue hazardous experiments.
Smoke your pipe or light some sage, mullein, marijuana or incense, the
smoke makes spirits solid but they are nonphysical at all times, and they are
actually the inner story of yourself. Bliss, this is how you will feel
attending the Cosmic Party, when the linkage between the Solar System and
Galaxy is totally felt on Earth again. Follow your bliss, especially the bliss
that comes from doing good work. The Moon protects us, forming a psychological
atmosphere around our psyche, protecting it from the full blast of our soul’s
impulse toward immediate and total enlightenment – symbolized in the HA Party
by the unlikely source of the Perseid Meteor shower – Comet Swift-Tuttle – to
teach the human to identify the Solar System with the civil law system, avoid
crashing into the Sun or Earth with a judicious melting of just-ice and the
Universe with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be self-determinate
and understanding of the needs of others on our planet, the only one known to
harbor life, to be free of unfair government influences in our collective
attempt to create a democratically elected world government called the States
of the United Nations (SUN)
and individual copyright royalty seeking behavior, that is good. Absorbing only seven percent of the Sun’ s
light the Moon reveals its relationship to the Sun through its phases- from new
to crescent to first quarter to gibbous to full to disseminating to last quarter
to balsamic. It is the Moon’s phases at
our birth that reflects back to us how instinctual, how conscious, and how
absorbent we are toward the sun’s light, our soul’s evolvement, because on our
way to enlightenment we have to pass by the Moon first, the ancient adversary
of the rational yet strangely political science of meteor observation. We have to begin at the beginning (Clow ’95:
150, 266, 267, 120, 121, 158, 134, 135, 147).
Moses commands us to take a Sabbath off after six days of work for the
Creator and thanks to the ease of modern machinery we must also limit the
working day to eight hours, if we hope to enjoy our physical and mental health
and continue working efficiently, over the long run of at least two and a half
miles daily, ideally 10 kilometers, 100 push-ups, 100 crunches and yoga sun
salutation daily, whether we perform sedentary or physical labor, we need
balance between scholastic and athletic performance.
Medicine people from numerous tribes
demonstrate how ancient medical practices can be used to attain mind and body wisdom
and to “walk in balance with Nature’. For centuries medicine people have made
sincere efforts to become brothers and sisters of all living things so that
they might divine the hidden spirits of the plant world and be able to make
remedies which would aid their people. The traditional Indian makes medicine
work, and the power of this magic is usually of a higher efficiency than that
of the average student of Western occultism.
These men and women who seek the power of medicine must make a total
commitment and pay a higher price in self-denial to attain the wakan (the
essence of medicine). To be a recipient
of medicine power, the practitioner must live the commitment every moment of
the day. The practitioner must believe
in the unity and the cooperation of all forms of life, and must cherish and
value all brothers and sisters. For many years Twylah Nitsch taught a course in
“Seneca Wisdom” at the Human Dimensions Institute in Buffalo, New York. The course dealt with “self-realization,
self-control and how to live in harmony with Nature”. According to Twylah, “The
Indians did give instructions that helped one function within the highest
intellectual self, which is the spiritual self.
If all people would let themselves be guided by their spiritual selves,
their material world would be more satisfying”. The Ghost Dance was originally
the vision of Wovoka, a Paiute medicine man who was adept at sleight-of-hand
magic, impressed with the Christian stories of Jesus’ Second Coming, and
sorrowed by the state of poverty and despair to which the Indian nations had
been reduced. Wovoka advocated a code of
conduct established upon the principles of peace, brotherhood, forbearance and
nonviolence. Handsome Lake, Smohalla,
and John Slocum (founder of Shakerism) had preached similar principles. Wovoka died in 1932. Sun Bear said, “Medicine power to our people
means many things. Medicine is different
herbs to be used in healing. There is
the sweat lodge. There are various
healing poultices. It is when the
).medicine man has the particular gift of knowledge that enables him to go into
the medicine lodge and talk to spirits.
All these things are medicine. I
smoke a pipe and ask for medicine” (Steiger ’84: 53, 24, 42, 44, 183
The most essential elements of medicine power
are: The vision quest, with its emphasis on the self-denial and spiritual
discipline, extending to a lifelong pursuit of wisdom of body and soul. A reliance upon one’s personal visions and
dreams to provide one’s direction on the path of life. A search for personal
songs to enable one to attune oneself to the primal sound, the cosmic vibration
of the Great Spirit. A belief in a total partnership with the world of spirits
and the ability to make personal contact with grandfathers and grandmothers who
have changed planes of existence. The possession of a non-linear time sense. A
receptivity to the evidence that the essence of the Great Spirit may be found
in everything. A reverence and a passion
for the Earth Mother, the awareness of one’s place in the web of life, and
one’s responsibility toward all plant and animal life. A total commitment to one’s beliefs that
pervades every aspect of one’s life and enables one truly to walk in balance. The vision quest, certain meditative
techniques, and innumerable symbols employed in a wide variety of American
Indian ceremonies are reminiscent of Tibetan mysticism. Medicine power enables its possessor to
obtain personal contact with the invisible world of spirit and to pierce the
sensory world of illusion which veils the great mystery. As the Eastern holy man intones his mantra
and sings holy syllables in an effort to attune himself with the eternal sound,
the cosmic vibration, so does the traditional Native American seek for magical
songs which will increase the power of the medicine. First you need water to survive. Figure on a
minimum of one-half gallon of water per person per day for drinking. To use water that is unsafe, purify it by
boiling for one to three minutes, then pour it from one container to another
several times to get some air and flavor back in. You may also purify it by adding bleach that
has hypochlorite as its only active ingredient (eight drops to a gallon of
clear water, sixteen if the water is cloudy) letting the water sit for a half hour
and checking that the chlorine smell is still there. If it isn’t, add another dose of the bleach
and let stand for another fifteen minutes.
You may also use a 3 percent tincture of iodine. Add twelve drops per gallon of clear water,
and twice that to cloudy. Or you can use
water purification tablets if you have them.
You should have on hand any herbs or prescription medicine needed by
members of your group. If you are able
to obtain any strong antibiotics, these might also be helpful. Then of course, you’ll need food, seeds,
canning and drying equipment, logging, fishing and hunting gear. Having a varied diet is very essential to
keeping your balance. While you can get
your meat through hunting, and forage for wild greens, berries, herbs, fruits,
we believe that more variety than that is necessary. Growing a garden may be difficult or
impossible for a year or two. Besides fruits, juices and vegetables you’ll also
need staples. With a mixed diet an adult
will use three hundred pounds of wheat per year, or one hundred pounds of flour
(Steiger ’84: 31, 24, 25, 179, 180).
The Indians have always believed in one
Creator. For this reason Indians could
accept Christianity. In 1586, Thomas
Heriot, an erudite mathematician who became proficient in the tongue of many
different tribes, reported: “The Indians believe that there is a Supreme God
who has existed for all eternity”. David
Zeisberger, a Moravian missionary, translated scriptural texts of the Algonquin
tribes and was proficient in several native languages. In 1779, from his years of personal contact
with several Amerindian nations, he wrote “They believe and have from time
immemorial believed that there is an Almighty Being who has created heaven and
earth and man and all things else”. When
the Europeans began their invasion of North America early in the sixteenth
century there were about three hundred different tribes with a combined
population of over one million. Today
with a population exceeding 800,000 in 1984 the Native American is far from a
vanishing race, and although some tribes have been totally decimated, others,
such as the Navajo, the Sioux and the Cherokee have grown in numbers. Earnest
Tootoosis, a Plains Cree from Saskatchewan, and delegate to the Indian
Ecnumenical Conference, remarked to the assembly, “We were in a Garden of Eden
when the white man came in 1492, but now we have been destroyed. We must go back to the way our forefathers
worshipped. We must pray to the Great
Spirit the way he wanted us to”. Heart disease, cancer and arthritis did not
exist among Indians before the non-Indian came to our shores. Twilight blooming Moon Flower (Jimsonweed)
was used as a soothing drug. Once the
leaves had been dried, patients would smoke them to treat such ailments as
asthma, cholera, and epilepsy. Today the
chemicals in this flower are distilled for use in tranquilizers and eye
dilations. Medicine people found small
amounts of mistletoe were effective in treating epilepsy, and the leaves and
berries, cooked with rice, formed a poultice used to draw pus from
infections. The Shoshone, Navajo and
Blackfeet chewed stone seed, a coon weed of the area, for an oral
contraceptive. Diarrhea was treated by the
root of a cherry tree, the leaf of horsetail weed, and the root of the blackberry. Indians found an instant Band-Aid in the
thick juice of the milkweed plant.
Toothache was dealt with by chewing the root of wild licorice and
holding it in the mouth. Salicylic acid,
the basic ingredient of aspirin, can be found in willow bark, the basis of a
brew prescribed by medicine people for headaches and fevers. Patients with stomach upsets were given swamp
root, manzanilla buds, or branches of the juniper. Soapweed may be used as a shampoo that gives
luster to the hair. An application of
the boiled leaves of horse mint make an excellent acne treatment. Crystals used in healing should be one given
to an individual (Steiger ’84: 92, 29, 129, 70, 196, 61).
Indian medicine teaches that everything
returns into the circle like the sun rising each day and setting each
night. It also teaches that every circle
must be completed in everything we do, the sun can continue to rise. Our lives seem to need this same consistency
of cycle. If that circle is left
incomplete, there is stress or vibrational interference affecting the physical,
mental and spirit being. The future of
Indian medicine is emerging form a past spirit for health actions. Its focus will be on quality of life and
planning for the life hereafter. As Doc
Sequoyah once said, “We have to believe the Spirit of our Indian people is
coming back. We have to believe that!” O
Great Spirit, bring to our white brothers the wisdom of Nature and the
knowledge that if her laws are obeyed this land will again flourish and grasses
and trees will grow as before. Guide
those that through their councils seek to spread the wisdom of their leaders to
all people. Heal the raw wounds in the
earth and restore to our soil the richness which strengthens men’s bodies and
makes them wise in their councils. Bring
to all the knowledge that great cities live only through the bounty of the good
earth beyond their paved streets and towers of stone and steel. Iron Eyes Cody
sang: Great Spirit, whose voice I hear in the winds and whose breath gives life
to the whole world, hearken! I come before you as one of your many
children. See, I am small and weak; I
need your strength and wisdom. Permit me to walk in beauty. May my heart treat with respect the things
which you have created, may my ears hear your voice! Make me wise that I may
understand the things which you have taught, which you have hidden in every
leaf and rock. I long for strength, not in order that I may overcome my
brother, but to fight my greatest enemy, myself. Make me ever ready to come to you
with pure hands and straight eyes, so that my spirit, when life disappears like
the setting sun, may stand unashamed before you (Steiger ’84: 197, 200, 201,
210). .
2.
North American Observation
For North Americans the
end of the Mayan Long Count presents a poignant opportunity to reminisce about
the past 5,125 years and adapt our faith to be healthier in our worship of the
Creator more in balance and harmony with Nature. The area of America which lies north of Mexico is
vast, and the people native to each of the sections of this territory differ
notably from each other physically, linguistically and culturally. Yet, by popular usage, all are called
Indians, or Eskimos in the far northern sections. Tribal styles within any one culture area may
vary, and are usually quite distinct.
For instance, even the east trained eye will notice that the colors,
designs, and techniques of application are completely different in Crow and
Cheyenne decorative beadwork although both tribes are located in the Plains culture area. As a rule, the Indian artist generally used
whatever material was most readily available: wood and wood products were the
dominant materials in the Northwest Coast and Eastern Woodland areas, buffalo
hides on the Plains, and clay in the Southwest.
The intertribal trade in finished products was paralleled by the trade
in raw materials, and long journeys were undertaken to obtain them. Seashells from the Pacific were traded as far
east as the upper Missouri River area, and were common in the Southwest. Parrot feathers, metal bells, and seashells
were traded in to the Southwest from central Mexico. Catlinite for pipe bowls
was traded from a center at Pipestone, Minnesota throughout all the Plains area
as far as the state of Washington.
Skins, horns, bowwooods anad pigments were also commonly traded. The
acceptance of Indian art by the modern public is directly related to efforts to
popularize it by exhibits, publications and performances, during the Great
Depression when many people were living in primitive conditions, and needed to
rediscover the wild arts and crafts, to improve their standard of living. These efforts started in 1931 with the
Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts. This
was followed in 1939 by a major show at the San Francisco World’s Fair
organized by Frederic H. Douglas and Rene d’Harnoncourt, who later created a
similar exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1941 and published a
book titled Indian Art of the United States, that became a classic. Americans
Indians were firmly confined within the conventional artistic limits imposed by
their particular society. The individual
artist was usually allowed very little freedom of expression, though the degree
varied from tribe to tribe. The
introduction of new materials and the adaptation of European patterns and
designs into Indian crafts, such as silver brooches, hair plates and earrings
were introduced first as gifts and were later copied by the Indians themselves
(Feder ’65: 12, 13, 14, 15).
Among American
Indian groups a new religion usually started with an individual having a
dream-revelation in which he received full instructions concerning ritual and
the religious equipment necessary to it.
Often a dream revelation was an individual experience which dictated the
design they painted on their shield.
Objects which were sacred in the originating tribe were often
secularized within the borrowing tribe, such as the tablita dances from
the Rio Grande Pueblos to Hopi. In the Oklahoma area and elsewhere, a special
phenomenon known as Pan-Indianism has developed. Here many different tribes were placed on
reservations in proximity to one another and a blending and borrowing of tribal
styles evolved to the point where most groups completely lost their individuality. Today, instead of distinct Ponca, Oto, Osage,
Pawnee, Cheyenne and Kiowa styles, there is one common Oklahoma style with only
occasional tribal differences still visible in the outfits worn by American Indian
women. Among American Indians, specialization of labor was the exception rather
than the rule, and each family was generally a self-sufficient unit. At times, particular large-scale
undertakings, such as the Plains Indian buffalo drives, or the Pueblo cleaning
of the irrigation ditches, called for community effort. But if isolated from the rest of their
community, a husband and wife team could produce for themselves almost
everything necessary for their survival.
The outstanding exception was the specialization of some select
individuals in the healing arts; however, even these doctors, shamans, or
medicine men still had to be self-sufficient since the fees for their services
were rarely enough to support them adequately. There was usually a division of
craftwork by sex. In areas where hunting
constituted a major part of the economy the males concentrate on producing
equipment for the hunt, and a major portion of their time was spent in the
chase. Most of the other necessary
household crafts fell to the females.
