With Ken Burn's PBS series on the Roosevelts< I thought it very propitious to finally publish this article. In spite of their many faults, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt had one thing in common: their love of the average American. Together, they were responsible for every right and Protection that we enjoyed as workers and average Americans up to the Reagan counter-revolution of the 1980's. It's time to get those rights back.

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Rights, Privileges, Franklin Roosevelt, and an Unfinished Revolution

By Richard Girard

"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god--the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!"--William Shakespeare; Hamlet, act 2, scene 2.

In previous OpEdNews articles, I have discussed whether human beings have rights: innate powers of self-determination and individual expression, which are limited only by their potential to harm other human beings now and in the future, and where these rights come from (Rights, Powers, Privileges, and Responsibilities, among others)? If these rights exist, what is their source, are they limited in number and scope, or are they potentially unlimited and changing in number, scope, meaning and application over time (See especially The Tao of Government, Right is Wrong, The Ghost of Ancient Hellas, and The Communist Takeover of America )? Finally, is there a difference between a right and a privilege?

There are too many people today who think that what rights they have are absolute, or nearly so: that unless their actions represent a clear and present danger to others, they should be permitted to do as they desire. This is especially true in the economic sphere where "caveat emptor"--let the buyer beware for the majority of you who think Latin is a musical style--seems to be the sole limitation that many business people desire to be saddled with.

The problem with such a short-sighted view of harm can be seen in examples of disasters and near-disasters such as: the harm to children caused by lead poisoning from tetraethyl lead in gasoline and the lead in pre-1978 paints; the various EPA "Superfund" pollution sites; the multitude of near-disasters involving our strategic nuclear forces during the Cold War, as well as the damage to the environment by nuclear weapons plants like Rocky Flats here in Colorado and Hanford in Washington state. Avarice, the desire for wealth for it's own sake, is a form of evil as well as a mental illness. It is when a human being's selfish desire for a thing for its own sake is exalted in both its utilitarian and abstract value above the value of living things, especially other human beings.

There are also individuals who believe that their rights--in particular property rights--are somehow superior to the non-property rights possessed by the rest of us. For these individuals, somehow taxation is theft, rather than the duty and responsibility they have as a member of society to the rest of us. We cannot as individuals avoid the payment of taxes, simply because we will never use the services those taxes provide, or disagree with the use that those taxes are providing for other members of the public.

You may be fortunate enough to never need unemployment insurance, or food stamps, or public housing, or Medicaid, or even Social Security. They are there just in case you do need them, should tragedy or misfortune befall you or your family. They are part of a system of "social insurance" started by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930's. This system of social insurance reached its pinnacle under President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960"s, but it was never as extensive or inclusive as the systems of the other Western democracies. The so-called "Reagan Revolution"--really a counter-revolution in response to the New Deal and the Great Society--began the destruction of this social safety net in the 1980's. This has created a series of gaps in the social safety net's coverage that you could drive a semi-truck through sideways thirty years later.

There are those on the Right who like to call programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid "entitlements," which is a fancy way of saying privileges. These heartless trolls like to include everything from Federal funding for education to farm subsidies to unemployment to food stamps to student loans under the wildly inaccurate descriptive term "entitlements." In their eyes, these programs are nothing more than undeserved privileges extended to the poor, working and middle-classes--more than 75 percent of the American electorate--as an inducement to vote for the 'spendthrift" Democrats rather than the politically conservative, "fiscally responsible" Republicans. In reality, these programs are "social" insurance policies, carried by the Federal government, to protect us against unforeseen disaster in our lives.

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."

"There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests."

Madison then goes on to write that faction is as integral to liberty in a modern democracy as air is to fire. Faction is the sign of a healthy political state, as long as faction does not become implacable ideology. No two individuals should have the exact same opinion on everything, or they cease being individuals. It is my belief that the more people who you ask for their opinions on any given subject, the more diversity you will discover in their answers. Eventually, you will discover that this broader, more inclusive worldview, is also most likely to give you, by consensus, the best, long-term answer to a given problem. (See James Surowiecki's 2005 book The Wisdom of Crowds, which is all about the untapped power of the collective in solving many problems, for more on this subject.)

Madison explains his opinion why everyone having identical opinions is not only improbable, but unwise:

"As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties."

So in Madison's opinion, faction is a necessity in a modern democracy, and it is a problem that cannot be eliminated, merely controlled.

