A New Way - Adherence To The Laws

This is the fifth of a series of articles

exploring the creation of

The Independence Party ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Every political decision and every political campaign in our Nation's history occurred not in a vacuum, but among the many occurrences of the times. And so this article comes next, simply because the Vice President, Richard Cheney, demanded it. He demanded it not as he does most things, ... by imperial edict, but rather by the high-handed and near-hilarious assertion that he was somehow, and somewhere, above and beyond any other branch of our government. Someone has apparently redoubled his medications, or perhaps his implanted defibrillator fired at last, and provided the side benefit of "Electro-Convulsive Therapy" to rearrange his otherwise deranged thinking of his own importance and role, and bring him closer to the view of his predecessors; Namely that his role is to attend funerals of state, ... at least one more perhaps on his own behalf, to kiss babies who would not object, ... failed on that count, even perhaps in the case of his own grandson born of late. You know, ... the sort of crap that gets slung to the runner-up in any contest in America.

Adhering to history is not the same as adhering to the law, however. The law, as it is laid out, requires a degree of independence of the judiciary, and the attorneys general, from the legislative and from the executive branch, ... at least during the functional range of the regimes that come into power in our Nation. Nominating the attorneys is a "kite-building" operation. They are selected to be competent, and even politically sensitive, for it is designed in that way. As with kites, however, their air-worthiness depends upon, or should depend upon, their abilityto meet the needs and requirements of the Department of Justice, and its overriding role in our legal life as a Nation.

Therein, in the the case of Bush and Company, lies the rub. The intention to interfere, or at least to intervene, in current legal cases, is, I fear but also believe, de Regeur in the DOJ. What has never been the rule, on the other hand, is the use of DOJ to interfere with the rights of citizens to vote just before elections, ... nor the deliberate denial of the vote to active service people in the combat theater.

We are not talking about whether our service people in harms way around the world can buy a beer, or drink legally in their own homes stateside, nor whether I have served you illegally, perhaps. We'll save that for another day.

We are specifically talking here about whether these soldiers, those who have sworn an oath to protect and uphold the Constitution, and to safeguard the United States of America, will have their votes counted even as they served at war on behalf of a President and Nation, whose chief political aide, Karl Rove, swore a similar oath to theirs, ... but fulfilled it in an entirely different manner. He is suspected of defiling your right to vote, by the way. It is suggested he felt we could build the vote for his president by denying you the right to vote while you were overseas. Within the bounds of decency for all who might read these words, I must say that I am more disgusted by that possibility than I would be by a bloated dead possum found dead in the road with a tattoo of Dick Cheney's face along the flank of its ass.

If Rove is found to have sought to disenfranchise the enlisted people in service around the world while he was reinforcing his handlers slimy empire, I assure you all that I will seek his indictment and conviction of the crime against our service voters for the balance of our lives, ... mine and Karl's.

There are many crimes I feel they have committed that they can chalk up to politics. This is a crime that can not be forgiven.

A New Way - Peace and Prosperity Are Our Right

This is the fourth of a series of articles exploring the creation of



The Independence Party



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It seems the time is growing short once again for the opportunity to promise peace any time soon to our children and our grandchildren. I know what you are thinking, ... when has peace ever been a priority in America, certainly not since after World War II. When it had seemed we ran out of the big fights, we created some smaller ones in Grenada, and Panama, and Somalia, ... just to keep the "saw sharpened" so we'd have it to use when we needed it, as in the case of Iraq, ... twice, ... and Iran, ... next perhaps.

Let me begin by saying that the Cold War, those many years of practicing for our own demise in the hallways of our schools, with our heads bent between our knees, kissing our asses goodbye, ... the Cold War was, at least from the vantage point of children in America, a peaceful time. Actually, the 1963 murder of our President, John Kennedy, was the beginning of the endless violence we have experienced in the last forty-four years. It is imperative for our children's and our grandchildren's sense of safety that we disavow our society's addiction to the violence of war, and violence as a solution to any international or interpersonal differences. Whether that would fall into the realm of a Public Health concern, or an International Peace concern, ... is, in the end, of no particular consequence whatsoever, to me, nor should it be to the law-makers in our Nation. It should be an objective of EVERY Congress, and EVERY President, and EVERY Supreme Court, that for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to ever become a practical promise to every life of every citizen in the Nation, we MUST invest in the notion, ... in the promise, that PEACE is a promise to every citizen under the Constitution of the United States of America.