For example, in most of the Plains area, the men made bows and arrows,
some horse gear, shields, and charms connected with warfare, a limited amount
of religious equipment. At the same
time, the women made the domestic equipment, clothing utensils (such a
parfleche containers), and carried out all the beading and quilling of
decoration on garments and ceremonial items.
Among the Pueblo groups which depended on agriculture, the mend were the
farmers. Hunting was still men’s work,
but it was such a secondary part of the economy that it occupied little of
their time. The men therefore also
practiced such crafts as weaving which was often the work of women in other
societies. The women in Pueblo groups made
pottery, basketwork, and carried out general domestic chores. The Guild of
Southern Cheyenne Women had an
organization in many respects parallel
to that of men’s military societies.
The women recognized as the best bead workers within the tribe would
meet together to make tepees, tepee, linings, pillows and bed sheets all in a
standard form (Feder ’65: 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20).
The Northeastern
Woodlands area runs from the eastern Great Lakes through New York and New
England. At the time of first contact by
Europeans it was occupied with a great many tribes of the Algonkian stock, and
the powerful Iroquois confederacy.
Although lacking wild rice and the Midewiwin religion the Coast tribes
depended upon sea-foods to a great extent, but were also farmers and hunters. The Iroquois still occupy much of the same
territory they did on first contact on scattered reservations in New York State
and Canada. Any Iroquois still speak
their own language, follow the religious teachings of their prophet “Handsome
Lake” participate in masked dances, and maintain some old arts. The political organization of the Iroquois, a
confederacy of six tribes, with the women having a strong voice in major policy
making, is well known, and the model which held the Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk
Onondaga, Cayuga, and Tuscarora together in the League of the Iroquois was
supposedly followed in framing the Constitution of the United States. Always an important military power, the
Iroquois also expertly controlled trade over a wide area, and forced the
removal of some of the Eastern Algonkian groups. Their alliance was eagerly sought by the
Dutch, the English and later by the United States. The typical Iroquois home was a long
rectangular structure covered with sheets of elm bark. The entire southern part of the United
States, from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean, comprises the Southeastern area. This par to the country in prehistoric times,
could boast the highest development of native American civilization north of
Mexico. Huge earth mounds, elaborate
artistic production, sun worship, royal families, and large cities were
features of it, which probably owed their forms to influences from Mexico. Some groups, like the Natchez, still showed
evidence of this higher civilization when first encountered by Europeans but a
decline had begun long before. The
entire Southeast was subsequently strongly affected by European settlement and
entire tribes became extinct owing to war and new diseases, while others
adopted the white man’s ways. The
so-called Five Civilized Tribes – Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole –
very early adopted European clothing, and went on to organize their own
universities and newspapers. The
invention of a Cherokee alphabet by Sequoya in 1821 facilitated this process of
acculturation. Most of the Five
Civilized Tribes moved to the Oklahoma area by 1830, leaving only a few
scattered groups in the Southeast.
(Feder ’65: 132, 133
The entire area
from the interior of Canada and Alaska to the Atlantic Coast and all of the
United States east of the Mississippi River, is for convenience discussed as one
area characterized by deciduous forests.
In general, the Indians derived at least a portion of their food supply
from corn farming. They are divided
into four distinct subareas, the Northern Woodlands, the Great Lakes, the
Northeast and the Southeast. The people
of the Northern Woodlands may divided into the Athabascans to the west, and
Algonkian to the east. Farming was not
practiced here; the economy was based on seasonal hunting and gathering, and
almost everywhere famine alternated with plenty. The arts were poorly developed. The lives of these people were affected by
contact with Europeans and they soon became dependent on the fur trade and
trade goods such as rifles and steel traps.
They adopted Christianity and much of their old material culture
disappeared. Lake Michigan was the
center of the Great Lakes area. Here the
abundance of water game and hard wood forests helped to shape the pattern of
living, in addition to seasonal hunting and gathering, practiced corn farming,
gathered wild rice as a staple food and made use of fish and small game. Relatively sedentary, they not only built
fairly large villages around their corn fields, but often maintained separate
villages for the winter season. The
Midewiwin or Grand Medicine Society, a secret curing society which supposedly
endowed members with supernatural powers, was the dominant religion. Membership was gained by purchasing
initiation into the different degrees by gifts and feasts. All Great Lakes tribes kept a variety of
sacred medicine bundles, which often contained ancient treasures. Bundles are still owned by many Indians in
the area and the Grand Medicine Society is active in a few places. In some tribes the Drum religion has replaced
the Midewiwin, and in other, Peyote (Native American Church) or Christianity is
the dominant religion (Feder ’65: 120, 131).
The Arctic Cost
form the Aleutian Island to eastern Greenland is the home of a group of people
racially quite distinct form American Indians to the south. Although the Eskimos have inhabited the area
for at least two thousand years, they are comparative newcomers to the North
American continent, and still bear close
cultural affinities to parts of eastern Siberia. The Arctic Coast is a vast area;
nevertheless, the Eskimo living on Greenland are not very different culturally
from those in western Alaska, and they are also related linguistically. The normal economic pattern for Eskimo groups
consists of seasonal migrations on land in the summer to hunt caribou, musk ox,
and polar bear, in addition to doing some fishing, and on or near the sea
during the winter when seal and walrus are hunted through their breathing holes
in the ice. Some Eskimo groups, such as
those around Point Hope, Alaska, are also proficient whalers. The area is inhospitable, with long, cold,
dark winters and short summers. The
Eskimo made an amazing adaptation to this difficult environment. House types varied, including dome-shaped
igloo built of snow blocks, simple skin-covered tents, and fairly permanent,
earth-covered semi-subterranean structures.
Clothing, made of a variety of skins with or without fur, was more
tailored than anywhere else north of Mexico.
Transportation was accomplished by dog sled inn winter, and in summer by
skin-covered kayaks, and larger umiak.
The harsh conditions in which these people lived were eased by social
attitudes in which food and shelter became in effect communal property. Each individual was willing to share whatever
resources he had, in the realization that at some future time his own survival
might depend upon someone else’s sharing with him. It was also the custom, in difficult times,
to practice infanticide and abandonment of the lame or aged which, however
barbaric to our society, was necessary in the Arctic. Religious practices were somewhat rudimentary
but a rich mythology concerning the animals hunted was evolved, and host of
taboos and restrictions was followed.
Shamans had the important responsibilities of curing disease,
controlling the weather and insuring an adequate food supply. Some Eskimo inventions included the bow
drill, snow goggles, harpoons, dog sleds, stone oil lamps, and moon-shaped type
of woman’s knife. The produced no
weaving, but made a type of coiled basket and crude form of pottery. The earliest pre-historic Eskimo remains show
a fully developed artistic tradition of carving in ivory and slate. In the historic period, the Eskimo have
continued to excel in ivory carving for resale.
The Aleut groups who inhabited the Aleutian Islands were linguistically
related to the Eskimo, but their culture was somewhat different, owing to a
different environment with little snow and ice resulting in permanent villages
all winter, but Aleut culture was early destroyed by Russian fur traders who employed
the men on their voyages (Feder ’65: 121, 122, 123).
The Pacific
coastline from Yakutat Bay in southeastern Alaska down to about the Columbia
River is a clearly defined area with a
distinct culture and art style, the influence of which extended as far
as northern California. The area is
fairly isolated by the Coastal Range on the east and the waterways were the
chief avenues of travel. In addition,
the Tlingit and Tsimshian people had well-developed trails across the mountains
for trade with the interior Athabascan groups.
In general, the area is characterized by a mild climate, due to the
Japan current which warms much of the coastline, and by abundant rainfall,
resulting in dense vegetation with cedar, fir and hemlock common. The people lived along the rivers, or on the
sheltered ocean inlets in the few places where a natural beach could be
found. Although a little hunting was
practiced in the forests, the people much preferred to stay close to the water. The sea was their main source of food. Fish were caught, shell fish gathered and
water mammals hunted. Wild plants and
berries also contributed to a plentiful food supply. A very limited amount of agriculture in the
form of tobacco farming was practice in some areas but no other crops were
raised. Because of the wealth of food, a
good deal of leisure was available for a non-essential art industry, often a
rare situation in a hunting-gathering economy.
Wood and wood products were the main raw materials. Cedar bark was used for mats and clothing and
spruce roots for sewing and baskets.
Other raw materials included animal products in the form of wool, skins,
horn, bone, teeth, and ivory. There were
also some stones and seashells. Almost
everything used by the Indians of this area was elaborately decorated, from the
paint brushes and sewing awls, the house posts and canoes. Artistically it was perhaps the most
productive area in North America north of Mexico (Feder ’65: 99, 100,
Rank in the Pacific
Northwest was primarily based on ancestry and family connections in that the
latter carried with them certain privileges titles, names, and exclusive rights
to certain dances, songs, rituals and animal crests. However, each inherited privilege had to be validated
at a potlatch in which guests were given gifts (actually payments for
witnesses) which varied according to the importance of the privilege being
validated and the rank of the recipient.
Wealth in the form of material possessions was an important
pre-requisite for achieving a high standing within the society. Efforts to raise one’s social position
consisted of acquiring wealth, and then holding a potlatch to validate
an inherited privilege. A certain degree
of prestige could be achieved by well-known and skilled craftsmen who were continually
called upon to create important carvings.
Shamans who cured disease and predicted the future were also
important personages. Ancestry was based on mythology about animals as an
expression of totemism. The people felt
a direct and close relationship to mythological animals and used them as
decoration. The arrival of Europeans
increased artistic production and metal tools were introduced in quantity. Most importantly new opportunity for
acquiring wealth opened up by the trade of furs and other services. Families of merely middle-class status were
able to acquire sufficient possession to compete in the potlatches with
important chiefs. This new wealth
accelerated the entire economy and vast quantities of carvings, totem poles,
blankets, boxes and other works of art were made throughout the nineteenth
century. About this time potlatches were
outlawed by Canadian law, missionaries discouraged any Indian practices as
being heathen, and whole villages became economically dependent on commercial
fishing, which contributed to a decline in the arts. The importance of the potlatch and the secret
societies was replaced among the Coast by an emphasis on personal guardian
spirits, which spread as far south as the Columbia River (Feder ’65: 101, 103,
104).
The Great Basin
comprises the area between the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Sierra
Nevada on the west, the largely barren deserts of Utah, Nevada and southern
Oregon. The scattered bands of Paiute
and Shoshone Indians living in this region are the most primitive of any in the
United States. Theirs is a bare
subsistence economy based on seed gathering, supplemented by a little hunting
of small game. They utilize almost all
the potential food products of their environment, including even insects and
grubs. Food gathering consumes almost
all their waking hours, allowing little time for artistic production. The Basin group live in very simple brush
shelters. They produce little pottery,
and only a limited amount of crude baskets, tanned hides, and beaded novelties.
The Plateau area is composed of portions of Idaho and Washington to the east of
the coast range, inland British Columbia and northern Oregon. The area is somewhat less isolated because
travel is feasible on the Columbia and Frasier rivers. The people here subsisted largely on roots
and berries, but also depended heavily upon the salmon and other fish from the
rivers. There are many tribes in this
area belonging mainly to Salishan and Shaptian linguistic families. The formerly lived in semi-subterranean
houses or in mat-covered lodges, but in later years adopted the Plains type
tepee covered either with skin or bulrush mats.
Throughout this area basketry was developed to a fine art. The Ghost Dance religion, launched about 1889
by Wovoka, a Paiute prophet from the Pyramid Lake reservation, foretold that if
the Indians performed the new dance, refrained from fighting and did no harm to
anyone but always did what was right, then the buffalo would return, the white
man would disappear, and all the dead would return to life (Feder ’65: 91, 92,
91).
The Sierra Nevada
and the desert to the east formed an effective barrier to east-west cultural
exchanges, so that the California Indians were fairly isolated from the
outside. The entire area was densely
populated in precontact times by, many small and scattered tribes belonging to
several linguistic families. Throughout
the state living was fairly easy,food abundant, and the climate mild. The people practiced no agriculture, but
depended on food gathering. The acorn
was the staff of life throughout most of California, supplement by wild plants,
seafood, and the catch from hunting.
Clothing was scanty, even non-existent in some areas. Everywhere the level of technology was very
primitive, with the major exception of basketry: California Indians produced
some of the finest baskets in the world.
Weaving was unkown, but a type of knot netting was produced with native
fibers. Feathers were often used for
decoration. The degree of white contact
was, at first, inconsistent, Spanish
missions and settlements were created early along the coast from San Diego to
San Francisco, and many of the neighboring coastal groups became extinct at an
early date. Other northern and interior
tribes received almost no white contact until the 1849 Gold Rush ,and were able
to maintain their aboriginal way of life to a date. As recently as 1911 an Indian was found who
had no contact with whites, and who was still making stone arrow-points. Influences from the Southwest can be seen in
the pottery, the use of boomerang-like rabbit sticks, sandals and especially
the sand paintings made for the puberty ceremonies of boys. These paintings are usually quite simple in
comparison with Hopi paintings. The
ceremonies involve the use of Jimson weed (Datura stramonium) a
hallucinogen. Today the art of basketry is almost extinct. Religion survives to some extent and
ceremonies are still performed in costume (Feder ’65: 85, 87).
There are three
major divisions to the tribes of the Southwest.
The Pueblo peoples have developed a sophisticated agricultural town
dwelling society; Navaho and Apache are nomadic hunters; and Papago, Pima and
Yuma had a primitive farming and gathering existence. The Pueblo farmers live in permanent villages
scattered along the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and north to the Hopi villages in
Arizona. The Pueblo peoples have
occupied the area continuously for well over one thousand years; indeed, some
of the present day villages have been occupied in the same location since
before the first Spaniards arrived in 1539.
Most groups continue to farm with the same primitive tools that their
ancestors used, and they continue to plant the same crops of corn, beans and
squash. Corn remains the staple food
even though, many villages now have irrigation and a wide variety of newly
introduced crops. The people in this
region have developed a complex religious life centered around rainmaking and
crop fertility. The rituals are so
lengthy that is has been estimated that the average Hopi man spends almost half
his time preparing for and participating in dances or ceremonies. All groups
formerly baskets and textiles and they still make their own pottery. In recent years the Pueblos of Hopi and Zuni
have reduced the bulk of the woven textiles.
Pottery varies from village to village and there is a blending of
styles. The Hopi are the principal
producers of kachina dolls. Painting has always been a Pueblo art, since
prehistoric times when artists worked on pottery and kiva walls. In addition, some groups such as the Hopi
made dry sand paintings for some kiva ceremonies. Since the American anthropologist Jesse
Walter Fewkes encouraged two Hopi artists to produce a series of watercolor
sketches in the early 1900s other Indian artists followed who produced
paintings on paper for sale to tourists.