Controlling the negative effects of faction in a modern democracy has never been easy, nor should any system that has a direct effect on a democratic government ever be easy. Here in the United States, we have made the mistake over the last century of attempting to control factionalism by making the creation of a third party, as a viable alternative to the Democrats and the Republicans, all but impossible. While this reduced factionalism for a time, it has also created a political landscape where there was little if any difference between the two major parties. The reactionary Tea Party faction of the GOP is breaking this centrist log jam by adopting such extremist philosophies--and forcing the GOP as a party to do so as well--that they are scaring away the small business, cloth-coat Republicans that have been the party's base since the time of President Eisenhower. The Tea Party extremists--who have nothing to offer but fear, lies, intimidation, character assassination, and a past that never was--have only succeeded in frightening the Republicans and Independents of the center-right with their extremist policies. This means that in November the Tea Party will discover that they are lacking the electoral support they need to get their candidates elected, providing those of us on the left and center left actually make it a point to go out and vote.

Senator Barry Goldwater once stated that "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." But the Senator from Arizona forgot that when extremism becomes irresponsible, it is worse than a vice. It is an insidious pipe dream that leads to fascism at home, and tyranny abroad--just ask the Germans. This is the path that the Tea Party--as well as many libertarians--either knowingly or unknowingly wish to lead us down: where a two-tier state of irresponsible wealth and the voiceless poor, the later so burdened by carrying the nation's responsibilities on their backs that they lack the strength to complain. These two groups, existing in the actualized dream of Edmund Burke's 1756 essay "A Vindication of Natural Society" of haves and have nots, struggle in an ever increasing atmosphere of enmity and despair, as the middle classes of the Western Democracies march in commercially driven lockstep to what appears to be their inevitable destruction.

We have reached a point in our history where a merely political Bill of Rights is no longer sufficient to protect "We the People" from the political AND economic oppression of would-be tyrants in our country. We no longer have a new frontier where we can escape and get a fresh start away from our creditors, the long arm of corporate lawyers, previous employers, and bad credit scores. The world we live in has shrunk to Marshal McLuhan's "Global Village," where only the inhospitable cold of Alaska, the Yukon, and Siberia, or the stifling heat of the Amazon Basin, the Kenyan Highlands, or the Australian Outback offer any real hope for a fresh--and possibly anonymous--new beginning.

In this era where large-scale commercial enterprise dominates daily life more than political maneuverings at any level, control of the average American by economic necessity has become more conspicuous and intrusive in our daily lives than at anytime in our nation's history. It is time, now more than ever, for us to adopt President Franklin Roosevelt's Second Economic Bill of Rights.

The roots of FDR's Second Economic Bill of Rights can be found in his famous "Four Freedoms" Speech, given as a message to Congress in 1941. In this speech, FDR outlined the four cornerstones of freedom for al of humanity, from which all of the rest of our individual rights and liberties are derived:

The first is freedom of speech and expression.

The second is freedom of every person to worship (or not worship).

The third is freedom from want.

The fourth is freedom from fear.

Three years later, in his address to the nation on January 11, 1944--in lieu of a wartime State of the Union Address--President Franklin Roosevelt noted the fact that the Lord Chancellor of England had stated in Vernon v. Bethell, Eden 2, 113, (1762), "Necessitous men are not, truly speaking, free men: but to answer a present emergency, will submit to any terms the crafty may impose upon them." If we are not all free, theoretically possessing equal protection under our laws regardless of race, creed, color, national origin, gender or sexual orientation, with the sole exception of those who are incarcerated by due process because of their violation of others' rights, then none of us is free. For this reason, a Second Economic Bill of Rights, to protect individuals from the depredations of the unscrupulous and economically more powerful, is as necessary today as a political Bill of Rights was in James Madison's time.

1. The essential points of FDR's Second Bill of Rights may be stated as:

2. useful and remunerative employment, together with the potential to find an avocation and not simply a job;

3. wages that provide adequate food, clothing, opportunity for recreation, and decent shelter for themselves and their families;

4. adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

5. protection from unfair competition and monopolistic practices at home and abroad, for every business in America, large and small;

6. the ability of farmers and ranchers to raise and sell the the bounty of their lands at a return which will give themselves and their families a decent living;

7. protections from the fears attendant to old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

8. a good, quality education, sufficient for the needs of our modern society; an education that is ongoing if needed or desired.

One of the great lies that has been perpetrated on the American people for much of our nation's history is that there is only a finite amount of liberty to be divided up among the individual members of our society. This belief in a scarcity of liberty is completely baseless, and is being used by those who wish to be America's new class of aristocrats to drive us into the despair of powerlessness, and ration out liberty like a city rations water in the middle of a drought. Like love, liberty is a gift to be shared, that grows in the sharing, and is best limited by our own sense of responsibility. In theory, the only limits to our liberties should be those we impose upon ourselves. However, there are two difficulties with this utopian idea.

