“The Economic Bill of Rights” Franklin D. Roosevelt

What an amazing man to have put the needs of people before corporations!

Franklin D. Roosevelt


“The Economic Bill of Rights”

Excerpt from 11 January 1944 message to Congress on the State of the Union

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It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.

This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.

As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

Tyranny or Liberty?

Tyranny or Liberty?


This is a scathing pessimistic assessment of the state of our country and the world. I have employed histrionic literary license and apocalyptic imagery as a vehicle to illustrate the delusion that has overtaken us in this country and the world at large. The human economic state of affairs, along with our overall state of health still appears to be spun “positive” through the corporate media. Although complete economic collapse has not economically eradicated all humanity, the decimation of human economic stability and the quality of healthcare for our citizenry has occurred through political game playing in concert with corporate maneuverings.

Collusion between our elected governmental officials and big-business has created a corporatist oligarchy that is becoming more and more visible, profitable and sinister with every passing law financed by the corporate death dealers. For lack of basic human considerations such as healthcare, financial protections from legalized predatory financial practices, and right livelihood, we have all been deceived by our own greed and self-delusion.

Some Americans can still buy cars, Blu-Ray players and flat screen TVs, and rack-up huge debt, but neighbors on all sides of me have lost or are losing their homes; they are unable to have meaningful stable employment; and cannot purchase healthcare. One can be sure that the ones that are enslaved from our economic gluttony in third world countries where corporations exploit and enslave the peasantry could not purchase the merchandise that is exacted from their labors. The whole world is eating from the corporate crumb bank.

What may appear to be histrionic hyperbolic ravings in this short discourse, may in turn reveal prophetic omens, indicators that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark (Macrone, Michael. "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." Brush Up Your Shakespeare. Cader Company, 1990. eNotes.com. 2007. 1 Mar, 2010 http://www.enotes.com/shakespeare-quotes/something-rotten-state-denmark).

Ask any of the victims of our healthcare system, or of the American workforce who have been tragically affected by the denizens of the corporatist elite. The proof is on the battlefields and villages across the planet; lying in the bedrooms of our sick family members who can’t afford healthcare, left on the slabs in the morgues and dying on our streets. The financial and physical executioners of the American people and subsequently, the people of the world:

1. are the politicians; the pushers and preachers of the opium of positive thinking that turns a blind eye to human suffering and rejects all personal and corporate responsibility to compassionately act.

2. the immoral, and, at best, amoral corporate zombies that infect and prey upon humanity at large through lack of healthcare, corporate downsizing, and warmongering.

We are still the killers of our own brothers and sisters instead of the keepers.

It is abundantly clear that healthcare reform is not in the hearts or the minds of the corporate political oligarchy. The impotent political leadership of our nation, which has long been spayed and neutered by their corporate masters, has preemptively attacked the very core of our humanity as American citizens. We the people are mere decimal place holders on corporate and government spreadsheets that through the gross computations of profit mongering corporations. The share and stake holders have demeaned, dehumanized, and relegated us to insignificance — impersonal, economic collateral damage — “its not personal it’s just business” as the mantra goes.

The study from the American Journal of Medicine in its abstract stated “Illness and medical bills contribute to a large and increasing share of US bankruptcies (© 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. • The American Journal of Medicine (2009) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/american_journal_of_medicine_09.pdf).

The Washington Post who quoted from the American Journal of Medicine report wrote “Sixty-two percent of all bankruptcies filed in 2007 were linked to medical expenses, according to a nationwide study released today by the American Journal of Medicine. That's nearly 20 percentage points higher than that pool of respondents reported were connected to medical costs in 2001. Of those who filed for bankruptcy in 2007, nearly 80 percent had health insurance. Respondents who reported having insurance indicated average expenses of just under $18,000. Respondents who filed and lacked insurance had average medical bills of nearly $27,000 (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/health-carereform/2009/06/new_study_shows_medical_bills.html?hpid=moreheadlines ).

It is clear that people are the anti-profit of corporate interests and corporate expansion. Stakeholders with their stakes in hand are staking the hearts of their victims and are bleeding the people dry. The healthcare debate is lost in the un-hallowed sanctuaries of divine corporatism, whose scripture is little more than spreadsheets and cost benefit analyses, with a little six sigma thrown in for computational effect. We the people have been reduced to rows of faceless, dehumanized numbers on corporate and government ledgers.