By 1917 art classes were taught on reservation schools throughout the
nation. Today there are well over one
hundred artists from the Plains, Navaho and Apache who are every bit as good as
the Pueblo artists. .Since the Pueblo people came in contact with the Spanish
settlers for some four hundred years they have adopted some Spanish elements
into their culture. All Pueblo villages
have a Catholic church, and the people are devout Catholics although they
maintain their own religions as well.
Many Pueblo speak at least three languages, their own tribal language,
English and Spanish. Sometimes they can
also speak a little Navaho, or the language of a neighboring village as well
(Feder ’65: 53, 54, 57, 58, 59).
The Navaho and
Apache groups both speak related languages of the Athabascan linguistic family,
but they are quire different in their way of living. Most of the Athabascan speaking peoples are
situated in the far north of the interior of Canada and Alaska. Thus it is believed that these two groups
migrated from the North at some date before the historic period. The Navaho were in 1965 the largest tribe in
the United States, with the largest reservation and over seventy-five thousand
people. They were generally quite
warlike and often raided Pueblo villages for their crops. After the introduction of domestic animals,
the Navaho became sheep herders. The Apache in the Southwest are like the
Navaho in social organization, religion and mythology, but lack Pueblo
influences and produce no textiles, no sand paintings and very little
silverwork. Instead, they have excelled
at basketry. The Pima, Papago and Yuman, collectively the Rancheria tribes,
practiced soe agriculture but depended to a considerable extent upon mesquite,
cactus and fish for food. They have a
limited amount of Pueblo influences and are a link between the Pueblo and
southern California tribes. Pima and
Papago excelled at basketry to trade with their Yuman neighbors. With the exception of basketry arts were
generally poorly developed in the Rancheria region. Pottery is certainly a dying art in the area,
but Papago basketry will probably survive for at least a couple of generations
(Feder ’65: 71, 73, 79).
The Plains culture
pattern was dependent upon the horse for its development. Prior to the introduction of this animal, the
Plains area was only sparsely settled by semi-sedentary groups that practice
some agriculture in addition to sporadic hunting. The inhabitants depended mainly upon the
bison for food, clothing, shelter and other necessities of life, though in part
of the Plains some agriculture was practiced and bison hunting became a
seasonal activity. The Plains people are
the ones most stereotypically Indian in that they were the warriors who fought
Custer, wore feather bonnets, and lived in skin tepees. Elaborately decorated skin clothing was
common, but, in general, material possessions were few because of the nomadic
existence necessitated by following the bison herds. By the late 1860s most of the Plains Indians
were paced on reservations, which made Plains materials plentiful to the
collector. The most significant form of
sculpture from the Plains takes the form of carved stone pipes. The usual material is red pipestone
(catlinite), found in several localities in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Where this was not available, Indians used
shales, soapstones, calcite, chlorite and limestone. The practice of carving anthropomorphic forms
on pipe bowls originated in prehistoric times. “Love flutes” were often made
with carved top blocks; Grass Dance whistles were sometimes carved in bird
forms; some bowls were made in the Eastern Plains and various ornaments such as
mirror frames and Horse Dance sticks were carved for use in certain
dances. Some Eastern Plains groups often
added carved decoration to their cradle boards.
Such boards were a specialty of the Osage and Pawnee, but carving also
occurs on some Eastern Sioux boards.
Prairie Potawatomi live dolls were due to an extension of a Woodland
tradition. Other arts practiced on the
Eastern Plains as a result of Woodland influence include ribbon applique, loom
beadwork, and the making of yarn bags and sashes. Pottery and basketry are extremely rare, and
nowhere in the area was true weaving practiced (Feder ’65: 25, 32, 34).
I hand down to you the “Legend of the White
Buffalo”. I hope your mind is ready to
bind it for the next generation. In an
age before horses, in a season of budding spring, two braves went out scouting
for the buffalo. For three days they
hunted and tracked over plain, hill and valley.
On the fourth day, following the sunrise, the braves caught sight of a
buffalo herd in a valley on the eastern stretch of the mountains. The herd was scattered across the
valley. The two hunters rushed their
descent into the valley, and through habit of many hunts, slowed their pace as
they neared the buffalo. There it was, with
equal surprise and joy, they noticed the white buffalo in the center of the
herd. White with fur like winter
etching, the prairie monarch stood motionless, enveloped in mystic vapor. The hunters paused to robe themselves in wolf
and coyote hides to kill their human odor, and readied their weapons. The buffalo throughout the valley began to
move toward the White Buffalo, forming a circle around the White One. The two hunters moved cautiously toward an
opening on the eastern side of the circle.
The music of nature does not fly in discord, and it was all around the
valley. As the hunters crept closer to
the opening in the herd, the spirit of the White Buffalo fully enveloped them,
causing them to forget their desire to kill.
When the crouching hunters reached the opening, a blinding white flash
brought them up straight. In place of
the White Buffalo stood a beautiful woman in complete whiteness. In sunlight grandeur, she stood with hands
extended, and the soft whisper of the wind made her hair, white skin, white
robe, and white buckskin dress shimmer radiantly. Her mouth moved, and her voice, gentle and
warm, flowed with a depth of sympathy
that brought quiet to the valley.
I was here before the rains and violent sea.
I was here before the snows and the hail.
I was here before the mountains and the winds.
I am the spirit of Nature.
I am in the light that fills the earth, and in
the darkness of nighttime.
I give color to nature where themes of mystic
wisdom are found.
I am in your chants and laughter.
I am in the tears that flow from sorrow.
I am in the bright joyous eyes of the
children.
I am in the substance the gives unity,
completeness, and oneness.
I am in the mountains as a conscious symbol to
all mankind when earth’s face is being scarred with spiritual undone.
I am in you when you walk the simple path of
the redman.
I am in you when you show love of humankind,
for I also give love to those who are loving.
I am in the response of love among all humans,
for this is a path that will find the blessing and fulfillment of the Great
Spirit.
I must leave you now to appear in another age,
but I leave you with the redman’s path.
Complete stillness was everywhere. The White Buffalo Spirit withdrew her hands,
and with a glowing smile of eternal love, her body began to return to
vapor. One hunter could no longer
contain himself from the beauty of the White Buffalo Spirit. His mind filled with extreme desire. He flung his weapons aside, brushed off his
robe, and rushed for the fading spirit.
A blinding flash again filled the circle. The White Buffalo Spirit was gone, the White
Buffalo was gone, and all that remained was the skull of the charging hunter,
gray ashes, and his formless bones.
This, my brother, is why we hold the White Buffalo to be sacred. I hope that your tongue can interpret the
deep wisdom of this holy legend, and that you, my brother, may help to bring
its message to all mankind. (Steiger ’84: 152, 153). Among other profound
thoughts this legend explains that wild buffalo have become an endangered
species since the injunction of the white man’s transcontinental railroad
wherefore Indians of good faith no longer hunt them. To the Taos Indians of New
Mexico, the watershed of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is a natural temple of
meditation. They grow no crops
there. They do not harvest the trees for
lumber. They are not interested in the
possibility of any valuable minerals existing in the rocks. They have been making pilgrimages to Blue
Lake for more than seven hundred years.
In July 1970, US Senators saw no reason why the Taos Pueblo should have
control of 48,000 acres of timberland.
President Nixon said, from the fourteenth century, the Taos Pueblo
Indians used these areas for religious and tribal purposes. In 1906f, however, the US government
appropriated these lands for the creation of a national forest. According to a recent determination of the
Indian Claims Commission, the government ‘took said lands from petitioner
without compensation’. For sixty-four
years, the Taos Pueblo has been trying to regain possession of this sacred lake
and watershed area in order to preserve its natural condition and limit its
non-Indian use. The Taos Indians
consider such action essential to the protection and expression of their
religious faith (Steiger ’84: 73).
3.
Food and Environmental Quality as a Civil Right
More than 20 million people took to the
streets on the first Earth Day (22 April 1970).
It was the largest demonstration in American history. The current environmental agenda, other than my
backyard, is well-explained in Organic Crop Insurance Modification HA-9-9-12 are (1)
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) effluent, (2) label genetically
modified (GM) crops and recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) products (3)
discontinue non-medicinal use of antibiotics in livestock feed, (4) discontinue
non-medicinal use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers to improve food and
water quality (4) discontinue the rendering of remains as food to members of
the same species, plant or animal (5) grass feed livestock in pastures for six
months before slaughter, (6) regulate styrene used in hydraulic fracturing and
thermal reactant chemical and (7) regulate water temperature in global warming
treaties. The current Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) has been billed for good email behavior $100 for the
adoption and $1,000 for the edition of this modified agenda, including a
prohibition of the laboratory sale of Aspergillus niger for improvement
in the respiratory prognosis of African-Americans, codified in Book 8 Drug
Regulation (DR). Before
Earth Day and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the
success of the Clean Air Act with greenhouse gas emissions, the preservationist
ethos of John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, were the prominent feature
in the in the overall framework of American environmentalism and remain
important today. Founded in 1892 by John Muir and many educated San Francisco Bay Area
friends as an outdoor recreation group with a special interest in Yosemite
National Park that had been created in 1890.
The prospect of a dam in the Hetch-Hetchy Valley, within the boundaries
of Yosemite, forever embroiled the Sierra Club in an environmental
dispute. Between 1907 and 1913, the
Sierra Club, Appalachian Club and various other organizations waged challenges
to the right of any organization, public or private, to infringe on the
embryonic national park system. Sierra
Club membership grew from 35,000 members in the 1960s to 137,000 by 1972. By the last half of the 1960s the club was
growing at around 30 percent a year. The Sierra Club regional chapters
continue to do a thorough review of environmental disputes. However since the
late 1970s the Ecumenical Task Force (ETF) entered the history books as a first
responder to the immediate problem presented by leaking chemical pollutants and
advocate for Christian stewardship regarding capitalist land use. Beginning in 1978 with extensive public
hearings as part of a second Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE II), the
Oregon Wilderness Coalition, which changed its name in 1982 to the Oregon
Natural Resources Council (ONRC) was able to must a line-up of local citizens
who knew each specific area with deep personal knowledge and passion, different
from the dominantly urban, middle-class membership of the Sierra Club. The
creation of Earth First in 1980 was a direct outlet for the frustrations that
arose from this growing division nationwide. In the twenty-first century, as we
look to a climate crisis in which over a billion poor are predicted to lose the
life-giving waters of vanishing Himalayan glaciers by 2035, and witness the
Inuit sue the United States in protesting the melting ice, there are many
missed but still available environmental opportunities to engage with the
protests of the disempowered (Egan & Crane ’09: 1, 123, 302, 11, 13, 236,
84).
The Jacksonian era
between the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson and the beginning of the antebellum
period in 1848, relied on sophisticated ideologies that perpetuated
inequalities. On one hand, it was an
“Age of Democracy” with non-property owning Anglo-American males earning the
right to vote, but it was a bleak time for Indians, blacks, workers, women and
the environment. American leaders of the
day believed that a society with surging immigrant and urban populations could
not maintain the promises of democratic opportunity for whites without empty
land to settle and unlock raw materials to transform into wealth. This ideology fueled Andrew Jackson’s
controversial 1830 Indian Removal Act, resulting in the removal of cultures
from their homeland – from the Seminole of Florida to Black Hawk’s Sauk of
Illinois – 70,000 members of native peoples in the 1830s. Most infamously, this decade of mass removal
led to the “Trail of Tears” during which 4,000 Cherokee died on the forced
journey from Georgia to Oklahoma. Two
years after Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, Black Hawk led Sauk
and Fox Indians back into their traditional territory in present-day
Illinois. The Black Hawk War ended
brutally, with Sauk men, children and women slaughtered by Illinois militia,
U.S. Army and Sioux warriors as they fled across the Mississippi. One hundred and fifty of Black Hawk’s 1,000
people died in this fight. In 1832 Black
Hawk and his co-leaders sat in Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis as public
curiosities, receiving visitors such as Washington Irving and George
Catlin. With Indians removed, their cultural
and environmental practices were replaced with the exhaustive, early capitalist
extraction of raw materials fueling a global market revolution. Slave labor intensified as a central tool for
extracting raw materials rapidly and cheaply in these “new” western lands. In these territories, slavery expanded with
such intensity that in many section of Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas slaves
constituted well over 50 percent of the population. Ironically, Cherokee, Creek and other Indian
tribes mimicked these intensive agricultural practices with their own slaves in
Indian Territory. As was the Jackson’s
Indian Removal, slavery was described as a “positive good”. The paternal plantation owner was defined as
protecting “inferior” beings from the confusing poverty of cities of the
uncivilized darkness of Africa. As John
Calhoun said in 1850, “We see slavery now in its true light, and regard it as
the most safe and stable basis of free institutions in the world” (Egan &
Crane ’09: 70, 83).
Swill milk was drawn from cows living in
cramped urban dairy barns and fed the cheap (and nutritiously dubious) slop
from neighboring distillery factories.
Urban dairy workers milked these diseased and dying cows, and sold their
milk to the urban poor at discount prices.
Until the early 1900s, milk was
often adulterated with foreign substances, taken from sick cows, or mis-handled
during milking and storage. As a result, it was often host to tuberculosis,
cholera, typhoid fever, and other life-threatening diseases. But few people
knew that the milk made them sick. It wasn't until the late 19th century, when
scientists began to understand germ theory, that they realized diseases were
being transferred through milk -and that they could do something to eliminate
the hazard. As New York’s population grew after 1830, the amount of
enclosed pasturage available for cows shrank noticeably. The establishment of dairy stables in urban
enclosures was common and often necessary without the means of refrigeration
and rapid transportation. Many rural
dairies were not equipped with the economic or technological means to supply
milk to larger, distant urban populations.
As a result large dairy herds were kept on New York’s West Side near 16th
Street, both dairying and butchering took place in the city. Without sewers, the disposal of waste in
antebellum New York City was an expensive and time-consuming process, that cows
would consume the distillery waste was a significant solution for distillery owners. Although swill had a relatively high
nutritional value, it required supplementation with hay and grain to provide a
healthy diet for the cows, which were already living in deplorably unhygienic
conditions, and few farmers went through the extra expense. Milk from cows fed on alcoholic dregs smelled
strongly of beer and displayed a tendency to coagulate into a hard lump. Cows became diseased and rarely survived for
more than a year in these conditions, being milked until they died, the last
milking performed “posthumously” and their meat then sold to butchers who
distributed the diseased meat to consumers.
By 1835 there were an estimated 18,000 cows in New York and Brooklyn
being fed distillery slop and by the 1850s more than two-thirds of New York
City milk came from distillery herds (Egan & Crane ’09: 41, 42).