The first of these is, as I have pointed out in numerous articles in the past, the roughly four percent of our population--mostly men--who suffer from Antisocial Personality Disorder, i.e., sociopathy/psychopathy. As I pointed out in my 9 April 2014 OpEdNews article, "Governance Without Cynicism, Part 2," [Corrections and amplifications in brackets]:

"Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" of market forces is simply ineffective against its greatest enemy: the four percent of the population who are sociopaths. Martha Stout--former professor of clinical psychology at the Harvard School of Medicine--pointed out in her 2005 book, The Sociopath Next Door, and Professor Donald Black, MD--Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa Medical School--pointed out in his 2013 book, Bad Boys, Bad Men, Confronting Antisocial Personality Disorder (Sociopathy), that not all sociopaths end up in prison. Some of them end up in corporate boardrooms, where their ruthlessness and lack of empathy, covered by a thin veneer of civilized behavior, makes them stars (Think of movies like Wall Street, or at its parody-level extreme American Psycho). Other corporate climbers, seeing the success of the sociopaths, emulate the sociopaths' behavior, so that a new and horrific normal for morality is set for the [American] corporate boardroom."

The second is very nearly the inverse of the first: human beings who have the perverse view that the best way to impose what they believe are "responsible" limits on themselves, is by first attempting to impose limitations on the liberties of others. This can include limiting others' ability to thrive within society by reducing their lives to mere existence, rather than lives that nurture and permit their developing their human potential to the fullest. Karl Marx, whose stated, underlying motive for his political-economic system was to maximize humanity's opportunity to maximize their personal growth and potential as human beings, wrote of this in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (pp. 120-121, 1844), which I quoted extensively in my 15 November 2012 OpEdNews article "Marxism for Fun and Profit." (Words in brackets are corrections and amplifications for the sake of clarity.):

"(1) By reducing the worker's need to the barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement; thus [the capitalist] says: Man has no other need either of activity or of enjoyment. For [the capitalist] declares that this life, too, is human life and existence."

"(2) By counting the most meagre form of life (existence) as the standard, indeed, as the general standard--general because it is applicable to the mass of men. He [the capitalist] turns the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs, just as he changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need--be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity--seems to him a luxury. [The economics of laissez-faire capitalism], this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus [the economics of laissez-faire capitalism]--despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance--is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save--the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour--your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power--all this it can appropriate for you--it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have that." [Emphasis added.]

The ultimate goal of the fearmongers and other liars who strive with such intense fanaticism to force their workers to become powerless "wage slaves," is to make people believe that their social Darwinist form of capitalism is the only option. Too often over the last seventy years, these individuals have used the threat du jour to trick Americans into giving up some part of our freedom, especially in the sphere of economics. They desire to reduce our middle class, once the envy of the World, to penury and mute acceptance of the abrogation of their rights, both politically and economically.

President Eisenhower gave these monsters a name, "the Military-Industrial Complex," in an address to the nation just before he left office. President Kennedy wanted to break the Military-Industrial Complex into "a thousand pieces," starting with its most obvious and obnoxious piece, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). JFK was killed--probably by members of that shadow government--before he could achieve his goal, and every President since has lived in fear he might be next unless he toes the line. The Military-Industrial Complex fears, and wishes to eliminate, a large, knowledgeable middle class. That middle class has foiled the fearmongers' plans twice in recent memory: the War in Vietnam, and forcing Richard Nixon to resign as President of the United States.

Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers No. 8, warned us of the potential for such an occurrence, the rise of an aristocracy on the back of the nation, and its outcome:

"The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated above the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors, but as their superiors. The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters, is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions, to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power." --The Federalist Papers, No. 8.

We must oppose the efforts of this would-be aristocracy to make our nation, it's Constitution, and its laws as outdated as hoop skirts and bustles. The plutocrats have the advantage of long-term planning, money, and too many Americans' ignorance of the Military-Industrial Complex's real purpose and intentions. All we have are numbers, determination, and love of this country and its traditions. Ir is enough for us to win, if we do not hesitate to oppose those who would trample our rights in the name of self-aggrandizement, now.

"Five to one, baby, One in five,

No one here gets out alive;

...They've got the guns,

but we've got the numbers;

Gonna win, yeah, we're taking over."

--The Doors, "Five to One"

Authors Bio:

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 all of those who decry Democratic Socialism is that it is a system invented by one of our Founding Fathers--Thomas Paine--and was the inspiration for two of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who the Democrats of today would do well if they would follow in their footsteps. Or to quote Harry Truman, "Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, 'socialism.'