Corporations, with governments on their leashes, have continued their imperialistic pogroms of expansion —corporate manifest destiny— and have declared the right to conquer all that lies before them as their god given right to unfettered profits. Unending war, bankruptcy, foreclosures, lack of healthcare, all fueled by mercenary forces of impersonal faceless storm troopers —lobbyists; propaganda ministers —i.e. Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, punitive pundits pounding effluent down the throats of the masses telling them that our suffering derived from corporate profiteering is trickling down to the latrine of their choice. All we have to do is stand under corporate urinals —“they're pissing on us and not even giving us the courtesy of calling it rain” (http://www.reelmovienews.com/quotes/movies/avatar/page_2.html ).

The government lackeys — our elected officials, senators and congress people, presidents and vice presidents and their secretaries, in league with the economic overlords perpetuate this wholesale economic rape and genocide of the American people and should be held responsible for the demise — the slow death and torture of our people and the people of the world — that, by all indications, will lead to the eventual extinction of the middle class and heavily diluted individual rights. The corporations are sending us the Bill for our rights and we have already put the check in the mail.

Our individual rights have again recently been overtly assaulted, for example, by the Supreme Court’s decision to grant corporations the rights of individuals, by sheer financial means to commandeer elections. “In a 5-4 decision, the court decided corporations should be allowed under the First Amendment to draw from their own treasuries to fund campaigns. The ruling also effectively overturns part of the McCain-Feingold Act restricting corporate-funded issue ads” (http://www.dailycardinal.com/news/u-s-supreme-court-overturns-campaign-funding-restrictions-1.1081144 ). Money, the influence peddled, is being extracted from the suffering and death of our citizenry. We the people have chosen 7 and 8 figure earning CEOs, CFOs, and COOs (COO-COOs), to decide our fate of who is worthy to receive healthcare, right livelihood, and financial justice. The democratic façade is fading away.

Yet we have been told through artful propaganda that corporations, capitalism and the so-called “free market” are preferable to “The People” and their government; while the “The People” at large have no say or participatory representation within the boardrooms that rule society at large. The voice of the people is silenced in vacuous boardrooms and political backrooms. Sound cannot exist in a vacuum and neither does life.

This movement to privatize and divest control from the people seems more fascist than democratic. “Fascism …comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology developed in Italy. Fascists believe that nations and/or races are in perpetual conflict whereby only the strong can survive by being healthy, vital, and by asserting themselves in conflict against the weak.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism).

I thought that we defeated fascism with Hitler and Mussolini. Yet the corporate imperialistic interests that run our government perpetuate war and escalate conflict over resources with ideological smokescreens. The corporate and government spin doctors, and PR propagandists lie and distort, while they knowingly and freely decide the demise of millions of people without a twinge of conscience.

Recently, empathy has become an undesirable attribute in our socio-political system, because it requires feeling, compassion and mercy, equanimity, and loving-kindness — human emotions and feelings. The undead, un-alive corporate entity —quasi-dead— do not have human concerns or emotions to be shackled by morality or ethics; they just depersonalize, justify and perpetuate their agendas. The crusades, jihads, inquisitions, pogroms of genocide, fratricide, and matricide — the Manifest Destiny of depraved corporatist self-interest — have continued in pursuit of oil, natural resources, market share, corporate enslavement, cheap labor, low prices with high human costs, profit share — the American way.

The government officials that we have elected tell us that big government is bad and that small government with large corporations at the helm —big business is good. “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help” (Ronald Reagan, http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/33742.html ). We outsource war, intelligence gathering, and torture, to corporate mercenaries to keep the military industrial complex in business. We let the corporate corpses profit and drain the people from their dignity, and inalienable rights “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” (http://www.halexandria.org/dward245.htm ). Our corporate rulers have depersonalized, objectified, minimized, and written-off and deducted all human considerations that stand in the way of profit and their contractual survival from all checks and balance sheets.

Corporations only exist on paper, soulless and without affect. Yet corporations and the super rich behind them control the vast majority of humans and human activity, including the Fed, and the rest of the US Government. Flesh and blood human beings have their existence appraised, quantified, objectified, and trivialized by inanimate delusions of human machinations that only exist on paper — “whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean” (http://bible.cc/matthew/23-27.htm). The Trojan Horse has nothing on the well lubed insertion of the corporatist phallus that has penetrated every human orifice.