Public criticism
emerged during the 1820s and 1830s yet neither city nor state felt compelled to
restrict the swill milk industry. During
the 1840s the economy froze with the weather during the winter months as canals
were closed and ocean commerce was reduced.
The difference between 3 cents for a quart of swill milk and 6 cents for
a quart of country milk became significant.
In 1847 distemper or “cow fever” broke out in the swill stables near
South Ferry. The disease spread rapidly
through the stables and was uniformly fatal, until it was discovered that cows
could be inoculated by slitting their tails and inserting parts of a dead cow’s
lungs. The tails generally swelled and
rotted off, but only 20 percent of the inoculated cows died. Even at the height of the epidemic swill milk
remained the only milk that many poor New Yorkers could afford. For 1843, before the epidemic hit the
stables, the City Inspector of New York reported that children under five years
of age represented 4,588 of the 13,281 deaths reported in the city. In 1856, 13,373 children under the age of
five died, but the number of deaths of people over the age of five had hardly
changed at all. Whereas in 1843 children
under five has represented roughly one-third of all deaths, by 1856 they
represented more than 60 percent of all deaths. The New York Academy of
Medicine set up a committee to investigate the swill milk stables in 1848. The committee found the conditions under
which the cows were kept were atrocious and unacceptable. The larger stables kept 2,000 to 4,000 cows
confined in unventilated stalls, which combined with their inadequate diet of
distillery slop, led to the easy transmission of disease throughout the entire
herd. Running, ulcerated sores all over
their bodies, missing teeth, sore feet, hair loss, and consumption of the lungs
were just some common ailments. After a
chemical analysis of the milk, the committee found that the milk contained only
one-half to one-third the amount of butter fat found in country milk and
concluded that the distillery milk was very likely the cause of scrofulous and
cholera infantum, which had claimed so many of the city’s young. One 1 March 1848, the committee’s chair, Dr.
Augustus Gardner, presented two resolutions to the Academy: that swill milk was
“not only less nutritious than that of unconfined and well-fed animals, but is
positively deleterious, especially to young children”, and that city officials
should take action against the swill milk dairymen “as in their wisdom they may
think fit”. The report was not published
until 1851. The Daily Tribune published
a long article and editorial on 26 June 1847, attacking swill milk for
containing “positively noxious properties” pointing to swill as “being responsible
for the excessive infant mortality numbers in the city” and concluding by
chastising the city officials for not acting. The Health Department formed in
1866 banned swill milk as part of the sanitary code in 1873 (Egan & Crane
’09: 47, 48, 56).
When the Civil War ended, many former slaves
remained in the South because it was unclear exactly where they should go. Upon hearing word of Abraham Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 some were said to have walked to the entrance
of their plantation only turn directly around and come back. It was unclear what freedom meant, or would
mean. Many who remained entered into
sharecropping agreements with their former slave owners. This arrangement turned out to be the primary
economic relationship of blacks and whites in the South following the war. Instead of the position of master and slave,
a sharecropping agreement ostensibly changed the relationship to that of
employer and employee. Sharecropping
worked this way, a landowner provided land to farm, and often provided the
tools, a mule, a horse, hoes, seed. The
sharecropper provided all the labor. At
the end of the growing season, the sharecropper “settled up” with the landlord. The landowner sold the crop that the
sharecropper harvested, and then split the proceeds. The sharecropper usually got half. That’s why
some people called this arrangement “half-cropping”. A crucial turning point in the relationship
of black farmers and the federal government came when the Union general William
Tecumsah Sherman marched through the South toward the end of the Civil
War. Slaves abandoned their plantations
and joined his army. To hand the
refugees, Sherman issued a special directive to resettle black families on the
coast of Georgia, saying that “each family shall have a plot of not more than
forty acres of tillable ground” and that the “military authorities will afford
them protection until such time as they can protects themselves”. Sherman’s army also provided mules to some of
the first settlers protected under this directive. Freed slaves soon embraced the hope that the
federal government would help them establish their independence with the
guarantee of “forty acres and a mule”.
Yet when President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated a few months later,
his successor, Andrew Johnson, abandoned any commitments of the U.S. Army to
protect black people who were resettled under Sherman’s directive. He returned all land that had formerly
belonged to slave owners, and the Freedmen’s bureau Act of 1866, passed over
Johnson’s veto, did not provide forty acres and a mule. The act focused instead on trying to make
sure that labor contracts between black people and their former slave owners
were fair. The law provided few
resources to enforce even this much more limited goal (Allen ’12: 46, 47, 99).
In the nineteenth
century, the passenger pigeon, once the most numerous bird on the North
American continent, went extinct on account of habitat loss, the buffalo
dwindled in numbers from approximately 30 million in 1830 to a few thousand in
the 1880 (with 5 million slaughtered in just three years), and forests the size
of Europe were mowed down in North America.
Materially “free” land and labor from Indians, blacks, working-class immigrants
and women collectively enabled the feverish pace at which environments were
depleted. In October 1872, pioneering environmentalist and Indian historian
George Catlin died at the age of 76, forty years after visualizing “a nation’s
Park” from a solitary vantage point overlooking Yellowstone River. Coincidentally, he died the same year that
President Ulysses S. Grant dedicated 1,600 square miles of Wyoming Territory to
Yellowstone National Park. The official statute
read that the park would be “set apart as a public park of pleasuring ground
for the benefit and enjoyment of the people” and prohibited the industrial
extraction of timber and mineral deposits. Railroads connected the city to
these national parks. Yellowstone was
originally promoted by the powerful railroads of late nineteenth-century
America. Jay Cook’s Northern Pacific
Railroad lobbied Congress and heavily advertised the park through the
1870s. In similar instances, the
Northern Pacific promoted Rainier National Park in 1897; the Great Northern
pushed for Glacier National Park in 1899; the Union Pacific advocated for the
Grand Canyon while the Southern and Central Pacific supported Yosemite. These railroad companies were also the
driving force behind the opening of the prairies and forests of the West to
aggressive timber harvesting, cattle ranching, wheat farming, mining and cotton
planting, and a critical factor in the demise of the buffalo (Egan & Crane
’97: 71, 79, 80). The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was created in
part by farmers who had over-plowed the topsoil of the Great Plains. The land was tilled too deeply and abused for
decades by planting the same crop over and over again. The soil became vulnerable to wind and
storms. In the past several decades, the
industrial agriculture system has depended heavily on chemical fertilizers that
are high in nitrates, which farmers feel are necessary to produce high yields
year after year. Plants use these
fertilizers inefficiently and when it rains the fertilizer ends up running off
into our drinking water. More than a
quarter of wells in the United States now contain levels of nitrates that are
considered higher that the acceptable standard.
Excess human consumption of nitrates has been linked to gastric and
bladder cancers. High levels in drinking
water have also been connected to a condition called “blue baby syndrome”. The nitrates begin a chain of biological
reaction in infants that deprive the child’s organs and tissues of oxygen. This syndrome is most common in rural
agricultural areas where chemical fertilizers are widely used. The amount of protein, iron, calcium,
phosphorus, iron and vitamin C have all declined noticeably in a ll harvested
fruits and vegetables in the United States from 1950 to 1999. Riboflavin, a B vitamin that helps the body
convert food into energy, that is necessary for healthy skin, eyes, hair and
liver, declined overall in fresh foods during that time period by nearly 40
percent (Allen ’12: 189).
Several months
after the publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson praised the public
response to her best-selling book in a speech to the Garden Club of
America. She commended not only the
increased awareness about the dangers of pesticides and the government’s
heightened attention to address these hazards, but also the growing tend tendency
among the public to demand access to information and to insist on change. The
most hopeful sign is an awakening of strong public interest and concern. People are beginning to ask questions and to
insist upon proper answers instead of meekly acquiescing in whatever spraying
programs are proposed. Although
Progressive era institutions encouraged nature study as a method of promoting
conservationist values also championed the importance and authority of
technical expertise. This second
phenomenon created a culture of “leaving it to the experts”, which Carson
regarded as intellectually problematic and socially dangerous. “Science is not something that belongs in a
compartment of its own, separated from everyday life. The materials of science are the materials of
life itself”. After receiving a master’s
degree in zoology from John Hopkins in 1932, Carson devoted her career to
working as an editor and biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1951, she published The Sea Around Us,
an eloquent scientific description of the marine world for which she received
the National Book Award. She also
published the best-seller The Edge of the Sea in 1955, detailing
scientific elements of the marine world.
In writing Silent Spring Carson again sought to provide the
public with important scientific information, this time about the negative
effects of pesticides and other chemicals.
Carson worked hard to ensure the scientific integrity of her book,
thoroughly researching the existing data on pesticides, collaborating with
other scientists in compiling and verifying facts, and welcoming scientists
input on draft versions of Silent Spring. In a strongly worded critique, Carson related
a decision by a committee of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow a certain
chemical to be marketed for two years while the agency determined whether the
chemical was a carcinogen. “Although the
committee did not say so, its decision meant that the public was to act as
guinea pigs, testing the suspected carcinogen”.
Carson cited an aggressive spraying campaign in the southern United
States to kill the fire ant. After the
campaign, scientists accumulated data about its impacts, revealing, “losses
running all the way up to complete destruction of wildlife in the treated areas”. Nonetheless the USDA “brushed away all
evidence of damage as exaggerated or misleading” (Egan & Crane ’97: 185,
188, 190).
Whereas the public
traditionally viewed scientists as disinterested researchers, discovering
observable and objective facts, Carson highlighted the fact that their training
and their economic ties strongly influenced their findings. Scientists had interests and these interests
shaped both the questions they asked and the way they interpreted the
answers. More pointedly, Carson
maintained that scientists’ affiliations and funding directly shaped their
interpretations of data. In a striking
passage in Silent Spring Carson writes, ‘Inquiry into the background of some of
these academics reveals their entire research program is supported by the
chemical industry. Their professional
prestige, sometimes their very jobs, depends on the perpetuation of chemical
methods. Can be then expect them to bite
the hand that literally feeds them? But
knowing their bias, how much credence can we give to their protests that
insecticides are harmless? Major chemical companies were pouring money into the
universities to support research on insecticides. You can readily invent chemicals to kill a
pest like a fire ant but it is very much harder to decide how to staff the USDA
so as to get the right mixture of chemical and biological and political
judgment involved in the decision to use it or not. At a lecture to the Kaiser Foundation in 1963
Carson said, “I for one would like to see the American public treated like
individuals, capable of hearing the truth about the hazards that exist in the
modern environment and capable of making intelligent decisions as prudent and
necessary measures that ought to be taken”.
Environmental emphasis on the right to know stemmed directly from
Carson, and the Freedom of Information Act was enacted in 1964 and National
Environmental Policy Act in 1969.
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called it “the most
revolutionary book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin and claimed that it would be
the “most important chronicle of this century for the human race” (Egan &
Crane ’09: 191, 192, 194, 198, 199).
W.E.B. Dubois urged African Americans to find
success through liberal education, writing, “The Negro race is going to be saved
by its exceptional men”. Booker T.
Washington argued that black people would be better served by the development
of practical abilities. Dubois ideas
won. His vision helped give us a world
where it was possible to have Martin Luther King, Jr. Jackie Robinson, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. Colin Powell, Ben Carson, John Lewis and Barack Obama. African Americans proved their worth in
corporate boardrooms, in Ivy League universities, on sports fields, in
operating rooms, in the halls of Congress, and in the White House. This “Talented Tenth” as Dubois called
top-performing African Americans provided blacks with role models and reasons
for pride. Yet for all the progress in
civil rights in the past several decades, great disparities have grown in the
physical health of our people, and this change has come directly in the wake of
the departure of black farmers from their land. One in two African Americans
born in the year 2000 is expected to develop type II diabetes. Four out of ten African American men and
women over the age of twenty have high blood pressure. Blacks are 30 percent more likely to die
young from heart disease than white. And
while some suffer from the effects of too much unhealthy food, others go
hungry. One out of every six people in
the United States will find themselves fearful sometime of not having enough
food to eat. These problems are not limited to one race, and they are not owing
simply to faults of willpower or personal discipline. They are the symptoms of a broken food
system. In inner-city communities
throughout the United States, it is easier, and often less expensive, to buy a
Twinkie or frosted cupcakes or a box of fried chicken than fresh vegetables or
fruits. Our current generation of young
people rarely eat fresh foods, don’t know to grow or prepare them, and in many
cases, can’t even identify them. They
have become entirely dependent on a food system that is harming them. Equal
access to healthy, affordable food should be a civil right, every bit as
important as access to clean air, clean water, or the right to vote (Allen ’12:
6, 7).
For black farmers in the twentieth century who
outlasted the upheaval of the Great Migration, there were more subtle forces
that drove them off their land. In 1982
a bipartisan U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report called “The
Decline of Black Farming in America” that attempted to understand why black
farmers were leaving the profession at two and a half times greater than that
of whites. The committee found that one
important reason was that black farmers were small farmers. The average commercial farm owned by a black
man in the South was 128 acres. The
average farm of a white landowner was 428 acres. Almost all the technological innovations that
the United States government had subsidized over the previous decades, were
geared toward increasing the productivity of large farms, and not to making
small farms sustainable. These subsidies
were first established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great
Depression to help farmers who were suffering.
Prices for things like wheat, corn, tobacco, rice and milk had declined
sharply in the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New
Deal program encouraged farmers to allow some fields to lie fallow or to kill
excess livestock, the decreased supply increased prices for these
commodities. The government, in turn,
compensated farmers for the money they would have made had they continued to
farm at full capacity. The policy later shifted emphasis so that farmers were
less often encouraged to let fields lie fallow, but were simply compensated
directly with payments if corn or what prices fell below a certain
minimum. This meant that the more food
you could produce, the larger your income support payment when prices fell too
low. By the late 1970s payments for
participating small farmers were as low as $365. Farms with more than 2,500 acres, on the
other hand, received as much as $36,000 a year.
These policies allowed larger farms to borrow and invest capital in more
land and improved technology, resulting in increased production on their part
and providing for an “increasing disadvantage for small farmers”. The USDA has acknowledged that these
income-support programs could be contributing to the loss of small farms. Then,
in 1983, President Ronald Reagan closed the USDA Civil Rights Office and the US
stopped responding to claims of discrimination.
In 1984 to 1985 the agency lent $1.3 billion to farmers in order to buy
land. Sixteen thousand farmers received
these loans. Only 209 of them were black. From the 1960s to 1990s about 115,000 black
farmers left the profession. By the last
decade of the twentieth century, the typical African American farmer who
remained on the land was sixty years old.
