Jefferson's Very Short-Lived Conviction That All People Are Created Equal - Founding Fibs That Crush Democracy, etc.

NOTE: I was going to just post the quote with a few comments but another school shooting is being announced as I type this so I am amending.

Extracts from Debates in the Congress of Confederation, preserved by Thomas Jefferson, 1776 [as quoted in The Constitution A Pro-Slavery Compact, by Wendell Phillips]
 
Congress proceeded the same day to consider the Declaration of Independence.

The clause reprobating the enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa was struck out, in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of Slaves,  and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it.  Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures;  for though their people, have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.*

 *[The clause was as follows: "He, [viz, King George 3d] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur a miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep a market where MEN should  be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain the execrable commerce." - Editor].

Of course the only slightly older Jefferson never gave up the holding of the descendants of the enslaved Africans whose slavery he so rightly condemned as permitted by the British Government.  He accommodated his ideals to the same interests as those of the brutal slave holders in South Carolina and Georgia, the ones who, during the Constitutional Convention were cited as killing the most slaves through working them to death in rice swamps, the reason that the very trade condemned above was allowed to continue, explicitly permitted by the fabled Founders under the Constitution.  As I noted, the rice barons so accommodated were the moral equals of the Krupps and I G Farbens who worked Jewish slaves to death during the Nazi era.   I can't imagine no one else has never made the connection

Letters from Jefferson to his fellow aristocrat "planters" after the Revolution advocate that they increase their slave holding as a means of wealth building. Man of science that he was, Jefferson had calculated the rise in his wealth whenever one of his slaves - perhaps including the one he raped and had children with - gave birth.  

The same interests, in some cases the very same rich, white men who came together eleven years later to create, unauthorized, a federal government never really even considered even the promises made to poor white men that they had  retained in their Declaration of Independence from the British government, promises with which they got so many poor men to fight their revolution.  They deeply regretted the measure of democracy they had allowed in the Articles of Confederation which led people like Shays and his followers to believe they really meant those things, including the right of People to overthrow a government which does not support their rights and legitimate interests.  One of the things about revolutions and the constitutions that come after that, they never figure that the right to overturn a government should ever apply to what they create.  The founders made it very difficult to amend it, certainly the slave-power would have made it impossible to amend in regard to slavery and the Northern financiers who controlled the governments in those states would have made it impossible to amend against their wealth acquisition.

The real history of the United States, the real history and character of the Constitution, the real history of the most sordid branch of government, the Supreme Court, isn't pretty, it is as ugly as genocide, slavery, male-supremacy, white supremacy - our indigenous and long standing and empowered form of fascism, American apartheid - and economic inequality.  The pious lies which fill our popular kulcha, especially what flows out of Hollywood and from Broadway, the myth of the nobility of the framers (most of whom despised democracy and equality), the fetish of the founders feeds the legal profession and judicial crushing of any legislated attempt to move beyond that evil into equality and democracy and as much of a decent life for all as can be achieved.  I will point out that the clause condemning the Native Peoples who the white land speculators were murdering and robbing and displacing survived the group editing process and is still read every July 4th by DC Press Whore-hacks on NPR in that annual putrid exercise.

There is a reason the Roberts Court relies so much on the lie of "originalism" the lie of "textualism," it is because those evils inserted into the Constitution by slave-holding white-supremacists, wealthy, self-seeking aristocrats - most of them prominent lawyers (a profession second only to the media in the peddling of lies and fiction) are still there and ready to prevent any struggle for equality, for equal justice, for economic justice, for democracy even against the ownership of certain people of their own bodies - what the overt pro-slavery provisions and those inserted to protect slavery from democracy was from the start.  That it has been so recently been used against Women to so little reaction is no surprise.  Those provisions were put into place to keep Black People and others from the ownership of their bodies and lives, something put up with by white People for most of our history.  The Republican-fascist majority on the sitting Court, including Clarence Thomas are the successors of Charles Pickney, John Calhoun, Roger Taney,  Jefferson Davis, . . . Orval Faubus, George Wallace, and, let's admit it, the KKK and other extra-governmental enforcers of white supremacy.  The media and others who sandbagged Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are in on it, too.  Anyone who believes the press freed to lie is a guarantor of democracy and freedom is a total knucklehead who has been asleep for the past fifty-four years as they enabled Republican-fascism.

We are in for some terrible days ahead, the patched together democracy that existed for a short time after 1964 has been destroyed and its foremost engine of destruction was the American media, "journalism" and, even more so, the fascist-chic of entertainment, civic pieties, sentimental depictions of the South and the ol' Way-est. Before the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and the various provisions assuring Women of their rights as citizens, American democracy was everything from a blatant lie to a mere aspiration.  The decline of education and egalitarian Christianity has some considerable role in it but it is primarily due to the successor of education and Christianity, the mass media.  The stultification of Americans by television and movies and, now, the internet is part of it but more so the putrid moral decay of selfishness, consumerism, superstition, the appeals to racism and bigotry, lies told about liberals, the fascist chic starting in the 1970s and pandering to all of our worst faults.  