There should always, and forever, be a United States Department of Peace created under the next President in order that the attainment and maintenance of Peace, ... the sheer practical conviction on the part of our Nation that We the People are intended and committed to live in Peace forever and always as a part of the Community of Nations as defined under the United Nations Charter, might have a chance to become a reality at last. More importantly, the commitment of the greatest nation currently on the earth to the assurance of Peace as a critical pursuit of Mankind, is in the end, the essence of the true meaning of the purpose of the United States of America Declaration of Independence.

This critical new Cabinet-Level Department of Peace must be enacted and staffed before Peace itself will ever have the chance to be reborn in the World, and certainly at American hands. This suggestion has been endorsed for many years by US Representative Dennis Kucinich, and was first suggested, it is widely believed, by renowned International Peace Advocate and Spiritual leader, Marianne Williamson.

A New Way - Safeguarding the Constitution

This is the third of a series of articles exploring the creation of




The Independence Party




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Life and Liberty depend upon more than the good wishes of our fellow citizens, and upon more than the promises of their safekeeping by our governmental officeholders. The former has never been a strong assurance, for we have seen riots, and lynchings, and private corporate armies set loose upon labor organizers. We have killed one another in fits of anger and disagreement. The Founders held little confidence in comity among our populace. Laws were required, but they also knew that laws set loose upon our People without clear limitations on their scope were, and would always be, a far greater risk to the Nation than anarchy. Their words are clear, and have been reaffirmed in public oaths of allegiance to uphold them, by every Federal officeholder since the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified as the Founding Law upon which all our laws are based. George Bush's defiling comment that It is a "God-Damn piece of paper" notwithstanding, the Constitution will withstand him as well, though the time frame is open to question. On May 9, 2007, the President signed a document titled "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive" which purports to convey special powers and responsibilities upon persons under him in the case of a "catastrophic emergency", ... to be defined by him at the time. It feigns concern that the underlying Constitutional foundations of our Nation would be at risk in times of such a designated emergency. The document then goes on to convey special over-reaching authority upon executive branch designates, and assures "comity" among the designated branches laid out in the constitutional founding of our nation will be upheld. The lower case "c" reference, in itself, to the Constitution puts the lie to what this document sets out to do, or attempts to do. It attempts to lay to rest any concerns that the Legislative and Judicial branches might be rendered worthless and toothless, when in truth they are rendered lifeless of any resemblance to the Balance of Constitutional Powers as set forth by its authors.
What the "NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL DIRECTIVE/NSPD 51" does at its heart is to grant license to George Bush as the first dictator of the United States of America, without Legislative authority or Judicial oversight of any kind whatsoever. He says when it begins, and he says when it ends. During his "catastrophic emergency" he could lock the Senate doors and ban the House of Representatives from even meeting in session. He could preclude any actions by the citizenry, and there is nothing whatsoever in it that precludes the suspension of elections across our Nation. Nothing in it precludes him from declaring an emergency of his own making, either, such as an unprovoked attack upon Iran, and the aftermath which would follow.
It is typical of the Right Wing in American politics these days to exaggerate the threats to the American People which exist at this moment in our history. As much as they love to cling to the Founders' pant legs, they seem to have ignored the sacrifices which were, and have always been, made by our generations of forebears.
Before the Constitution was the law of America, The Declaration of Independence was an overt collective act of Treason against the Crown of England. The 56 signers placed every life they loved, and all the property they owned in peril by writing those words, and placing their signatures and seals to them. For those who survived, there would come other wars. In 1812 our Capitol and the very White House, which Bush calls home until he ends his term, were burned during the occupation by the British. The American Civil War raged across wide swaths of our Nation, costing over 600,000 American lives, more than all wars to which our Nation has ever been party, all lost on our land and waters among and between our fathers. World War I, World War II, the Korean War, The Viet Nam War, and the First Persian Gulf War, ... all left cleaving marks across our land in loss of life, disruptions of lives and families, and the rendering of our political beliefs across our Nation to this day. Every one of these wars, ... EVERY one, ... caused America to bleed. More importantly, every war visited upon America or caused by Her, in the 220 years since the Constitution was adopted, have been "catastrophic emergencies". Nothing will occur in Bush's final months that we can not survive as a Nation, as long as the Constitutional Balances remain intact! Nothing this Homo de minimus could achieve, even if given another 8 years, could ever give him a run at historical importance or achievement of anything approaching a Coolidge, let alone a Lincoln, stature in the history books. It will be highly unlikely that historians will fully distinguish one Bush from the other, in the end, so to speak.
Sadly, George W. Bush could never withstand a calamity the scope or size of any, or even part, of the disasters this country has already often survived, long before he was anointed President by the Supreme Court. The Constitution for which he holds so much childish disdain was MADE to survive just such misadventures and misdeeds as these, and more. In fact, It was made to survive HIS PRESIDENCY in particular; this is not because It grants him or his contemptible clan special powers, but because it does not. George W. Bush has saved us from NOTHING in his time in office, except perhaps from the truth.
In the end, every President of the United States has worked for the People of the United States, and never the reverse. That this President has done nothing for us in turn, is our own fault, but should never, in the end, become our undoing as a People, unless we allow that to occur. While there are risks in the world, and some would do us harm, that is not something our fathers and mothers did not face in spades. Perhaps now is the first and only time that the greatest risk came from within, ... from our own officeholders rather than from enemies abroad. We know, and must face, that this man will never be a true President to our People. What we must guard against more than any other risk, is that as time grows short on this man's time in the White House, that he will not lay ruin to something which cost our parents so much to create and protect! Our parents and our grandparents are no longer here to assure he will not take away what many of them have died to protect for us. It is our turn to act as Americans and to protect what we have been given as our birthright. I do not yet know what form or force that protection will require of us. I fear that we may all be about to discover that in ourselves, as our parents did in their own lives.

Protecting ideas requires understanding them. Protecting your rights demands that you know what they are. Go here for a start!

A New Way - Life as A Constitutional Right

This is the second of a series of articles exploring the creation of

The Independence Party.

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Roe vs. Wade, decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1973, provided for the legalization of abortion across the United States. That decision is debated across our land to this day, not simply as a moral consideration, but also as as a political issue which seems further from resolution with each passing election year. There was a certain irony in the prohibition of capital punishment for the first time in our nation's history in that same era that abortion was approved. Conservatives gained association with casting their fate against abortion, and yet for executions, and Liberals the reverse. Some thirty years later, that dichotomy persists. What is clear is that the United States Declaration of Independence sets forth "Life" as an essential Human right.

Without addressing either extreme, ... abortion, or execution, the right to life for all Americans has been eroded, or at the very least, subjugated to other interests, whether they are corporate, governmental, legal, or institutional.

If we think of employment as a contract between an employer and en employee, on the surface it appears to have many of the usual features of any contractual relationship. One party, for consideration, performs or provides a service or product to the other party. The mutuality of a contract arises from the willingness of the parties, who enter into it without coercion, and do so with their eyes openo all consequences which may arise. Employment, in my estimation, never quite rises to that level of mutuality, despite the legal decisions to the contrary.

Employment agreements typically assure a number of things, ... pay for services, sharing of important business information, and other things. Training may be provided by the employer. Profit sharing, if there is to be any, may be assured to the employee by the employer based upon a certain level of performance. Often, there are confidentiality agreements required of the employee, and Agreements not to Compete if the employee leaves the employment situation. But many states in the US operate with an understanding of "Employment at Will". In those states, an employee may be terminated for cause, or without cause altogether, and has virtually no recourse whatsoever to question the firing, nor to recover promised bonuses, performance incentives, and other perquisites of the "agreement" to do work. On the other hand, the employee, should he leave for other opportunity, or due to unmet implied or explicit promises by the employer, may be required to forego working for a competing employer for a specified period after terminating his or employment. That is, the employer has a right, under "non-compete" agreement provisions, to ask the court to deny a former employee work at their established profession or trade, after they have quit their job.