By the end of the 1980s there were fewer than two thousand African
American farmers under the age of twenty-five in the entire United States. According to the National Agriculture
Statistics Service, there are only half as many honey-producing hives in the
United States as there were in 1980.
Scientists are concerned that the widespread use of certain pesticides
throughout the U.S. and Europe is impacting the central nervous system of bees,
impairing their ability to perform the waggle dance effectively or carry out
the other delicate tasks that are necessary for their ability to survive as a
colony. Bees are responsible for
producing as much as one of every three bites of food that we eat. A honeybee may visit as many as five thousand
apple flowers a day, and bits of the female pollen get stuck to its body as it
flies from flower to flower, creating the conditions in which an apple flower
can pollinate then fruit. Were bees to
disappear, we would lose much of our ability to produce many of our healthiest
foods (Allen ’12: 101, 103, 166).
Martin Luther King Jr. had the audacity to
believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies,
education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for
their spirits. Martin Luther King, Jr. By 1970, many African American political and
civil rights leaders were concerned that the environmental movement shifted
national attention and discourse away from the civil rights movement. When newly elected African American
politicians were interviewed in 1970 by the national media on the topic of the
environmental movement, they did not hesitate to express their disdain and disappointment over the country’s sudden
embrace and focus on environmental issues so soon after the assassination of leading
civil rights leaders and deaths of political activists. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first
African-American woman elected to Congress, held a slightly different opinion
about the relationship between economic and environmental enfranchisement, “It
will do black Americans absolutely no good to be politically and economically
enfranchised into a system that systematically denies human values and destroys
the environment that sustains life. By
affirming and fighting for the values that are life sustaining, black
politicians can become the vanguard of the forces that save this country, if it
is to be saved” (Egan & Crane ’09: 208).
In 1920 there were more than 900,000 farms operated by
African-Americans in the United States.
Today, there are only 18,000 black people who name farming as their
primary occupation. Black farmers
cultivate less than half a percent of the country’s farmland (Allen ’12: 237,
6).
Caretaker (Black Panther poem)
By Tolbert Small
We are not owners
of Mother Earth;
We are merely
caretakers for future generations.
We must let our
forests grow.
We must let our
animals roam.
We must let our
rivers flow.
We should take only
what we need.
We must pick only
flowers for today;
We must leave some
for tomorrow.
We must save the
future for our children’s children.
We must let the
salmon swim and the buffalos roam (Egan & Crane ’09: 218, 219).
4.
Tea Party and Occupy Recession Protests
Since a little before the Great Recession the
Democratic-Republican (DR) parties and all their defective creation, the
federal and international governments, became too poisonous to the petitioner
to continue to appeal. The people were
therefore relieved of their duty to report to Constitutional Government
otherwise your health and society will be biologically and economically damaged
by the irrational pillaging of Republicans infiltrating President Obama’s
Democratic administration, justice, health or social security systems. States governors had to stop participating in
the torture of the major parties and govern their states responsibly, with
mixed results, on the unsatisfactory side of Democratic-Republican (DR)
monopoly. The federal government however
theoretically remains as insolvent as their budget deficit is in excess of 3
percent of the GDP. In response the
fiscal irresponsibility of the Democratic-Republican (DR) major parties that
caused the Great Recession a majority of likely voters think a viable third
party would be good for American politics.
Fifty-four percent of respondents in the Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll
said they’d like an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. That number rose to 67 percent for
self-identified independents. But even a
plurality in the established parties – 49 percent of Democrats and 46 percent
of Republicans, said they’d like another choice. There’s a record number of independents and a
record number of people looking for a possible third party. There’s a greater potential for a third party
than perhaps at any time in our history.
There is broad level of dissatisfaction throughout the electorate –
right, left and middle. Several third
parties have risen to prominence, most notably as spoilers in presidential
elections. In 1912, former President
Theodore Roosevelt made an unsuccessful bid to reclaim the White House by
running on the Progressive ticket. More recently, Ross Perot ran under the
Reform Party banner vote in the 1992 presidential election, capturing almost 20
percent of the popular vote, which helped Bill Clinton topple President George
H.W. Bush. Ralph Nader made several
presidential runs as a Green Party candidate, but his most notable feat was
siphoning votes away from Vice President Al Gore in 2000 for which reason it is
presumed he did not run against President Barack Obama in the 2012 elections. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and others have also
made runs for the presidency – with modest success – under the Libertarian
Party banner. However the rules of the
election process – written by Republican and Democrats – provide substantial
advantages for the two established major parties (Miller ’12: 50, 52, 58).
Incumbents win 90 percent of the time, therefore it is highly recommended that
independent parties sue the major parties for 25 percent of their campaign
contributions and/or dissolution under antitrust statute, if only to protect
their non-violent political organization against infiltration and take-over by
the major parties, rightly perceived as legal adversaries especially restrained
against infringing, while other independent parties are worthy political
opponents, that must not fall to the lowest common denominator of the major
parties and uphold high standards of literacy and science if their unlikely
victory is not to plunge the U.S. into a dark age (Sanders ’10).
It is interesting to note that both the Tea
Party and Occupy censured and committed espionage against HA for what they
thought was their advantage only to lose their raison d’etre, independent Political Party status. I went to the
Tea Party foundational protest when I was living in Mormon, Republican, Provo,
Utah in spring 2009. The emcee refused
to allow me to explain the mathematics of the tobacco tax which is indeed the raison d’etre for the timing of the Tea
Party mass protest, ostensibly to betray the noble cause of a legitimate tax
protest, in order to take corporate contributions, like the plagiarizing
establishment lobbyists and politicians who have suppressed HA’s trillions to
get rich at the expense of the macro-economy.
But having betrayed their true reason of existence they were quickly coopted
by the Tea Party Caucus for challenging the Republican primaries, and cannot in
their current form be a political party of their own, nor are they independent
of the Republican Party. Does the Tea
Party take hush money from the tobacco industry or Attorney General Master
Tobacco Settlement? Tea Party
representative, Ron Paul’s (R-TX) son, Rand Paul (R-KY) needs to jumpstart
organic tobacco production in his state with a tax credit or complete exemption
for the duration of the 21st century to offset the unfair tax only
for organic tobacco companies that eschew chemical additives, he should also
make sure the Attorney General Master Tobacco Settlement is completely used to
pay nearly 100 percent of the cost of children’s health insurance. Occupy came camping with me in September 2012
and was peaceful, if a few hundred yards off mark in the Plaza instead of the
Park the homeless want to camp in again, until the opportunity was presented to
censure their HA brief, a $1.4 trillion anti-trust settlement reinvesting
government assets from multi-national banks to local financial institutions and
$300 billion TARP return to the Treasury and instead got arrested for lobbying
Congress demanding the balanced budget of the author they were so dangerously
spurning. Occupy camps dedicated to the
homeless, for instance in Vancouver had the social work, the political
integrity to stay encamped for a long time, and might still be encamped this
winter, but those groups whose politics were co-opted by middle and working class
ideals, quickly found themselves in trouble with the police. When the leaders of Occupy DC came to speak
of their many arrests for lobbying the Congress, they were directed to focus on
occupying the prisons in the District of Columbia which is undermining the
operations of the federal government with the highest prison population in the
world, more concentrated than even Texas, whose politicians cannot be allowed
to seek high federal or international office until they have abolished the
death penalty and reduced the prison population to less than 500 detainees per
100,000 residents. While Occupy has a
healthy suspicion of the Democratic party, like the Democrats, they are too
riddled with bioterrorists for politics.
American politics are too tricky to settle for anything less than
Hospitals & Asylums (HA) research. The bi-polar, right-left affect, of the
Tea Party and Occupy, enabled us, for a short time only, to participate
politically in the Democratic-Republican (DR) two party systems. But multi-party politics are needed to the
extent that critical information is suppressed.
We give 2009 to the Tea Party, 2011 to Occupy and hope American
protestors will have more to express in President Obama’s second term. Are
Americans ready for as well-written a political agenda as HA political
party?
The rise of the Tea Party movement – a
mishmash of disparate organizations under one umbrella in spring of 2009 –
serves as one of the strongest signals that the public is dissatisfied with the
Democratic and Republican government.
But asked if they thought the Tea Party should be the new third party
(not “a” new third party), voters divided. More than two-thirds of Democrats
and 42 percent of independents said no.
But 55 percent of Republicans said yes.
51 The Tea Party is in denial that they were created in response to the
extremely unfair tobacco tax of 2009.
The Tea Party movement, a loosely organized coalition of citizen’s
political groups, is named after the 1773 Boston Tea Party. The original Boston Tea Party was a political
protest by early American colonists against Britain over the country’s
imposition of taxes on American settlers without giving them representation in
the British Parliament. Many commentators
say the modern Tea Party movement can be traced to Ron Paul, a libertarian
Republican congressman from Texas who ran in 2008 as a candidate for the
Republican nomination for the US presidency.
As a libertarian Paul opposed government involvement in the lives of
Americans on many levels. He spoke out
against deficit spending, taxes, business regulation, government security
intrusions such as wiretapping, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paul’s views were not popular with the
Republican Party, so on December 16, 2007, Paul and his supporters marched from
Boston City Hall to the historic Faneuil Hall, where they had a fund-raising
rally that appealed for grassroots support, raising $4.3 million in one day
over the Internet. Ron Paul’s bid for the
presidency ultimately failed, but many of his libertarian ideas ultimately
became part of Tea Party philosophy (Miller ’12: 51, 18).
Following a Republican defeat and the election
of the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in the fall of 2008, the
economics recession was in full swing, and the federal government’s response
was a $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) whereby President Bush
sabotaged his successor’s economy.
Although the Treasury and Federal Reserve portrayed TARP as critical to
preventing another Great Depression, many people saw it as an unjustified
bailout of Wall Street at taxpayer’s expense.
Obama’s Recovery Act and health care reform distorted the federal budget
and were viewed by conservative citizens as unnecessary deficit spending. The Tea Party began endorsing candidates to
run in the Republican primaries in preparation for the 2010 midterm
congressional and state elections. A
number of Tea Party candidates won in the primaries, ousting long-term, mainstream
Republican incumbents. Former Alaskan
governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, openly aligned herself
with the Tea Party. A number of
prominent Tea Party candidates were elected into office in the 2010 midterms,
most notably the son of Ron Paul, Rand Paul, who was elected to the US Senate
by Kentucky voters. While 18% of independents voted for Democrats in their
takeover of the House and Senate in 2006, 18% of independents swung back and
voted for Republicans in their takeover of the house and near-takeover of the
Senate in 2010. 32 Conservatives have largely embraced the Tea Party, although
some have questioned whether the Tea Party will truly change the Republican
Party position on issues, making it more right-wing in its views, or whether
the Tea Party will simply become a vocal but ineffective faction within the
Republican Party. Current controversies question whether the Tea Party movement
is legitimate, whether it is racist, whether it is compatible with the
Republican Party, and whether it will survive or have any political on the
nation’s future (Miller ’12: 18, 19, 20, 21).
Tea Party activists say their movement is
unwilling to be coopted into the traditional party structure. Nonetheless, Republican faithfuls are
concerned that the creation of the Tea Party as a third party would split the
vote and it would be a more appealing prospect to “take over” the Republican
Party. Which is more likely to absorb
the other? That’s easy. One isn’t an organization; it has two years
of experience, no national structure and no real fund-raising operation. The other has operated since 1854, has built
a formidable national organization and has survived electoral disaster more
than once. However, what actually happened in the 2010 midterm was that the
Republican Party coopted the revolution and incorporated the “Party” as a “Tea
Party Caucus” for the Republican primaries.
At a campaign rally in Paducah, Ky., Senate candidate Rand Paul, a
darling of the Tea Party movement, drew thunderous applause when he said that
if Republicans win, ‘we get to go to Washington and take back our government’.
Tea Party groups share three core ideals (1) limited government/individual
freedom; (2) fiscal responsibility; and (3) free markets. The Tea Party is however not a Party. The objective of the Tea Party movement is to
change the Republican Party from within.
Tea Party members are typically strongly supportive of big business, an
aspect that has opened it up for strong criticism from the Left. Since it has
not official role in government (beyond a Tea Party Caucus established by
Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann), the Tea Party is free to chart its
own course. The current Tea Party is a movement funded by corporations, which
then use their members as protest weapons against their own interests. 49
Many sign carrying Tea Party participants ‘cling to the belief that our
first African-American president is not only un-American, he was not even born
in the country’. There’s little evidence
to indicate that Tea Party leaders are doing anything to address the racism in
their ranks. Tea Partiers are mostly white and more likely to be male (59%);
three-quarters are 45 and older, compared to half of all Americans. They are more religious than average, though
not dramatically so: 39% are evangelical Christians and 38% attend church every
week, while the figures for all Americans are 28% and 27%. Not surprisingly the Tea Partiers are
disproportionately Republican and right wing: 39% consider themselves “very
conservative” and 34% “somewhat conservative” (compared to 12% and 24% for the
general population). Their conservatism
tends to be more authoritarian than libertarian, i.e. pro-Tea Party respondents
are much more likely than others to agree that the government should be able to
detain suspects indefinitely without trial and to tap phones if there is a
threat of terrorism. The Tea Party
movement is mainly conservative and that makes it a haven for racists (Miller
’12: 27, 28, 53, 144, 60, 62, 27, 35, 36, 49, 75).
Rand Paul, a forty-seven-year-old
ophthalmologist from Bowling Green, Kentucky and son of well-known libertarian
congressman Ron Paul (a Republican physician from Texas whose executions and
penal population bar the Saint from high federal or international political
ambition), won a US Senate seat on November 3, 2010, by decisively defeating
his Democratic opponent. Paul ran as a
Tea Party candidate, and in his election is considered by many to make him the
default leader of the Tea Party. The Tea Party is however, not more than a Tea Party
Caucus, he and others must be billed (T) by the press and Clerk and not (R) to
express their independence. As a
candidate, Rand Paul ran on many of the broad themes embraced by Tea Party
supporters, including cutting federal spending, reducing taxes, and balancing
the federal budget. However, as a
libertarian long schooled by his father, Rand Paul also included some familiar
libertarian ideas. Libertarians, for
example, believe that individual rights should be maximized and that government
powers should be sharply curtailed therefore, one of Rand Paul’s goals is to
curb the clout of the Federal Reserve (the Fed), the nation’s central bank and
controller of the US money supply. Both
Ron and Rand Paul view the Fed’s ability to create money without accountability
to Congress as a secret tax on Americans and a prime example of too much
government power. In addition Rand Paul
railed against the federal government’s decision to bail out big banks, and he
has promised to slash federal agencies like the Department of Education, ban
earmarks, and introduce congressional term limits. Sarah Palin has become the public face of the
Tea Party, according to many media sources.