Oh no, not another tired corporate conspiracy theory conjured by the oppressed and disgruntled. Secret societies, the Illuminati and fanatical religious zealots may be conspiring in shadows behind closed doors with secret handshakes and arcane symbology. However, the most egregious predators are those that conspire in the boardrooms and political backrooms to defraud and dis-empower the American people legally and by our vote.

However, those that don’t buy into the positive thinking “keep on the sunny side” opium, that promotes social blindness and refuses to acknowledge and take responsibility for the gross misconduct that perpetuates abject poverty and human suffering, are tossed aside as naysayers and wackos by pathological spin doctors that spread a deadly viral corporate pathology (http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/obrotherwhereartthou/keeponthesunnyside.htm ).

Our government should not be feared, but rather be the very tool of the people to improve our quality of life and keep us safe from the corporatist predatory practices. In theory, if we elect our government, we can change our government. How is that working for us anyway? We have abdicated our authority as citizens to govern our great nation to puppets of corporations who are little more than soulless zombies that prey upon and exploit human weakness. The boardrooms and the places where stock and stake holders gather are little more than marble mausoleums where personally engraved slabs are provided for the corporate undead to decide the fate of the masses.

The corporatist government that has enslaved its own people needs to be rectified. The government “of the people, by the people and for the people, [that] shall not perish from the earth” has been ripped from our cold dying hands and has been delivered into the hands of our keepers — those that decide who lives and dies emotionally, physically, and financially (http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm ). The pundants, the political supplicants that grovel at the feet of economic idolatry in the corporate pantheons of profit, have lulled the eyes, hearts and minds of the American people into a lethargic trance through economic shock and awe campaigns that rewards the masses with mindless entertainment and consumer trinkets that both endears and enslaves us to our own demise — economic Stockholm Syndrome meets the Corporate Gladiatorial Games.

Since the Declaration of Independence, we have abdicated democracy and allowed another kind of dictator to rule over us. The corporate oligarchy that has enslaved the world enslaved us. The USA has become the greatest proponent and defender of corporatist oligarchic dogma and propaganda. Our religions, our schools, the very fabric of how we as Americans see ourselves and our place in history has been gradually supplanted by the empty promises and the tempter’s words of death that are sweet to the ear yet deadly to the touch for all who happen in it’s wake.

The Declaration of Independence is a poignant document that we as Americans should know and live by. Of course if one were to post the Declaration of Independence on the walls and doors of our government offices, Homeland Security would definitely have you on their terrorist watch list. These words are seditious and treasonous to the corporatist regime that has no moral or ethical center. Thomas Jefferson wrote: “When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty (Thomas Jefferson, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thomasjeff169586.html).
I leave you with these thoughts…

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness - That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men [and Women], deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security” (http://www.halexandria.org/dward245.htm).

State of Disunion

This is a letter that I thought of sending to President Obama. I still  might...

Dear President Obama:


I realize you receive thousands of letters everyday. I have no delusions that you will even see this. But, as the American myth proclaims, individuals still have a voice in the Government — “of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth”. Tens of millions of the voiceless people are perishing under the guise of freedom, liberty and the pursuit of corporate gluttony.

I think I would be better heard if I were a giant corporation or a lobbyist that is pouring thousands of dollars down the political rat hole, fueling the greed and degradation that is foisted upon the American people, and, by direct result, the people of the world, in the name of free enterprise.

Free enterprise is a mirage that is perceived by delirious people dying of thirst in a wasteland that was created by the devastation of human beings left to die after the corporations have ravaged our existence. People are dying from the predatory practices of corporations that have deposed government and the people for which the government represents. The government in turn has condoned, empowered and protected the very institutions that are destroying the fabric of humanity. Corporate apocalypse.

You may think that this letter is overly emotional or distorted by hysterical perceptions of feelings of powerlessness. The reality is, predators have taken over human affairs, government, the marketplace and the sanctuaries of human existence. We are bought and sold each day for the highest — or in government contracting speak — the lowest bidder, to perpetuate human suffering.

When a family loses a job, a child loses their parent to death from lack of healthcare, or people are forced into bankruptcies every minute because of the predatory nature of our ill-gotten free enterprise system we are all affected. When people lose their houses and financial security because the promise of education that promotes student loans has failed due to a predatory economy that is based on greed and the exploitation of workers, blue collar or white collar we are all affected. Is this not suffering?

Families out in the streets, entire communities ravaged by the beast that has destroyed the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans left to the fates of suited professionals who have no regard for the pitiful condition of men and women. Again, is this not suffering? The death grip — mortgage — of the free-market has not empowered us or freed us, but enslaved us to the fates of powerful predatory practices that have shackled us to the engines that lead us to our destruction.