Some argue that this is fair, saying that an employer offers trade secrets, training, literature, and support to an employee during their tenure. In exchange that employer gets six months, even a year, of "protection" after the employee leaves employment.

If we look at the situation more closely, we often see that employees leave because employers have not met the commitments made to employees. For many companies, the income stream created by the employees continues long after the employee leaves. Customers reorder based upon a pattern of use, and the good will developed by employees can sustain itself by sheer force of habit.

What of the employee? Often she or he must take interim work until the "blue line" period has passed. Employers can malign and criticize the employee to former customers during that entire period when the customer is legally prohibited from contact with the customers! In the end, the employer has a distinctive legal advantage that is integral to the laws in many states, over the rights of the individual. What has this to do with Life? Meeting our basic needs through work and earning is of lower importance in the eyes of the law while the employer's right to preserve its business advantage is higher.

But the right to life for those of us already walking the earth does not end in the workplace, fortunately. The right to life includes the right to share our space and ideas with others, to love and live with those we choose. We have the right to write, and think, and pray, and speak our minds. I will address that concern in another essay.

We also have the right to a "healthy life". What does that mean? I believe it means that we have the right to expect the medical knowledge of our age will be brought to bear upon our conditions, as they occur, and we will all benefit from the cumulative knowledge that medicine has gathered about our "cumulative ailments", as we Humans have incurred them. It was once the standard of medical care in America that Physicians were revered, and responsibly paid. Hospitals were run as charitable institutions, and beds were donated by estates "in perpetuity" to the charitable care of patients. What did that mean? Did it mean that the beds would be available to charitable patients until the money ran out? Who checked to be certain that there was no money left for the care of other needy patients? Who sold the charitable rights to the profit-making company that bought out the non-profit hospital? Why didn't the community reinherit the rights to the failed investment? These were, after all, gifts to the communities in which these hospitals reside. These were sites of care and comfort which have been replaced by clinics and hospices at the expense of the community and providers, and were, at their essence, an irrevocable gift to the communities in which they are located. They should, in every case, revert to the community they serve, for the perpetual care of the members of that community. These are not, and never have been, legitimate "Corporate" assets! They arose on land in local communities, often as gifts from residents, and entrepreneurs, to assure the medical care of their fellow citizens, "in perpetuity". The disconnection between our forebears' gifts to us, ... hospital, parks, museums, and open land, ... can be reversed. These community assets should never have been deeded along with the businesses which stood on those lands.

What does this have to do with "Life", as it is assured in the Constitution? Everything, as it turns out, since the business of healthcare arguably arose in the United States at the hands of Benjamin Franklin, ... in the founding of the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. I suspect this best of businesspersons never imagined that healthcare should become the source of great personal wealth. Certainly the care of the dying should never fill the coffers of the living!

In the end, if that is where we find ourselves now, the assurance of "Life" under the Constitution has little practical effect or value. Hospitals dump their indigent patients under bridges to avoid the expense of their continued care and concern.

There must be a new way to rethink what we do with the insane, ... and the sick, rather than Ronald Reagan's approach of loosing the gates of the asylums, and hospitals, and declaring the patients "sane" and "healthy".

A New Way - Corporations are Not Persons

Most Americans have taken at least passing interest in the early "debates" among the plethora of self-declared Republican and Democratic candidates. In deference to those readers who have truly prepared and debated in their lives, ... these are pitiful excuses for debates, and truly do not rise to a level where they deserve that name. What they have truly revealed, I am sad to say, is that the two parties with which we have lived for so long, can not, or will not, allow a reasoned public discussions of the true issues which face us. I believe they will not, because the very issues they should and must address are of great interest to the American People. That in itself would not keep them from discussing them. But the interests of politicians and their clients, differ from the interests of America and Americans.