Although she currently holds no public office, Palin first aligned
herself with the Tea Party in February 2010, when she was the keynote speaker
at a national Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tennessee, that was organized
by one of the major Tea Party groups, the Tea Party Nation. She was paid $100,000 for her speech. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn, of the House,
formed an official Tea Party Caucus on Capitol Hill. Within three days, 42 members of Congress had
signed up, all conservative Republicans.
The group won an almost-instant
blessing from the House Republican leader John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, who
described his own experiences at Tea Party rallies with near-religious
enthusiasm. “Last Labor Day weekend, there were 18,000 people about a mile from
my home – 18,000 people!” Boehner said.
“These folks are the tip of an iceberg”. Boehner went on. “We should listen to them, we should work
with them and we should walk amongst them.”.
The Tea Party “Contract from America” and the GOP “Pledge to America”
are almost carbon copies. Both call for
the repeal of health reform and opposition to cap-and-trade energy
legislation. Both support making the
budget-busting Bush tax cuts permanent, including the repeal of the estate tax
and another $700 billion windfall for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Only the GOP pledge did not echo the Tea
Party call for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution (Miller ’12: 91,
127, 141, 97).
On September 20, 2010 former President Jimmy
Carter muses, “It may be difficult for some younger readers to realize how much
the Washington political scene has changed in the last 30 years”. The congressional bipartisanship on which he
relied for his considerable number of legislative achievements no longer exists
and that the “pernicious effects of partisanship have not been limited to
Washington; American citizens have also become more polarized in their
beliefs…Almost all segments of American society, the poor, the idle class and
the wealthy – have become more alienated from our government. Observing the behavior of the Washington
political establishment, people too often feel only frustration and mistrust;
inevitably, we now see frequent exhibitions of anger and vituperation”. Not
radicals. In Kentucky, senatorial
candidate Rand Paul wants to eliminate the Departments of Education and Energy,
as does Alaskan nominee Joe Miller, who also says that unemployment insurance
is unconstitutional. In Utah, GOP Senate
hopeful Mike Lee wants to repeal or amend the 14th and 17th
amendments, doing away with our current citizenship laws and the popular
election of U.S. senators. Limited government is inconsistent with state
intrusion in economic affairs.
Conservatives must learn to embrace a limited government perspective on
social issues. In the context of limited
government, civil libertarianism will not threaten social values held dear by
conservatives or liberals. If civil
liberty is properly honored, all people should be free to live their lives as
they choose, according to the values that are dear to them, as long as they respect
the similar rights of others. Limited
government is inconsistent with state legislating morality. Social and religious conservatives, like
their progressive counterparts on the left, have deluded themselves. They have fallen into the trap of believing
that achieving the social outcome they prefer trumps the need to build an
electoral majority based on those issues they embrace. Paternalism, from either the left or right,
is not something that Americans will accept.
According to OpenSecrets.org the 2010 midterms have seen a whopping 186.7
million dollars flowing into Republican coffers vice 88.6 million for the
Democrats. At least 16 other books have
been published on the topic of the Tea Party (Miller ’12: 91, 97, 99, 100, 101,
127, 141, 154, 158, 168).
Few if any of the few dozen pioneers who were
arrested for sleeping on the stony rectangle of Zuccotti Park on September 17,
2011, expected their protest to bloom so quickly into such a vast
movement. In 1770, a two-ton equestrian
statue of King George III was erected on the green, where it stood until five
days after the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776,
whereupon a band of Sons of Liberty toppled it.
Now, on September 17, most protestors were following the recent occupations
directed against bankrupt political classes in Madison, Wisconsin in December,
Cairo’s Tahrir Square in January and Madrid’s Puerta del Sol in May. Wall
Street is symbolic, capital has no fixed address, traders from around the world
buy, sell and bundle. Here the great
investment banks, the graduates of Ivy League colleges underwrite securities,
arrange mergers and acquisitions, devise extraordinary varieties of tradable
paper, and invest in every quantifiable phenomenon under the sun. The proprietors use the ingenuity of
thousands of Ph.D.’s in mathematics and physics to design financial products
(as if they were a tangible thing), securitizing (rendering marketable), and
managing (a word designed to soothe nerves if ever there were one) risk ( word
connoting the sort of danger that can be managed. 8 Their ecumenical spirit
radiated from this call: Occupy your Life.
Occupy your occupation! Whether
you clean houses, sit behind a desk, teach in a classroom, work in a kitchen,
play an instrument, speak a second language, are a whiz with budgets, can pull
projects together and make things happen, make videos, walk dogs, anything…your
skills are needed at your local occupation square! The current economic structure of the country
is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest
of the country. America needs to reduce
the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and
transparency. The government should not
provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich
(Gitlin ’12: 3, 18, 26, 37).
The American left had watched helplessly as
the Obama wave of 2008 subsided, its grass-roots organizing apparatus
disbanded. In the meantime, from the
beginning of the new administration, the Tea Party burst upon the national
scene. The result was that vast numbers
of young voters of 2008 had stayed home from the midterm elections of 2010,
with a predictably dire outcome for the Democrats, as Republicans gained
sixty-three Congressional seats. 46, 49
Americans, used to their two party system, have preferred a divided government,
with Congressional majority and President from different parties, to a
tyrannical majority, since the 1970s.
Even before Occupy surfaced, the Tea Party was receding in popular
support. According to one poll, the
percentage of respondents who viewed it unfavorably rose by half, from 26
percent just before the 2010 midterm elections to 40 percent in August
2011. As the Tea Party’s glamor faded,
Occupy replaced it as the big political trend.
48, 49 There were a total of
perhaps three million Americans who self-identified with the movement by
“liking” one of the 680 Occupy-related Facebook groups and pages. Periodically, a scattering of people more or
less simultaneously raise their fingers in the air and flutter them. “Twinkling”, this is sometimes called. Others lower their fingers and wiggle them
“de-Twinkling”. If you watch long
enough, you get the point. Twinkling is
the equivalent of applause. De-twinkling
is the equivalent of a hiss. People
raise their hands to get their names placed “on stack” on the speakers’
list. Occasionally, someone raises both
hands above his head and forms a triangle with his fingers, hoping to stop the
discussion and be called on. The person
with the authority to stop the conversation is a facilitator. More commonly, when a proposal is put up for
adoption, someone crosses raised fists and forearms. This is a block. It stops things cold. Meetings go on for hours. The subgroups that carry on most of Occupy’s
activities, Working Groups, operate in the same manner, even in meetings over a
hundred. There are ninety-seven of them
thus far – Think Tank (the largest with 794 members singed up online), followed
by Direct Action (719), Arts & Culture (664), Politics and Electoral Reform
(572), Tech Ops (552), Vision & Goals (519), Facilitation (439), Outreach
(423) etc. (Gitlin ’12: 48, 49, 48, 60).
The campers were making a statement in the
spirit of the First Amendment, availing themselves not only of freedom of
speech in the abstract but of “the right
of the people peaceably to assemble”. A
declaration of loyalty to the 99 percent and a desire to chastise and curb the
1 percent who prospered during and despite and sometimes because the bottom had
fallen out of tens of millions of lives as a result of a foreseeable financial
crisis for which they were responsible. 70
They were inspired, above all, by the Arab Spring, the global idea of
popular power overthrowing dictators.
The Tea & Herbal Medicine group practices clinical herbalism for the
occupation. Someone comes to us and
says, “I feel like I’m getting the flu” or, “I’ve had a UTI for a couple of
days”, or, “I’m feeling really burned out,” etc. We provide a tailored medicinal response to
their complaint, plus some general self-care guidance and whatever other
assistance we can provide continued follow-up care for them as an individual
patient. The GA tests the limits of patience, many simple decisions, like how
to transport the laundry, can take well over an hour”. For long periods the
GA’s online site was obsessed with an infighting proposal to expel a group with
money to burn on advertising called the 99 Declaration the99declaration.org,
who supported the creation of a continental congress of elected delegates to be
summoned to Philadelphia on July 4, 2012 to pass a slate of demands to be made
on the government (Gitlin ’12: 70, 71, 88, 94, 95).
On September 29, 2012, less than two weeks
into the occupation, the New York GA endorsed a “Declaration of the Occupation
of New York City”, directed “to the people of the world” and against
corporations: We write so that all
people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we
are your allies…We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit
over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our
governments. We have peaceably assembled
here, as is our right, to let these facts be known. Occupy’s nonviolence is rightly
seen by most of the movement as in itself an extraordinary achievement. We are committed to building a movement for
social liberation. We aim to transform
the governing values and institutions in all spheres of social life…We work to
break down all systems of inequality and injustice and to create a
participatory, democratic and egalitarian society. During the first nine months
of 2011, American banks launched 1.8 million foreclosure actions, though this
number was down from the record 2.9 million during the whole year of 2010. Millions more foreclosures are expected in
2012. Meanwhile the much-touted
agreement between forty-nine state attorneys general and five huge banks
announced in February 2012 as a breakthrough that pried $25 billion loose, netted
a meager two thousand dollars apiece for the victims of abusive
foreclosures. It was for good reason
that the Declaration of the Occupation of New York listed first among its bill
of grievances against corporations: “They have taken our houses through an
illegal foreclosure process…” (Gitlin ’12: 111, 127, 137, 175).
Regardless of what the more electoral minded
Occupiers may do on their own, register voters, knock on doors, make phone
calls, the whole universe of tasks that go into winning elections, some
activists argue that Occupy might leave its more lasting imprint on American
politics by stepping outside the candidate runs and focusing on deep
constitutional changes that in the longer run might just barely be
attainable. The idea circulates for a
campaign for a constitutional amendment that would provide for complete public
financing of elections and ban private donations over ,say, twenty-five hundred
dollars. The central pillar of plutocracy is the domination of politics by
money. On this there is broad popular
agreement. Whether a fog of agreement
can be condensed into a torrent of political energy is, given the
cumbersomeness of the US Constitution, quite another question, there will be no
way to know without years of work. In the fifties and sixties, the Leadership
Council on Civil Rights brought together all the civil rights groups, from the
most militant to the stodgiest, along with religious and union leaders, and
organized liberals, to coordinate work, to lobby, debate and coordinate
strategy and make deals with the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. 209 On
November 2 unions made donations, however, when Occupy camps decided to
blockade west coast ports on December 12, “to block the 1 percent” and cut into
their profits, thus “taking on the global issue of exploitation by capitalism”,
the unions objected. The
secretary-treasurer of the Alameda Building and Construction Trades Council,
Andreas Cluver, said: We’re extremely supportive of the message of Occupy
Oakland, and we did come out to support the November 2 general strike, but
we’re not behind this one. When working
people aren’t involved in the decision on whether to shut down their jobs at
the port, that’s problematic. And we
weren’t consulted. Losing a day of wages
is hard (Gitlin ’12: 204, 205 209, 210, 211).
Roughly three-quarters of the public (77%) say
that they think there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and
large corporations in the United States.
About nine-in-ten (91%) Democrats and eight0in-ten (80%) of independents
hold this view, a much narrower majority (53%) of Republicans do as well. For historical perspectives, six-in-ten (60%)
Americans expressed this view in a 1941 Gallup poll [twelve years after the
onset of the Great Depression]
Reflecting a parallel sentiment, 61% of Americans now say that the
economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy. A search of state constitutions shows that
the right to assemble is protected in almost all. Pennsylvania seems to have set the pace in
1776: The citizens have a right in a peaceable manner to assemble together for
their common good, and to apply to those invested with the powers of government
for redress of grievances or other proper purposes by petition, address or
remonstrance. Connecticut adopted a
text that differs in only a single word: it subtracts the word “together”. Several other states stuck with “common good”
and added “consult” as in this from New Jersey: The people have the right
freely to assemble together, to consult for the common good, to make known their
opinions to their representatives, and to petition for redress of
grievances. Massachusetts has this: The
people have a right, in an orderly and peaceable manner, to assemble to consult
up on the common good; give instructions to their representatives, and to
request of the legislative body, b the way of addresses, petitions or
remonstrances, redress of the wrongs done them, and of the grievances they
suffer. In New York, the state constitution guarantees “the right to assemble
and petition as follows” No law shall be passed abridging the rights of the
people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government, or any department
thereof…(Gitlin ’12: 223, 248).
Paine’s dedication of Rights of Man:
Pull proud
oppressors down,
Knock off each
tyrant’s crown,
And break his sword;
Down aristocracy,
Set up democracy,
And from hypocrisy
Save us good Lord
Why should despotic
pride
Usurp us on every
side?
Let us be free;
Grant freedom’s arms
success,
And all her efforts
bless,
Plant through the
universe
Liberty’s tree
Facts are seditious
things
When they touch
courts and kings,
Armies are raised,
Barracks and
Bastilles built,
Innocence charged
with guilt,
Blood most unjustly
spilt,
God stands amazed.
Despots may howl and
yell,
Though they’re in
league with hell
They’ll not reign
long;
Satan may lead the
van,
And do the worst he
can,
Paine and his
‘Rights of Man’
Shall be my song.
God save the Rights
of Man!
Let despots, if they
can,
Them overthrow…
(Hitchens ’06; 3, 4, 5).
5.
Center for Alcohol, Tobacco and Marijuana (ATM)
The first African-American president takes
office, and almost immediately we see the birth of a big, passionate national
movement, aiming to dissolve the major parties.
Obama is a better oilman than his predecessor and the annual World
Energy Outlook predicts the U.S. to exceed Saudi Arabian oil production by 2020
and be energy-sufficient by 2035 (Grose ’12).
It was Bush who inherited a budget surplus and left behind a suffocating
deficit. It was Bush who launched two
wars. It was Rob Portman (R-OH) who
infringed on the HA budget after running the highest international trade
deficit in history. It John Boehner
(R-OH) who became Minority Leader and Speaker of the House. It was Bush who appointed the Social Security
Commissioner whose lawyers killed Michael Jackson and stalled SSI benefits at
$666 a month ($678) for three years from December 2009-December 2011. It was Bush who bailed out irresponsible Wall
Street firms with the $700 billion TARP (Miller ’12: 62, 63), which Rob Portman
illegally received for the zombie law firm Sanders, Squire and Demsey. It was however Obama who failed to respond
with reparations for the civilian casualties of his 2008 election year visit to
Afghanistan, the day after he visited my, his accountant’s former hometown, and
had to be censured. It was the sale of
Obama’s seat that caused former Illinois Governor Rod Blagovich to be sentenced
to 14 years in federal prison for want of a Presidential pardon. It was Obama, with the counsel of his
Attorney General who appointed Ray Lahood (R-IL) Secretary of Transportation
and his primary school principal Secretary of Education although this clearly
presents a conflict of interest with the false imprisonment of Rod Blagovich. It was Obama who signed the tobacco tax and
the Recovery Act. It was Obama’s email
that attacked the plaintiff, the Church of Scientology, with a sword and had to
be shot to death. It was Obama who
infringed on the HA U.S. War History and murdered my Oma receiving the Nobel
Peace Prize for which the committee was punished to offer a less generous prize
for peace in future years. It was
Obama’s National Guard that mined the state prison identity of the roommate I
never met in Provo, Utah who was sentenced to prison on ridiculous charges at
the time our neighbor the Native American Larry Echo Hawk, was appointed
Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs, and 200,000 Haitians died in an
earthquake within an hour of contacting the prison that had already released the
listed detainee. It was Obama’s Harvard
law appointee to the Department of Homeland Security Office of Civil Rights and
Civil Liberties, who triggered the Japan quake and Fukushima meltdown. It was Obama’s state visit that triggered the
deprivation of relief benefits and gun violence. It was Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder
who rubber stamped Operation Fast and Furious although he already had a
conflict of interest with the ATF massacre of the Branch-Davidians in Waco,
Texas in 1993. Face it, while Obama might be a better oilman, he is Bush’s
lawyer, not ours, just like Holder is Obama’s lawyer, not ours. Obama must read Psalm 1, if he could ever
read and write by email like a civilized official, before getting elected and
selling out his ideals to the bipartisan system. Lawyer Presidents, from Adam’s Alien and
Sedition Acts, to Nixon’s burglary to Clinton’s sexual infidelity habitually
pose a hazard to the freedom of legal research, communication and expression. Obama needs a new Attorney General, Secretaries
of State, Education and Transportation, Commissioner of Social Security not to
mention Secretary of Treasury and Chairman of the Federal Reserve. But a black
Attorney General might be even more important to American prestige in Europe
than a black President in the White House.
Is former American Bar Association (ABA) President Joseph Gray Jr., who
published the Kennedy Commission of 2004 expose on the U.S. prison population,
as black as his photo or as white as his bio?
It deserves clear recognition that in the
fight for democracy led by visionary and fearless political leaders across the
world, such as Sun Yat-sen, Jawaharlal Nehru, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther
King Jr., or Aung San Suu Kyi, and awareness of local and world history has played
an importantly constructive part. In his
autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom,
Nelson Mandela describes how impressed and influenced he was, as a young boy,
by seeing he democratic nature of the proceedings of the local meeting that
were held in the regent’s house in Mqhekezweni: Everyone who wanted to speak
did so. It was democracy in its purest
form. There may have been a hierarchy of
importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard. The foundation of self-government was that
all men were free to voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens.
Democracy is no longer seen just in terms of the demands for public balloting,
but much more capacious of what John Rawls calls ‘the exercise of public
reason’. The definitive idea for
deliberative democracy is the idea of deliberation itself. When citizens deliberate, they exchange views
and debate their supporting reasons concerning public political questions. Democracy is best seen as ‘government by
discussion’. Ballots do, of course, have
a very important role for the expression of public reasoning. Balloting alone can be thoroughly inadequate
on its own, as is abundantly illustrated in the astounding electoral victories
of ruling tyrannies in authoritarian regimes in the past and present. The difficulty lies not just in the
political and punitive pressure that is brought to bear on voters in the
balloting, but in the way expressions of public views are thwarted by
censorship, information exclusion and a climate of fear, along with the suppression
of political opposition and the independence of the media, and the absence of
basic civil rights and political liberties (Sen ’09: 332, 324, 327).
If Obama continues to refuse to buy the HA
balanced budget for $1,000, he must at least do his duty as the
African-American we popularly elected, to safely reduce the prison population
by half during his second term, by releasing nonviolent detainees to an SSI
financed halfway house system, to free the slaves in law and equity, as United
States of America was never able to do for his people peacefully or
reliably. Heeded, Thomas Paine might have spared us both
the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. Paine
wrote in 1775, ‘Call it independence or what you will, if it is the cause of
God and humanity it will go on. And when
the Almighty shall have blest us, and made us a people dependent only on him,
then may our first gratitude be shown by an act of continental legislation,
which shall put a stop to the importation of Negroes for sale, soften the hard
fate of those already here, and in time procure their freedom’. Common Sense sold half a million copies
in the course of the Revolution. John Adams, in particular, detested its
subversive tone and its implicit elevation of the common herd. The later quarrels between Adams and
Jefferson, which marked the early years of the republic and supplied the
benchmarks for all future ‘left’ versus ‘right’ disputes in American politics,
were always, either openly or covertly, arguments about Thomas Paine. But within a few months the Continental
Congress had decided on an irrevocable Declaration of Independence and
appointed a committee, which included Adams, Jefferson and Franklin, to draft
it. It was Jefferson who was nominated
to pull the threats together in one version, and it is obvious that he had both
read and approved of Common Sense. He even inserted a paragraph denouncing the
slave trade, which was cut out by the Congress before the document was approved
and published. When Paine published the
first part of the Rights of Man in 1791, it sold as many as 50,000 copies at
once. On 21 May 1792 Prime Minister
William Pitt issued a “Royal Proclamation aimed at wicked and seditious
writing’ and Paine received a summons to appear in court and answer to the
charge of seditious libel. Paine was welcome in Calais, France as an honorary
citizen and confirmed as the town’s deputy to the National Convention although
his French was rudimentary. In November
1792 the Convention met to decide the fate of King Louis (Capet). Paine objected to the execution. His argument, ‘Public torture and execution
was the problem, not the answer. France
has been the first country to abolish monarchy let it also be the first abolish
the punishment of death’. The author of
the Rights of Man was arrested one
night at Christmas 1793, just as he was completing his work on the Age of
Reason. When the time for his execution
came he was saved by an accident. The
chalk mark on the door of his cell, scheduling him for execution, was made by a
stupid warder who put the chalk mark on the wrong side of the door. On 28 July 1794 Robbespierre was himself put
to death by guillotine. With President
Monroe’s support Paine’s release was only a few months away. He was not immediately allowed to return to America
but was restored his seat at the National Convention (Hitchens ’06: 28, 29, 37,
38, 60, 63).
Although the US began publishing vital
statistics data on a yearly basis in 1900, these data were not derived from all
48 of the then-existing states until 1933.
The first report, in 1900, was based on only 10 states, mostly from New
England. Additional states were added
year after year, until by 1933 all 48 states were included. By 1912, there were 22 states included, by
1920, there were 34 and by 1932 only 1 state (Texas) of 48 was not included.
195 The overall differences in violent death rates (murder and suicide) under
Republican and Democratic presidents is statistically significant. Republican presidencies, with the exception
of Eisenhower, showed a net cumulative increase in suicide rate of 14.5
suicides per 100,000 population per year from 1900 to 2007. And the Democrats showed an almost exactly
equal net decrease of 13.3 suicides per 100,000 per year during their years in
office from 1913 to 2000. Similarly, the
Republican administrations witnessed a net increase of 5.4 in the homicide rate
and the Democrats a net decrease of 5.
Thus the total net increase in rates of lethal violence under
Republicans is 19.9 (the sum of 14.5 and 5.4), and the total net decrease under
Democrats, 18.3 (the sum of 13.3 and 5).
24, 25 The homicide rate in 2000
(6.4 deaths per 100,000 population per year) is exactly what it had been in
1900. 37 The US in 1998, when it had the lowest lethal violence rates for the
past 30 years, still had a rate of 17.3 violent deaths per 100,000 per year,
consisting of a homicide rate of 6.9 and a suicide rate of 10.4. Comparing the US with the country that is
perhaps the closest culturally to it, namely its mother country the UK, that
country’s homicide and suicide rates were 0.8 and 6.8, respectively in 1999,
which means a total lethal violence rate of only 7.6 – a homicide rate only 10
percent of that in the US, a suicide rate some 35 percent lower, and a lethal
violence rate only about 40 percent of that in the US. During the late 1990s, all 19 of the other
largest economically developed countries in the world (consisting of Western
Europe, and other English-speaking democracies and Japan) had an average lethal
violence rate of 12.7, as compared with the US rate of 17.3. The US murder rate at 6.9, was more than 6
times as high as the average rate of 1.1 in the other 19 countries. Only their suicide rates (11.5) were close to
those of the US (10.4) and the US suicide rate itself had also been 11.5 as
recently as 1991, before Clinton became President and much higher than that
(13.3) in 1975 (Gilligan ’11: 195, 144, 145).
Our national imprisonment rate had been
essentially constant throughout the first three-quarters of the twentieth
century at roughly 100 (plus or minus 20) per 100,000 population. It was only in the mid-1970s that it began
increasing steadily and rapidly year after year so that today it is over 700
per 100,000. 172, 173 The highest in the rate. The incarceration rate is significantly
higher in the Red than in the Blue states.
In the year 2000, the average incarceration rate in the Red States was
712 per 100,000 as opposed to 487 in the Blue States. 132
The Red and Blue states differ in their rates of lethally violent
behavior, i.e. suicide and homicide, including the legal form of the latter,
capital punishment (the death penalty).
With respect to the suicide rate, in 2000 the Red States had a rate of
13 per 100,000 and the Blue States only 10.
In 2004, the suicide rate in Red States was 13.9 vs. the Blue State’s
10.2. Homicide rates in the Red States
were 5.7 in both 2000 and 2004 whereas in the Blue States they were 4. And 4.0
in those years. The difference between Red and Blue States in total lethal violence
rates (suicide plus homicide) in 2000 was 18.7 vs. 14.2 and in 2004, 19.6 vs.
14.2. Between 1976 (when capital
punishment was reinstituted in the US after having been declared
unconstitutional in 1972) and 2009, the Red States executed 1,177 people and
the Blue States 54: a ratio of more than 20 to 1. Of the 14 states with the most executions,
very one is a Red States (11 of them Southern States). Of the 14 states with no death penalty, 10
are Blue States. Of the 31 Red States in
2004, 27 have a death penalty. Among the only drugs we know of that actually
inhibit, and thus can be said to prevent, violence, two of them, marijuana and
heroin, have been declared illegal. 87 The only prison program that has been
100 percent effective in preventing recidivism, and that was gaining a college
degree while in prison – zero recidivism in the Indiana state prison system, 0
percent at the Folsom State prison in California. The study discovered two recidivists over a
period of 30 years, less than a 1 percent recidivism rate, compared with the US
rate of 65 percent after only 3 years (Gilligan ’11: 172, 173, 126, 127, 128,
130, 90, 91).
The ATF has become corrupt. Some people claim it began after ATFs raid on
the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Some say it was when government was realigned
and ATF was moved from the Treasury Department to the Department of Justice in
2003. As a deputy attorney general in Janet Reno’s Clinton-era Justice
Department, Holder backed the assault weapons ban and defended the department’s
bungled attack on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, in 1993. The
same day President-elect Obama chose Holder as his attorney general, he also
nominated Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security. Napolitano was not considered controversial,
and her confirmation proceeded smoothly.
Holder’s nomination was a different story, given his reputation as a
fiercely partisan member of the Bill Clinton-era Justice Department. During confirmation hearings, Holder admitted
to “mistakes” in the pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich – mistakes that he
claimed were “not typical” of his conduct – freedom. Since
2006, 48,000 people had been murdered in the cartel wars in Mexico. In May 2009 Napolitano said in testimony
before the Senate Judiciary Committee “A large number of weapons; recovered in
Mexico’s drug war are smuggled illegally into Mexico from the United States,
clearly stopping this flow must be an urgent priority. At a joint press conference on April 16, 2009
President Obama himself traveled to Mexico City reiterating that he had
personally ordered an overhaul of all operations targeting Mexican cartel
weapons and drug trafficking. In 2009,
21,313 guns were recovered in Mexico and submitted for tracing. Only 5,444, or 25 percent were sourced to
U.S. gun dealers. Claims by Mexican and U.S. officials that upwards of 90
percent of illegal recovered weapons can be traced back to the U.S. is based on
an incomplete survey of confiscated weapons. Deputy Attorney General Lanny
Breuer of the Department of Justice Criminal Division, after years of denial,
finally admitted to knowing about the “gunwalking” at the ATF. Breuer served in private practice with Eric
Holder and now serves as Holder’s number two man in the Justice
Department. Breuer also approved
detailed wiretap applications for Operation Fast and Furious in early
2010.Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales was left in the dark about
Operation Fast and Furious. She has
called for officials involved in the operation to be extradited from the U.S.
and sent to Mexico for prosecution.
President Barack Obama has refused to take responsibility for Operation
Fast and Furious. Obama maintains he has
“full faith and confidence” in Attorney General Eric Holder and his handling of
the scandal. In the end, Operation Fast
and Furious wasn’t a “botched” program.
It was a calculated and lethal decision to purposely place thousands of
guns into the hands of ruthless criminals.
The guns weren’t accidentally misplaced or lost. They didn’t somehow “fall into the wrong
hands” by mistake. The operation was a
coordinated and planned effort not to track guns, but to arm thugs south of the
border for political gain. “Justice has
blood on their hands” Chairman Issa said, “What we do know is that enough
weapons were down there that inevitably more will die, both Americans and
Mexicans. And this program is the kind
of program that will continue unless we get a change in how Justice views
things, and certainly a change in how political appointees are viewing it”
(Paylich ’12: 3, 23, 32, 162). The HA
reorganization plan is to dissolve the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
(ATF) and DEA to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Alcohol,
Tobacco and Marijiuana (ATM), leaving a Bureau of Firearms and Explosives (BFE)
to be transferred to U.S. Customs (a.k.a. Homeland Security) under the Customs House Act, St. Elizabeth HA-26-2-11 and Book 8
Drug Regulation (DR). A 2010 study suggested that the marijuana market in America is
probably in the range of $40 billion a year, with the potential to grow to $100
billion in the event of widespread legalization.
Thus, it's smaller than the market for other
legal mind-altering substances such as beer ($99 billion), tobacco ($71
billion), or hard liquor ($61 billion) -- but bigger than the market for wine
($27 billion) (Smith ’12). It is especially important that the
armed forces are not intoxicated or withdrawing from an addictive substance or
served for that matter with inflammatory political or radical economic work,
such as this.
Freedom is valuable for at least two different
reasons. First, more freedom gives us
more opportunity to pursue our objectives – those things we value. Second, we may attach importance to the
process of choice and make sure that we are not being forced into some state
because of constraints imposed by others.
The distinction between the ‘opportunity aspect’ and the ‘process
aspect’ of freedom can be significant and far reaching. To show that slavery
severely reduces the freedom of the slaves, or that the absence of any
guarantee of medical attention curtails our substantive opportunities of
living, or that severe undernourishment of children, causes immediate agony as
well as the underdevelopment of cognitive capabilities, including reduction of
the ability to reason, is detrimental to justice. The eighteenth century pioneer of social
choice theory, the Marquis de Condorcet, warned against ‘the maxim, too
prevalent among ancient and modern republicans, that the few can legitimately
be sacrificed to the many’. A ruthless
majority has no compunction in eliminating minority rights. The formation of tolerant values is thus
quite central to the smooth functioning of a democratic system. Democracy can be useful for preventing
sectarian violence. The role of democracy in preventing community-based
violence depends on the ability of inclusive and interactive political
processes to subdue the poisonous fanaticism of divisive communal thinking. The
success of democracy is not merely a matter of having the most perfect
institutional structure that we can think of.
It depends inescapably on our actual behavior patterns and the working
of political and social interactions (Sen ’09: 225, 226, 228, 347, 243). A
humane society must enable the expression of individualism for the public good.
Individual flourishing is necessary for social well-being. Given the interrelationship between
individual character and democratic fulfillment, Americans must avoid the
mechanistic standardizations of society, because Democracy cannot be maintained
on the mental habits of quantity-production.
Because individualism and democracy supported each other the
standardized ‘mental habits’ of rationalized industrial processes posed grave
threats to democracy: Much of our public organization for efficiency is
essentially monarchic in its tendency.
It is likely to eliminate the most precious resource in human society,
which is the freedom of expression of the competent individual. If democracy is the best way to harmonize
individual and social development, society must guard against the cultural
effects of industrial production that standardized individual identity. Given the antidemocratic nature of the
processes of standardization which were justified in manufacturing results
rather than in human results although scientific research should be used to
connect people to the natural world rather than to help institute industrial
monotony (Bailey 1905). World War II constituted something of a
technological revolution in the United States.
Between 1939 and 1945 government funding of scientific research and
development grew exponentially. The
motivation was to harness the ingenuity of American science and technology for
the war effort, but after the war’s conclusion the government grip on research
and development increased even further, creating what President Dwight
Eisenhower called a “military-industrial complex” (Egan & Crane ’09: 10).
The Statesman, Calcutta newspaper editorial
published on 16 October 1942 said: the weekly death toll (presumably from starvation)
in Bengal including Calcutta was about 1,000, but it might be higher. Two days later the Governor of Bengal (Sir T.
Rutherford) wrote: there are now at no less than 2,000 a week. The Famine Inquiry Commission that reported
on the famine in December 1945 concluded that in the period July – December
1943, 1,304,323 deaths were recorded as against an average of 626,048 in the
same period in the previous quinquennium, and it concluded that the number of
further death due to the famine was over 678,000. That amounts to a weekly
death toll not very close to 1,000 or 2,000, but rather larger than 26,000
every week. The Bengal Famine of 1943,
witnessed by Amartya Sen as a child, was made viable not only by the lack of
democracy in colonial India, but also by severe restrictions on reporting and
criticism imposed on the Indian press, and the voluntary practice of ‘silence’
on the famine that the British-owned media chose to follow. Despite China’s
greater success than India’s in many economic fields, China – unlike
independent India – did have a huge famine, indeed the largest famine in
recorded history, in 1958-61, with a mortality count estimated at close to 30
million. Though the famine raged for
three years, the government was not pressed to change its disastrous policies:
there was, in China, no parliament open for critical dissent, no opposition
party and no free press. The history of
famines has, in fact, had a peculiarly close connection with authoritarian
rules, for example with colonialism (as in British India or Ireland), one-party
states (as in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, or in China or Cambodia later on),
and military dictatorships (as in Ethiopia or Somalia. The contemporary famine situation in North
Korea is an example. It is interesting
to note that even Chairman Mao himself, whose radical beliefs had much to do
with the initiation of, and unrelenting persistence with, the ‘Great Leap
Forward’ identified one particular role of democracy in 1962, just after the
famine had killed tens of millions, Mao made the following observation to a
gathering of 7,000 cadres of the Communist Party: ‘Without democracy, you have
no understanding of what is happening down below; the general situation will be
unclear; you will be unable to collect sufficient opinions from all sides;
there can be no communication between top and bottom; top-level organs of
leadership will depend on one-sided and incorrect material to decide issues,
thus you will find it difficult to avoid being subjectivist; it will be impossible
to achieve unity of understanding and unity of action, and impossible to
achieve true centralism’. Democracy has
to be concerned both with majority rule and the rights of minorities (Sen ’09:
338, 339, 342, 345, 352, 354).
That which inflames the mind of suffering
humanity cannot but be of immediate interest both to policy-making and to the
diagnosis of injustice. A sense of
injustice must be examined even if it turns out to erroneously based, and it
must, of course, be thoroughly pursued if it’s well founded. The global recognition of endemic poverty and
systemic inequality as serious human rights concerns has put pressure on
individual countries for internal democratic reforms and made vivid the need
for more just and effective international institutional directive. In Rex
v. Sussex Justices Ex parte McCarthy [1923] All ER 233 Lord Hewart
admonished that justice ‘should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done’.
Justice is an immensely important idea that has moved people in the past and will
continue to move people in the future.
There are two principal grounds for requiring that the encounter of
public reasoning about justice should go beyond the boundaries of a state of a
region, and these are based respectively on the relevance of other people’ s
interests for the sake of avoiding bias and being fair to others. The first ground, related to the
interdependence of interests, is easy enough to appreciate in the world in
which we live. How America succeeds in
managing its present economic crisis unfolding as the book is being completed
2008-2009 will have a profound effect on other countries that have trade and
financial relations with America and still others who have business relations
with those who have commerce with America.
When Hobbes referred to the dire state of human beings in having ‘nasty,
brutish and short’ lives, he also pointed, in the same sentence, to the
disturbing adversity of being ‘solitary’.
Escape from isolation may not only be important for the quality of human
life, it can also contribute powerfully to understanding and responding to the
other deprivations from which human beings suffer. There is surely a basic strength here which
is complementary to the engagement in which theories of justice are involved
(Sen ’09: 381, 393, 388, 389, 401, 402, 415).
If someone has the power to make a change that
he or she can see will reduce injustice in the world, then there is a strong
social argument for doing just that.
Consider two different words – niti
and nyaya – both of which stand
for justice in classical Sanskrit. Among
the principal uses of the term niti
are organizational propriety and behavioural correctness. In contrast with niti, the term nyaya
stands for a comprehensive concept of realized justice. The roles of institutions, rules and
organization have to be assessed in the broader and more inclusive perspective
of nyaya, which is inescapably linked
with the world that actually emerges, not just the institutions or rules we
happen to have. Early Indian legal theorists
talked disparagingly of what they called matsyanyaya
‘justice in the world of fish’, where a big fish can freely devour a small
fish. We are warned that avoiding matsyanyaya must be an essential part of
justice, and it is crucial to make sure that the ‘justice of the fish’ is not
allowed to invade the world of human beings. Perhaps the most far-reaching
example of what is essential for an adequate understanding of justice is John
Rawls’ Theory of Justice that justice has to be seen in terms of the demands of
fairness whereby the following ‘principles of justice’ will emerge in the
original position with unanimous agreement: (a) Each person has an equal right
to a fully adequate scheme of basic liberties which is compatible with a
similar scheme of liberties for all. (b) Social and economic inequalities are
to satisfy two conditions. First, they
must be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair
equality of opportunity; and second, they must be to the greatest benefit of
the least advantaged members of society. It is important to note that the
principles of justice identified by Rawls include the priority of liberty (the
first principle) giving precedence to maximum liberty for each person subject
to similar liberty for all (Sen ’09: 205, 20, 53).
The nature of the lives people can lead has
been the object of attention of social analysts over the ages. However, much-used economic criteria of
advancement, reflected in a mass of readily produced statistics, have tended to
focus specifically on the enhancement of inanimate objects of convenience (for
example the Gross national product (GNP), and gross domestic product (GDP),
which have been the focus of a myriad of economic studies of progress). The case for using instead direct indicators
of the quality of life and of the well-being and freedoms that human lives can
bring has been increasingly recognized. The relevance of disability in the
understanding of the deprivation in the world is often underestimated, and this
can be one of the most important arguments for paying attention to the
capability perspective. People with
physical or mental disability are not only among the most deprived human beings
in the world, they are also, frequently enough, the most neglected. The magnitude of the global problem of
disability in the world is truly gigantic.
More than 600 million people – about one in ten of all human beings –
live with some form of significant disability.
More than 400 million of them live in developing countries. Furthermore, in the developing world, the
disabled are quite often the poorest of the poor in terms of income, but in
addition their need for income is greater than that of able-bodied people,
since they require money and assistance to try to live normal lives and to
attempt to alleviate their handicaps.
The impairment of income-earning ability, which can be called ‘the
earning handicap’, tends to be reinforced and much magnified in its effect by
‘the conversion handicap’ the difficulty in converting incomes and resources
into good living, precisely because of disability. One of the complications in evaluating states
of health arises from the fact that the person’s own understanding of their
health may be limited by lack of medical knowledge and by inadequate
familiarity with comparative information.
More generally, there is a conceptual contrast between the ‘internal
views of health based on the patient’s perception and ‘external’ views based on
observations and examinations by trained doctors or pathologists. While the two perspectives can often be
fruitfully combined (a good medical practitioner would be interested in both)
there can also be considerable tension between evaluations based on the two
different outlooks. The external view
has come under considerable criticism recently.
These works bring out the importance of seeing suffering as a central
feature of illness. No mechanically
observed medical statistic can provide an adequate understanding of this
dimension of bad health, since pain, is a matter of self-perception. If you feel pain, then you have pain, and if
you do not feel pain, then no external observer can sensibly reject the view
that you do not have pain (Sen ’09: 274, 258, 284, 285).
Happiness is that ultimate goal because,
unlike other goals, it is self-evidently good.
William Petty, the seventeenth century pioneer of national income
estimation, using both ‘the income method’ and ‘the expenditure method to
explain the various determinants of the condition of people, including the ‘the
Common Safety’ and ‘each Man’s particular happiness’. The American Declaration of Independence said
that it was ‘self-evident’ that everyone is ‘endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights’ including ‘the pursuit of Happiness’ a right to
happiness. There is something very
appealing in the idea that every person anywhere in the world, has some basic
rights which others should respect. The
American Declaration of Independence on 1776 took it to be ‘self-evident’ that
everyone had ‘certain inalienable rights’ and thirteen years later, in 1789,
the French declaration of ‘the rights of man’ asserted that ‘men are born and
remain free and equal in rights’.
Relatively recently the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was
adopted by the United Nations in 1948.
Following the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, there have
been many other declarations, often pioneered by the United Nations, varying
from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,
signed in 1951, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights signed 1966 to the Declaration on
the Right to Development signed 1986. The new proclamation of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 reflected a transformation in radical
social thought in the changing world of the twentieth century. This includes not only basic political
rights, but the right to work, the right to education, protection against
unemployment and poverty, and the right to just and favorable remuneration. The
global politics of justice in the latter half of the twentieth century became
more and more involved with these second-generation rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has
implications for the international community as a whole, individual human
being, not just for State parties (Sen ’09: 355, 357, 374, 366, 380). The
science of the politician consists in fixing the true point of happiness and
freedom (Hitchens ’06: 35). Welfare
recipients who have time to look all over the forest and prepare land use
plans. Who pays them? (Egan & Cran
’09: 234).
In the play King John by William Shakespeare, Philip the Bastard remarks that
our general evaluation of the world is often influenced by our own special
interests: ‘Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail; And say there is not sin
but to be rich; And being rich, my virtue then shall be; To say there is no
vice but beggary’ (Sen ’09: 196, 197).
Limerick by Stephen Leacock
Adam
Smith, Adam Smith;
Listen
what I charge you with!
Didn’t
you say;
In a
class one day;
That
selfishness was bound to pay?
Of all
doctrines that was the Pith.
Wasn’t
it, wasn’t it, wasn’t it, Smith? (Sen ’09: 186).
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Age of Light. Intro by Brian Swimme. Bear & Company Publishing. Santa Fe,
New Mexico. 1995
Egan, Michael; Crane, Jeff; editors. Natural
Protest: Essays on the History of American Environmentalism. Routledge Taylor
and Francis Group. New York and London. 2009
Feder, Norman. American Indian Art. Harry N Abrams, Inc. Publishers. New York.
Distributed by New American Library. 1965
Gilligan, James, M.D. Why Some Politicians are
More Dangerous than Others. Polity Press. Malden, Massachusetts. 2011
Gitlin, Todd. Occupy Nation: The Roots, The
Spirit, The Promise of Occupy Wall Street. Photo supplement by Victoria
Schultz. !t books. Imprint of HarperCollins Publisher. 2012
Grose, Thomas. U.S. to Overtake Saudi
Arabia, Russia as World's Top Energy Producer. National
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Hitchens,
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Miller, Debra A.; editor. The Tea Party
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MI. 2012
Pavlich,
Katie. Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless
Cover-up. Regnery Publishing Inc. Washington D.C. 2012
Sanders, Tony J. American Political Economy Hospitals & Asylums HA-20-3-10
n
American
Popular Election: The United States has not had a Quorum for Democracy since
1900 HA-29-10-10
n Constitution of Hospitals & Asylums Non-Governmental
Economy (CHANGE)
n Customs House Act, St. Elizabeth HA-26-2-11
n Drug Regulation (DR). Book 8
n Federal Budget
Balanced to Prevent Debt from Exceeding 100% of GDP FY 2012 HA-13-7-12
n Medicinal Herbs and Probiotics HA-31-10-12
n Organic Crop Insurance Modification HA-9-9-12
n Radioactive Polygraph HA-3-6-11
n States of the United Nations (SUN): UN Charter Legitimate
Edition (UNCLE)
n TARP Winter Shelter Close-out HA-31-12-11
Sen, Amartya. The Idea of Justice. The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Masschssetts.2009
Smith, Rich. Marijuana Legalization: 3
Legit Angles to Profit From Decriminalized Pot. Motley Fool. AOL Daily Finance.
November 17, 2012
Steiger, Brad. Indian Medicine Power. Whitford Press. West Chester,
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Hospitals & Asylums Statutory
Authority to Receive Certain Uncompensated Services 24USC(10)§422
Done
the 24th of November 2012