With Independence Day coming up, we feel this is a good time to remind our readers of the importance of staying the course. The course we refer to, however, is not the ill-conceived, half-baked plan that sent us stumbling into Iraq when we should have kept our eye on the ball in Afghanistan. It is the course set by our founding fathers when they drew up the Declaration of Independence and Constitution over 200 years ago.
The vision expressed in those documents is a course from which we have drifted terrifyingly far in recent years. In fact, it might be argued that, stampeded by the fear aroused by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, many of our leaders have cut and run from the challenging and dangerous task of maintaining a free society.
America’s drift from the course first set on July 4, 1776 has at least three major components. The first might be described as corporate supremacy, which has replaced government of the people, by the people and for the people with government of the people, by big business and for big business.
The second component is secrecy, the increasing propensity of the executive branch to hide its doings from the American people, and to claim immunity even from the scrutiny of the law. This has removed from the American people the tools they need to control their government, by forcing them to vote in ignorance, while also making prosecution by the courts or legislative oversight impossible.
The third major component of the nation’s drift is the adoption of a “unitary executive,” that is, an executive branch that combines all the powers of government into one branch that answers neither to the other branches nor to the people. Back in 1776, the technical term for this kind of executive was “king.”
For those who find all this too abstract and historical, we would like to point to this region’s current battle against the New York Regional Interconnect (NYRI) power line as a concrete example of the ways in which America’s drift away from its first principles could have a direct and painful impact on our everyday lives.
The only way that NYRI would be able to overcome the incompatability of the power line with the Upper Delaware’s Wild and Scenic River status would be if their proposed routes were found to fall within a National Interest Electrical Transmission Corridor (NIETC). And although the Department of Energy has refused to specifically grant early NIETC status to those routes, the list of NIETCs published later this summer may yet prove to be so widely defined as to include this area. In that case, the rights of all the people living along the power line route might be trampled by a federal mandate.
How did a law get written that enabled the federal government, hand in glove with energy industry interests, to run roughshod over the people affected?
This administration’s energy policy was conceived by Vice President Cheney’s energy task force. Cheney himself is an ex-CEO of energy/military-industrial complex giant Halliburton. He still holds millions of dollars worth of Halliburton options—options that, by some strange coincidence, gained over 3,000 percent in value between 2004 and 2005.
Lobbyists for the energy industry formed a significant part of Cheney’s task force, which formed the policies that became codified into law as the Energy Policy Act of 2005. And when Judicial Watch sued to have the proceedings of those meetings released to the public, the courts ruled that the president’s executive privilege trumped the American people’s right to know.
Here we see all three abovementioned components of our drift away from America’s true course in one example: the blurring of the line between elected representatives and corporate management, the suppression of information, and the claim of special rights on the part of an office that is supposed to be the servant, not the master, of the people.
There is nothing inherently holy about staying a course. It all depends on the course. We would say that the bulk of the American experience over the 230 years since July 4, 1776 suggests that the course set by the Declaration of Independence is one that has immeasurably enriched the human experience around the globe. Our wish this July 4 is that the American people take note of how far we have strayed from that course and do what is necessary to find our way home.
Dr. Punnybone
Friendly Fire
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As an American and voter I am completely disgusted with our current government leadership. This nation is quite possibly on the way to self-destruction.
Bush took us to war with no justification, and the senators and representatives went along with him and with his leadership. Why?
The job situation is critical—so critical that many have stopped looking for work. Yet, the House lawmakers took their automatic two-percent pay raise, amounting to $3,000. How is that right?