I would be at fault if I didn't also acknowledge the role that the "civil liberties" industry, the ACLU played in the destruction of democracy out of an idiotic and amoral fetish for the imaginary rights of liars, of rich liars, of Nazis and fascists and white supremacists, etc.  That quite dodgy effort piously held as idiotically sacrosanct has a history that is sometimes ugly and one of epic stupidity, especially in the period after the Sullivan decision, one of the major events in the sandbagging of the long fought for nascent Voting Rights Act era near-democracy.  I think the materialist-atheist-scientism of many of its major figures is entirely relevant in its willful, professionally cultivated moral blindness.*

After more than two centuries of struggle under it, we're not going to get equality and democracy from the United States Constitution.  As its critics at the time of its adoption and after saw, it is a pro-slavery compact an anti-democracy document, an engine of aristocracy.  It will always tear apart any attempt at those even after enormous sacrifice in struggle and blood, as happened after Reconstruction from the Civil War, as happened in the wake of the huge steps forward in the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and other legislation and, weakest of all, Court decisions that briefly and atypically furthered equality and democracy.  The Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have, by narrow majorities, destroyed what thousands and more died and bled to achieve. And that's held to be OK under our system.

We will never get equality, democracy if the anti-democratic Senate's role in staffing the corrupt Court is not taken from it, we will never get it as long as the Supreme Court usurpation of the legislative and executive functions is still acquiesced to.  Though that is something that can't be blamed on the Constitution or even on some of the worst of the framers of it but is a power grab by John Marshall and Roger Taney, supposedly the best and the worst of them.  I blame the lawyers for letting them get away with that one. Some lawyers. Especially those with elite educations.  The self-educated Lincoln rejected it, we haven't had another president with the courage to follow his reasoned and principled lead.  And then there are things like "corporate person-hood," inserted by not even a "justice" but a clerk of the court who went on to be a successful gangster lawyer.

We should, once and for ever, tear up the Constitution and base a new one on both the legitimate promises of the Declaration of Independence, including things like that deleted clause AND THE HARD EXPERIENCE WE HAVE HAD IN THE PAST TWO AND A HALF CENTURIES, ESPECIALLY THAT OF THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN OPPRESSED UNDER THE ONE WE HAVE NOW.  

We must make it plain in a real Bill of Rights that rights only belong to living beings, that there is no right to lie in the mass media, there is no right to advocate fascism, Nazism, Stalinism or any other ideology that is known to get people killed in the millions or which advocates discrimination.  The sheer lunacy and obvious inadequacy of the Bill of Rights holding that Nazis and Stalinists and our indigenous white supremacists should forever have a chance of doing it again, the lunacy of our civic piety holding that as a virtue impeaches it as morally and intellectually vacuous as little else could. But there is one thing that may surpass that demonstration of its depravity.

We must make it clear that there is no private right to own weapons of mass murder.  The damned Constitution as it is AND THAT IS WHATEVER THE SUPREME COURT SAYS IT IS can't even keep school children safe from mass murderers, they are as unsafe as Africans and Native Americans were under it in 1789. I'm sure none of the "justices'" children or grandchildren go to schools at risk of that, they don't care at all about those who are sacrificed to the gun industry and Republican-fascist ideology. OUR OWN CHILDREN ARE FAILED BY THE BILL OF RIGHTS, the supposed best thing about the Constitution in our national myth. It is a total failure.  I should be among the most important cautionary documents in the world of what will lose you egalitarian democracy, justice and a decent life.  We're about to lose whats left of it here.

* The representation of "Justice" as a blind goddess is certainly lived up to by the pretenses that judges cannot see reality as plain as the fact that white supremacists, fascists, Nazis, Stalinists, etc. have a record of murdering People in very large numbers and have explicitly stated intentions of oppressing and enslaving People.  The reason the morally bereft majority of the Roberts Court can pretend not to see the growing mountains of bodies under their "Second Amendment" and the rest of it.  Those gangster lawyers in black robes are in the business of pretending not to be able to see what is right there for everyone to see even as they will make the most precisian of distinctions when it comes to dividing up loot among the wealthiest gangsters and corporations.  The "enlightenment" notions about such things are a basic aspect of why we don't have equality, democracy, a decent or even a safe life.

If the South, if the Mid-West, if the interior West, etc. reject egalitarian  democracy the states and regions that do favor equality and democracy should break away from them and form one or more independent countries.  The price we pay for retaining the United States as it is is enormous - think of that during the next school shooting which will happen any time now as it is happening as I type this.  If the people in those regions want to retain the privileges of the gangsters who run things and who pander to their racism and their worst character flaws, we'd best face that and get shut of them.  I will, of course, feel sorry for those who live in those regions who do favor equality and democracy, a decent and safe life but I feel sorry for those who live in places that might face the hard truth and the reason we will never have it as things are now. Including most of my family and friends.  They have a right to those things.