In a speech before Congress on April 9, 1789, James Madison referred to agriculture as 'the great staple of America.' He added, 'I think [agriculture] may justly be styled the staple of the United States; from the spontaneous productions which nature furnishes, and the manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country.'
In 1794, independent whiskey distillers in Pennsylvania revolted against Hamilton's federal taxes on their product, calling them 'unjust, dangerous to liberty, oppressive to the poor, and particularly oppressive to the Western country, where grain could only be disposed of by distilling it.'
In Jefferson's mind, 'the natural rights of man' were enjoyed by Jefferson's ancient tribal ancestors of Europe, were lived out during Jefferson's life by some of the tribal peoples of North America, and were written about most explicitly sixty years before Jefferson's birth by John Locke, whose writings were widely known and often referenced in pre-revolutionary America.
Natural rights, Locke said, are things that people are born with simply by virtue of their being human and born into the world. In 1698, in his Second Treatise on Government, Locke put forth one of the most well known definitions of the 'natural rights' that all people are heirs to by virtue of their common humanity. He wrote:
As to the role of government, Locke wrote:
This natural right was asserted by His first draft of the Declaration of Independence similarly declared: 'We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and unalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'
They suggested that Jefferson and Madison were idealists and dreamers, trying to recreate a utopian society in a dangerous world. Hamilton wrote about the risks of such idealism, responding to Madison, in Federalist #30, saying, 'Reflections of this kind may have trifling weight with men [like you] who hope to see realized in America the halcyon scenes of the poetic or fabulous age; but to those [among us Federalists] who believe we are likely to experience a common portion of the vicissitudes and calamities which have fallen to the lot of other nations, they must appear entitled to serious attention. Such men [as those of us who would lead this nation] must behold the actual situation of their country with painful solicitude, and depreciate the evils which ambition or revenge might, with too much facility, inflict upon it.'
Thomas Jefferson's vision of America was quite straightforward. In its simplest form, he saw a society where people were first, and institutions were second.
In his day, Jefferson saw three agencies that were threats to humans' Natural Rights. They were:
Governments (particularly in the form of kingdoms and elites like the Federalists)
Organized religions (he re-wrote the New Testament to take out all the 'miracles' so that in 'The Jefferson Bible' Jesus became a proponent of God-given Natural Rights),
Commercial monopolies and the 'pseudo aristoi' (pseudo aristocracy) in the form of extremely wealthy individuals and overly powerful corporations.
Such a bill protecting natural persons from out-of-control governments or commercial monopolies shouldn't just be limited to America, Jefferson believed.
All of Jefferson's wishes, except two, would soon come true. But not all his views were shared universally.
But the Federalists fought hard to keep 'freedom from monopolies' out of the Constitution. And they won.
While most of the rest of the world watched this new experimental democracy with skepticism, the citizens of France took our revolution to heart and initiated the French revolution just six years after ours ended.
America grew swiftly and steadily for nearly a century, and many other countries of the world began to experiment with their own versions of democracy. As America was convulsed by the Civil War, the world held its breath, but America remained intact and the period of industrialization following the war led to one of the most rapid periods of worldwide growth in history.
This growth cemented for the world the concept of the American ideal, as millions escaped their homelands to settle in the new "land of opportunity and freedom."
American democracy is the model for the Global Dream
Thus, America has come to represent the world's archetypal concept of freedom and egalitarianism.
On May 29th, 1989, over one-and-a-half million people gathered around a 37-foot-tall statue in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. They placed their lives in danger, but that statue was such a powerful archetypal representation that many were willing to die for it'and some did.
They called their statue the "Goddess of Democracy": it was a scale replica of the Statue of Liberty that stands in New York harbor on Liberty Island.
From the French Revolution in 1789 to the people's uprising in Beijing in 1989, people around the world have used language and icons borrowed from the pen of Thomas Jefferson and his peers. Even if we didn't implement it fully in our early efforts, and even if it's been strained since its inception, the Greek-Roman-Masonic-Iroquois-American idea of a government "deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed" is probably one of the most powerful and timeless ideas in the world today. It is the Global Dream.
While there are pockets of those in the world who hate us and even foist terrorist acts upon us, there are billions more who desperately wish to embrace the principles upon which our nation was founded. We in the United States of America hold a sacred archetype for the world: the Dream of freedom and individual liberty.
Can we reclaim the Global Dream in the land of its birth?
Yes:
In the last century, a citizen-led effort resulted in passage and ratification of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote - despite long tradition and past Court decisions
Similar efforts led to constitutional amendments banning, and then rescinding the ban on, alcohol.
Most recently, the 26th amendment lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 was ratified, in part in response to demands from servicemen and women in Vietnam and veterans of that war. And a popular protest song, The Eve of Destruction, was a prominent voice for this popular sentiment, saying: "You're old enough to kill, but not for votin'."
In each of these cases, citizens spoke out and the Constitution was changed.
Today, a growing movement has begun in the United States to bring back the Global Dream, restoring human personhood to its rightful place at the top of the priority sheet. For example, on April 25, 2000, the city of Point Arena, California passed a "City Council Resolution On Corporate Personhood" "rejecting the notion of corporate personhood" in which they "urge other cities to foster similar public discussion" on the issue.
Restoring Jefferson's dream
The dream of egalitarian democracy in America was taken captive, but it lives on.
Today the captivity is so obvious that as the 21st Century began, people protested in Seattle and Genoa, facing police beatings to register their hope that the Dream be reawakened. They faced risks similar to those faced by the Americans who stood up against tyranny at the Boston Tea Party.
Presidents warned us, and the railroads fought their restrictions for decades. The Dream was finally, formally stolen in 1886, as we've seen in this book. When US Supreme Court Reporter J.C. Bancroft Davis wrote that Chief Justice Waite had said, "Corporations are persons," and courts read his headnotes as if they were a Supreme Court ruling, the course of world history was changed.
"It seems especially ironic that the whole premise of the founding of this country was "all Men are created equal," and companies have sought protection on that premise, yet in reality the words of William Jennings Bryan are far more accurate: men are indeed fairly equivalent, but a company can be a million times more powerful."
Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights, by Thom Hartmann
"Equal protection was designed to protect the disenfranchised, not to further empower the mighty. We can right the wrong; we can balance the scales; we can write new laws. We can restore the intent of the constitution's authors, by declaring that these protections apply to natural persons, and in so doing, begin the process of restoring and reinvigorating the world's democracies."
Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights, by Thom Hartmann | by: | |
Source: | Unequal Protection: The rise of corporate dominance and theft of human rights, by Thom Hartmann |
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