This is the first of a series of articles to address the many disconnects between what America must be about, and what American politicians seem driven to do instead. This is the first of a series of articles exploring creation of The Independence Party.

Corporations, mere abstractions of business thinking, ... relationships between investors who are persons themselves, were granted "personhood" even before the argument of a case before the Supreme Court of the United States, SANTA CLARA COUNTY v. SOUTHERN PAC. R. CO., 118 U.S. 394 (1886) . The year is noteworthy as roughly the beginning of the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons in Big Oil, Big Railroads, Big Banks, and Big Steel.

The ruling is interesting for declaring that corporations deserve the Constitutional protections as persons; indeed the arguments for and against were never presented. Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite pronounced from the bench, according to the court record, that "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does." And so, without so much as a Constitutional amendment, nor Congressional legislation, nor Executive order, corporations attained the same rights that American Citizens, Human Beings, ... had died so often to achieve.

Did corporations toast the occasion? Did they run into the streets and hug one another to celebrate? I know, ... ridiculous! Corporations are not persons, but rather constructs created by persons to effect ownership of interests and assets. "No!", some would say, ... "A corporation can own a corporation!" True, ... but at the end of the trail of droppings and documents which corporations leave and require to survive, there are investors who are, or were persons! Let's look at these two types of people separately with regard to their ownership of corporations.

Living persons who are owners of corporations and otherwise citizens

benefit personally from every aspect of the United States Constitution and its amendments. Owners' rights to vote, and speak, and associate, accrue to them as persons under the Constitution. Indeed the right to associate could be said to give rise to that person's ability to even participate in the ownership of a corporation. That a corporation could be recognized as a "person", would, in its most ridiculous iteration, ... make a single corporate shareholder the equivalent of two persons, under the SCOTUS ruling of 1886. Nothing, of course, would prohibit that owner from creating other corporations, and leveraging his money into the equivalent of many persons, avoiding the care and feeding, the housing, the education that accompanies true "persons" as you and I recognize them. And how, in the case of misdeeds, is a corporation to be punished? Jail, execution? No, ... fines are all that a corporation can yield. Persons pay the highest punishments, after all.

Even more obscene is the effect upon citizen standing under the Constitution that arises from Justice Waite's pronouncement. Much has been written about the three-fifths provision in the Constitution that diluted the personhood of slaves in particular. In a very real sense, this judicial precedent and its adherence in succeeding cases has performed an even more sinister dilution of the rights of citizens who are persons. While persons alone can vote, corporations can contribute to political campaigns in open and insidious ways that persons can not.

Therein arises the concern with corporations owned by dead persons. In truth, the dead, even the wealthy dead, must leave their possessions behind as they cross the river Styx . But a surrogate to the dead, a corporate trust, can be created to contain the assets of the dead, with instructions to contribute to causes and political interests long after the bones of the person whose intentions are expressed, have turned to dust. "So what!", say adherents to the "corporations as corpse" crowd. "Trusts drive the museums, and the arts, and municipal parks, and grants, and , .... ", they say, and they are correct.

But in the world of politics, which is a temporal pursuit, and affects only the living, I believe it is wholly inappropriate that the dead should rule with their remainders, ... for where is the end to that? In the end, ... the money they leave could build forever, and rule over us forever! While they relinquish their vote, it could be argued that they could select the only politicians from whom we could choose our elected representatives, by controlling the funding of elections.

And if you believe this is not possible for the dead to achieve, ... I assure you that it is already occurring. The disembodied corporations of the pharmaceutical and chemical and oil and financial industries already rule over who has the opportunity to run for office. There is no body, no corpse to be found, ... just groups of monied owners and officers who vote early, ... and then go to the office to forward donations to the politicos the corporations support. In effect, corporations allow shareholders and officers to vote twice, thrice, or even more times. And while they can not collaborate in their pricing of products, ... they are allowed under the law, to form non-profit trade organizations and support lobbyists and politicians whom they collectively believe serve their collective interests. Their industries grow as a result, and their boats all rise on the tide we taxpayers fund for them through their influence over our politicians.