Saturday, May 15, 2010

Citizen or Subject?

Until 234 years ago, the American People were subjects of His Majesty, the King of England. They were governed by His Majesty’s Government, far away and caring little for its distant subjects except for the money which could be extorted from them. Laws were piled on laws, taxes upon taxes. This caused much unrest, except for the very wealthy who had connections to His Majesty’s Government.

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in which he said “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

“He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.


“He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and, when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.


“He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only.


“He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.


“He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people...


“He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.


“He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.


“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.


“He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.


“He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.


“He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:


“For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us;


“For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states;


“For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;


“For imposing taxes on us without our consent;


“For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury;


“For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offenses;


“For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies;


“For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments;


“For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.


“He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.”


This is but a portion of the grievances the American People had against the King and his government. However, as subjects of the King, we had no independent power, even for the redress of grievances.

As you read the above, did certain similarities suggest themselves to you with modern America?

After a long and bloody war, the American People won their freedom and became Citizens of the United States of America. With the memory of being subject to a king fresh in their minds, the Congress wrote a document, the Constitution of the United States, and appended the first ten amendments to it, commonly known as the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights does not enumerate the rights of the American Citizen, it forbids the government from interfering with those rights. As a matter of fact, the Tenth Amendment states "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People." It established the means whereby the three branches of government were to be a system of checks and balances to prevent any one of the three gaining too much power, and thereby, to avoid a dictatorship.

It was not foreseen that the three branches of the government would become the paid agents of the wealthy, cooperating to control the people and curtail the Bill of Rights, and, in fact, most of the Constitution.

We are once again under the control of an effective dictatorship where the Rights of Man are ignored or circumvented by illegal and unconstitutional laws. Our so called “representatives” ignore We the People, listening only to the wealthy corporations and cartels which the Supreme Court has designated “persons.”

A huge agency has been created, “Homeland Security,” which has been given the right to overrule the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, to pry into every citizen’s home, business, communications. There are ever growing lists compiled; no-fly lists, border crossing lists, dossiers compiled on anyone who protests what is happening to our nation. Minorities are again coming under the eye of the government and discrimination is running rampant. We have the highest per capita percentage of people in prison of any nation. Exposes have been made of collusion between judges, law enforcement, and the private owners of prisons to be sure the population continues to increase, to the profit of the owners.

Business such as the oil companies are granted immunity for their crimes, and the government agencies that are supposed to be safeguarding us and regulating them are run by industry managers of the same industries, appointed by “our” government.

Reread the complaints above from the Declaration of Independence. Better yet, read the whole document. Look at the position of the average American, today. Then, tell me, are we Citizens of the Constitutional Republic of the United States, or or just Subjects of the American Empire?

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