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Rights, Privileges, Franklin Roosevelt, and an Unfinished Revolution

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This is the difference between right and privilege: if something is required for our basic existence, to have the hope of something approaching an even chance to succeed and live our lives to our maximum potential, in other words, if it is needed for "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," it is a right. If, on the other hand, it is something that we desire, something that will give us an advantage over our fellow citizens, rather than fulfill a basic requirement for a life, it is a privilege. By this definition, health care is a right; wealth is a privilege.

Of course, today's GOP never mentions the many entitlements that it is in favor of: acquiring Federal flood insurance coverage after the fact; $243 billion dollars in indirect subsidies to the nation's "fast food" industry; the low wages and poor benefits given to their employees by Wal-Mart cost the American taxpayer between $900,000 and $1.75 million dollars per store; the average American family is paying $6000 dollars annually (approximately $690 billion dollars) in total subsidies to all American corporations. All of this while corporate profits are at an all-time high, and wages are at an all-time low, according to Henry Blodget at Business Insider.

Nor are corporations alone the sole recipients of this government largesse, as Richard Eskow, Paul Bucheit, Robert Reich, Henry A. Giroux, and Dave Johnson--among others--have pointed out. From the Bush tax cuts to tax laws that allow billions of dollars of the wealthiest individual American taxpayer's money to be held offshore untaxed. The wealthiest Americans are the ones who have seen the lion's share of the benefits over the last thirty years of Reagan's voodoo, his so-called "supply-side" economics.

Ariana Huffington is correct when she states that we live in an era of socialism for the rich, and the worst sort of dog-eat-dog, laissez-faire capitalism for the rest of us. The direct and indirect subsidies that the wealthiest Americans and their corporate proxies get from the government, they believe they have as a "right;" what the rest of us get are entitlements: privileges that may be taken away whenever it has become too expensive, inconvenient, or we haven't been "good boys and girls," i.e., subservient lapdogs to the plutocrats' dark desires.

The 1787 Constitutional Convention viewed the central government as the best means of protecting individuals--especially individuals of different states--from having their rights violated by any state (including their own) or local governments. As James Madison, in The Federalist Papers, No. 10, stated [My amplifications in brackets]:

"Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our [state--RJG] governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that [political] measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true. It will be found, indeed, on a candid review of our situation, that some of the distresses under which we labor have been erroneously charged on the operation of our governments; but it will be found, at the same time, that other causes will not alone account for many of our heaviest misfortunes; and, particularly, for that prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements, and alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other. These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations." (Author's Note--The more things change, the more they remain the same.)

After defining what he meant by a faction, Madison continued:

"There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects."

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Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to (more...)
 

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