President Eisenhower said in his Military-Industrial Complex Speech: “As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow” (Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961, http://www.h-.net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html).

We have not only mortgaged our material assets for all generations to come, and have discarded our political and spiritual heritage, and have effectively seared or fouled the collective human conscience. As a direct result, we have become insolvent and impotent against the machinations of our own demise.

We the people have entered a new area of slavery visited upon all peoples and races without discrimination. We are now slaves of corporations and government influence peddlers that ignore the dying cries of the people. Bankruptcies, burdens of debt and financial hopelessness, overpriced or denied healthcare, disease and lies, have become the whips and chains of our masters to keep us bent over in the fields feeling the sting of the lashes on our bleeding and sweaty backs. While our masters profit from our delirium and suffering.

President Lincoln wrote this about slavery: "The monstrous injustice of slavery... deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world- enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites- causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty" (http://civilwar.bluegrass.net/SlaveryAndEmancipation/lincolnonslavery.html). Lincoln was against slavery on moral grounds and would have rather “[freed] all the slaves, and send them to Liberia, to their own native land” (Abraham Lincoln, http://civilwar.bluegrass.net/SlaveryAndEmancipation/lincolnonslavery.html).

However, the words Lincoln used to describe slavery are again dead-on for the state of union today. The monstrous injustice of slavery that has shackled the American people today through institutions — both private and public — have abdicated to the enemies of justice and the very fundamental principles of civil liberties and human decency. The men and women, through golems of human machinations, have visited this aberration of immorality upon the American people and have infected the world with its crippling and deadly disease.

President Lincoln prophetically wrote: “the world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names liberty and tyranny” (http://quotationsbook.com/quote/44419/) .

I propose that liberty can only be expressed when humans transcend the self and the selfish preoccupation with their own labors and profiteering and reject the egocentric tyrannical practices that have shattered humanity, and look to freeing our brothers and sisters by becoming our brother’s and sister’s keepers — co-liberation, co-liberators. Humans need to repurpose and rescue the “Golden Rule” from whoever has the gold rules, to its original meaning of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Humans must be sadomasochists at heart, since we literally can’t do something unto someone else without doing it unto ourselves. It is time to realize when one is oppressed and constrained by fear and injustice, we all are. Liberty is freedom from our self-centeredness, the self-centered dream.

The new decade does not offer much promise for change or reform. The banks and insurance companies, not to mention the mega-corporations and our non-representative representatives and senators, have hijacked any real hope for significant change. The bondsmen that have arrested the goodwill and decency of our citizens and the citizens of the world, are deaf to our cries and loathe the repair of our condition. Persons incapable of seeing the condition and plight of our people have convinced us that our suffering is well deserved and we should be thankful for the crumbs that we find as we lay bleeding on the floor under our masters’ table.

The engines of war have scarred our existence and have defined us as people. Great civilizations that have conquered their way through history, have marshaled the economies of their subjects and focused bloodshed and destruction in the guise of Manifest Destiny sanctioned by hubris and lust for power and control. President Eisenhower stated: “in the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist” (Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961, http://www.h-net.org/~hst306/documents/indust.html).

Along side the military-industrial complex, banks, corporations, politicians, religions, and despotic individuals and organizations, have expanded the practice of overt war fought with bombs and bullets and now use mortgages, debt instruments, loans, credit reports, stocks and bonds as deadly ordinance. Instead of hospitals and medicine, jobs and a productive livelihood, the wounded left dying on the battlefields are rotting fetid corpses to remind and warn all that would dare oppose the harbingers of death of who wields the power of money. To see the devastation brought by governments, religions, corporations, and despotic alliances, follow the money.

We as individuals have to resist the impulse to become victims of our own treachery that has enslaved us and our planet. We are the enslavers and the enslaved. Our narcissism and arrogance have deluded us to follow a lifeless specter of human existence. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo in Tricycle stated that “we’re gods acting like monkeys. We are standing in our own light; we don’t see who we really are” (http://www.tricycle.com/feature/no-excuses).

Our prisons are in our little minds and our little minds are very powerful and have distracted us from who we really are. We have settled for our delusion and have lost our way. The Mind that we all possess and perhaps are, transcends the self-centeredness of our little mind that is fixated on the little me.

I would like to end this post with the Gettysburg Address. I hope the irony is not lost upon you.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm.