3 July, 2008
ABOUT US
pop·u·lism: A political philosophy supporting the rights, power, and autonomy of the masses of people in a struggle against economic elites and governmental abuse.
Virtual Citizens provides free content to global media and engages in legal activism in order to reverse the tide of homegrown tyranny and empire.
We draw inspiration from the 18th-century Enlightenment on both side of the Atlantic: its emphasis on reason, freethinking, natural law, popular sovereignty, and human rights - and its challenge to theocratic fundamentalism religion and hereditary aristocracy.
As Marquis de Lafayette said of the 1776 American Revolution:
"Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country."
We also admire the 19th-century Abolitionists and the 20th-century leaders who fought for factory workers, farm workers, and African-Americans.
Virtual Citizens feels compelled to make a clarion call for political change – through the use of words and ideas.
In the spirit of Thomas Paine, Peter Zenger and other 18th-century writers, we perform a metaphorical vivisection of the Bush administration, exposing its cancerous entrails to the searing logic of the American and French Revolutions. Two modern English writers, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, stand at the ready, providing the right scalpel at the right time.
Virtual Citizens is not affiliated with the Democratic Party, socialist organizations, labor unions or any other type of formal political entity. While we agree with some Democrats, their party will not stop exporting taxpayer money to corrupt foreign governments, anti-democratic movements, warlords, drug traffickers and coup plotters. Nor will the Democratic Party stop signing "free trade" agreements that hollow out American industry and destroy agriculture in Mexico. Nor will the Democratic Party reverse the tide of corporate prisons or corporate-controlled elections. Nor will the American Democratic Party adequately defend the right to bear arms.
Virtual Citizens agrees with a tiny fraction of progressive Republicans, but we wage a digital warfare on a Party that has long been an instrument of corporate oligarchs, and recently hijacked by neo-conservative ideologues and theocratic fundamentalists. Today, the Republican Party has captured the State and use its machinery to grind the vast majority of Americans between the twin millstones of economic and cultural regression. It is an un-American, neo-fascist, Bushevik Revolution – a permanent "revolution from above" that is destroying our nation.
1. Defensive Perimeters and Parameters No Eternal War - (Top) - (21 Points)
The Party's current slogans include:
"Let's fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here,"
and
"The best defense is a good offense."
Let's examine the actual policy. The war in Iraq is like crossing the street and climbing up your neighbor's tree to smack a hornets' nest – all the while leaving your home windows and doors open.
The Bush war in Iraq has multiply the number of armed terrorist groups from zero to 11 in just three years. Meantime, the federal government has moved slowly, if at all, to inspect cargo at ports or monitor the borders. Well, it has done something: America's travelers, young and old alike, must take off their shoes and belts at the airport.
Bushiite sectarian violence promises to multiply Iraq's armed militia groups from 11 to 22 in the next three years at the current pace. And that is the point. This war is not about pre-emptive war or preventive war; it is about permanent war. The Bush regime says it will take "generations." Other neo-cons call it "the Long War," "the New Hundred Years War," and "World War IV (World War III having been the Cold War). The point is that the Bush regime wants your children, your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren to fight a war that only places the United States at greater risk and soils her reputation.
Is permanent war a sop to defense contractors? Is it a rationalization to concentrate even more power around the executive branch? Is it a fig leaf for despotism? Is it a blind Crusade? It is all that, and much more. Permanent war represents the glorious climax of the totalitarian ideal as revealed by George Orwell in 1984. "WAR IS PEACE"
Permanent war allows the state to feed off the turbulence like a hurricane over a warm patch of ocean. There is no chance of running out of enemies; no chance or victory or failure; and no chance of losing profits for those properly positioned in the military-industrial complex. George Orwell was right: "War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."
The idea that "the best defense is a good offense" (which in this case means an eternal war against nobody-in-particular and everyone-in-general) is simply bad strategy.
On war, we must go beyond Machiavelli, Romans and the Greeks. The Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu offers us the best and clearest guidelines.
In chapter II of the Art of War, Sun Tzu said: "When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, [the troops'] weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped … you will exhaust your strength." He concludes with a condemnation of the long-war: "If the campaign is protracted, resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. … There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare." Hence Sun Tzu points plainly, permanent war is not sensible. Rather, as he describes in chapter III, "supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting" (more on that later).
The United States must cease indulging in the "co-dependent enabling behaviors" that, in part, contribute to terrorism: Supporting monarchies and military dictatorships; training extra-state militias and terrorist groups; funding opium warlords and bounty-hunters; subsidizing settler colonies; stationing bases in the Muslim world; and using white phosphorous and depleted-uranium munitions.
When our Sloganeer-in-Chief stood on the rubble of 9/11 to bellow through his bullhorn, where was his Promise-Keeper Pledge that none of that would happen again?
The Arab-Israeli Conflict & Iran
John F. Kennedy was right: "Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind." The evolution of this conflict demonstrates that the real enemy is war itself.
US foreign policy has actually impeded the realization of land-for-peace agreements by not insisting upon the dismantling of the West Bank settler colonies, illegal under Article 49 the Geneva Conventions.
Israel should rightly expect recognition of its sovereignty according to the 1948 ceasefire boundary. Thus, a truly legalistic approach to the conflict involves UN Resolution 181, establishing Israel's 1948 boundary, and Article 49, removing all of the settler colonies.
Preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons might be ultimately impossible, and new countries will make periodic attempts. The only real way out of the conflict, we believe, is for coalitions of peoples and states to push for universal nuclear disarmament. Obviously, this calls for a fundamental breakthrough in political, cultural and spiritual life, but we are not interested in alternatives because we know the ultimate outcome of Bush-Bolton tag-team diplomacy: everyone loses.
2. Open Diplomacy No Subverting Foreign States - (Top) - (21 Points)
George Washington: "It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world."
In keeping with the Founders' intention to create a nation and not an empire, the United States should limit foreign relations to open diplomacy – to the power of persuasion - unless attacked, upon which military force will be restricted to the people, groups or nations demonstrably responsible.
Alexis de Tocqueville was right. Democracies are not very good at foreign relations. Not only does each administration alter the foreign policy of its predecessor, but each agency within the executive branch – the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA – has its own (sometimes covert) foreign policy.
The United States should speak to the world with one voice, a consistent voice, in an open forum. It is not as if the people of the U.S. have had successes based in a foreign policy of chaos, confusion and covert operations: Iraq, Hamas, Iran, Sudan, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, to name a few.
3. Humanitarian Relief Groups No Aid to Foreign States - (Top) - (21 Points)
Foreign aid consists of taking money from working-class Americans and transferring the lion's share to rich foreigners, connected contractors, and Wall Street bankers.
Foreign aid has contributed precious little, if anything, to the real economic and social development of any country. In fact, U.S. pipelines of money bolster kleptocracies in the developing world, nurturing a "predator class" of elites.
The American people can express their solidarity with people around the world by supporting programs of short-term disaster relief. American aid in times of floods, earthquakes and famines can alleviate human suffering and bolster our national image overseas.
4. Fair Trade with Protections No Monopoly Capitalism - (Top) - (21 Points)
Virtual Citizens argues for more freedom and lower taxes for small family-run businesses, sole proprietorships and similar business arrangements. A tax rate for individuals and businesses should begin at zero and progress upwards to no more than 20% - the royal fifth.
Simultaneously, Virtual Citizens argues that certain natural resources, like coal or petroleum, which figure into America's security, should be national resources. After all, Big Oil will never put America's energy security - or even its physical security - before its own bottom line. Everyone is entitled to enjoy the fruits of his or her labor and investment, but giant monopolies and oligopolies enjoy no God-given title over America's minerals, trees or petroleum.
Abraham Lincoln got it right: "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, recognized that free enterprise periodically gives way to "monopoly capitalism" – shorthand for clusters of oligopolistic firms earning supernormal profits, and this is especially true for industries with enormous economies of scale, like petroleum or pharmaceuticals.
In the past, progressive reforms broke the monopolies. Not today. In a world of Grover Norquist and Paul Bremmer's Order 39, the public sector is being sold off to the private sector. Neo-Con Republicans with considerable support from "mainstream" Democrats in the Congress have let the Party capture the State, transforming it into a New Leviathan of monopoly capital.
As a result, a handful of oil companies will do everything in their power to encourage and maintain America as a petroleum-based society long into the future – squeezing every last drop of profit possible from the American consumer.
Virtual Citizens endorses a free enterprise system with safety nets so that no American falls below a minimum level of subsistence. Any trade agreements with foreign nations must be restricted to those of a comparable and compatible nature – not to economies based upon slave labor, child labor and sub-human working condition.
5. Checks and Balances No Imperial Presidency - (Top) - (21 Points)
It is clear that the White House has used the War on Terror to siphon power upwards. The ideological window dressing for this power grab is what two lawyers and torture-boosters, John Yoo and Alberto Gonzalez, call "Unitary Executive Theory."
This "Unitary Executive Heresy," this Caesarism or New American Monarchism, is sustained in the Bush era even though the Framers were crystal clear in their intent to establish an overt system of "checks and balances." This system was designed to frustrate any president and to prioritize the authority of Congress.
"The legislature necessarily predominates," said theorist James Madison in Federalist #51.
The Framers were adamant about avoiding European-style despotism. Having listed a slew of abuses and wrongful usurpations in the Declaration of Independence, they set out to prevent the tyranny that a single government - headed by a single executive - would bring.
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary," said Madison in Federalist #51. Now, however, we have a new King George renting out secret Gulags in Eastern Europe; arguing for the suspension of habeas corpus, even for Americans; brazenly authorizing mass surveillance without warrants – activities that violate both federal law and the Constitution.
Virtual Citizens supports efforts to constrain the executive branch with the help of Congress, the Supreme Court, a conscientious and active news media, and world opinion.
James Madison: "The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judicial in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."
6. Free Speech and Expression No Government Sanctions - (Top) - (21 Points)
Under the Bush administration, political speech and expression has come with consequences. People active in legal political movements – those who proclaim messages of peace, anti-war or animal rights, those who advocate bicycle riding, and voter protection – are routinely placed under surveillance.
Worse, the federal government maintains a growing "No-Fly List" to prevent activists from traveling freely; it hides data on who is being audited by the IRS; and seeks to revoke the tax-exempt status of progressive anti-war churches (but not of pro-war "churches.") And now, the Republican Congress is seeking to restrict the Internet, permitting private industry to control it and to monitor who goes where. Big Brother is now outsourced.
Virtual Citizens advances the proposition that "government shall have no power to restrict an individual from commercial travel, or initiate a tax audit, or conduct a criminal investigation, or pursue any strategy of punishment, on the basis of that person's legal speech or expression."
7. Privacy Rights Protections No Unwarranted Searches - (Top) - (21 Points)
The Bush administration has used the "War on Terror" to justify spying on ordinary Americans without "probable cause." They have amassed a colossal amount of personal data on Americans. The existence of "mass surveillance" is not a feature of open societies.
Virtual Citizens advances the proposition that "government shall not employ active or passive surveillance technology on American citizens, without a search warrant based upon probable cause and describing the place to be searched."
As Benjamin Franklin said: "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."
8. Gun Ownership Preserved No Mass Confiscations - (Top) - (21 Points)
As Thomas Jefferson said: "No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms."
The Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights provides Americans with the right to bear arms, but the Supreme Court has also recognized that government can regulate that right in 1939 by prohibiting exotic weapons for example. Government may also encourage advancements in safety mechanisms, child-proof locks and other accident-reducing technologies.
The right to bear arms provides a check against foreign invasion. Alexander Hamilton said: "The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed."
The Second Amendment also provides for the protection of people and property during disasters. During Katrina, the New Orleans Superintendent of Police expressed his intention to confiscate guns – precisely when people needed them the most. Virtual Citizens advances the proposition that "government shall have no power to confiscate weapons from law-abiding citizens."
As James Madison said: "Americans have the right and advantage of being armed - unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
9. State-Owned and Run Prisons No Corporate Lock-ups - (Top) - (21 Points)
Virtual Citizens maintains that the United States of American cannot claim to be a democratic republic if has the world's highest incarceration rate outside of North Korea.
Violent criminals and drunk-drivers should be in jail, but most Americans are not aware that over one million people spend year after year in prison for non-violent and petty offenses: marijuana possession, prostitution, bouncing checks and even writing graffiti.
The Founders would be rolling in their graves even faster than they already are if they knew that prisons are now lucrative corporations. These "McJails" receive money from government on a per-prisoner, per-day basis.
Not surprisingly, the executives of these for-profit prisons sponsor "tough-on-crime" legislation and even line the pockets of politicians who back "mandatory sentencing" laws. For-profit prisons even get to write new mandatory sentencing laws to guarantee a steady flow of the raw material - the rabble of society - into an emerging prison-industrial complex.
Virtual Citizens advances the proposition that "government shall not retain the right to privatize any portion of the justice system, including prisons; and that government shall not have the right to punish non-violent and non-sexual offenses for terms of more than four years.
10. Responsible Drug Policy No Warehousing the Nonviolent - (Top) - (21 Points)
Prior to 1914, nearly all medicines and drugs were available from local chemists, pharmacies, doctors and traveling salesmen. Though drugs were available, drug use rates were low and the social pathologies tied to such use was minimal. Through the triumvirate of class, race, and religion, in short order, the U.S. would create a juggernaut of state-repression that would have the Founders scratching their heads in disbelief.
With the encouragement of corporate forces (in areas of wood pulp and petrochemicals, e.g., the DuPont corp.), and the emerging professional classes of doctors and pharmacists, a drug prohibition movement began. These authorities had support from alcohol prohibition groups – like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and overt racists who associated Chinese, Blacks, Filipinos, Mexicans, Indians, and other undesirables with drugs, lawmakers embarked on a trip that has destroyed the lives of millions and robbed the public treasury.
Today's war on drugs is no different than that of others – except that the scope is broader. The financial and human cost is enormous. America's criminal justice system is largely geared towards ensnaring and incarcerating people who are either minding their own business or whose substance abuse is best addressed as a medical issue.
Other nations have different models – be they at the national, regional or city level. While the Netherlands has the most lax system in the West, they still convict producers and sellers of heroin, cocaine, XTC, and other prescription drugs. In much of Australia , Scotland and Canada, police refuse to waste time policing the use of marijuana. The results are multifaceted but we should be aware of a few facts.
Where marijuana is decriminalized, children and teens use it less often than in the U.S., crime is lower, and test scores in mathematics and the sciences are higher. Prisons outside the U.S. are not teeming with dealers, users, or addicts. Even the Nixon commission headed by a Republican, and former governor of Pennsylvania, Raymond Shafer, said that marijuana should be decriminalized.
Our position is linked to fiscal sanity, the proper understanding of liberty and natural rights, recognition of historical forces of oppression, and de-linking the myths and lies about the role and effects that drugs have in a society where over one-third of all adults have used marijuana, millions more regularly consume alcohol, and doctors dispense anti-depressants to children and adults alike with little concern for the long-term damage on individual users or society.
11. Justice Under Law No Capital Punishment or Torture - (Top) - (21 Points)
Capital punishment is based upon an unwarranted faith in human infallibility. It is expensive, biased along lines of race and class, and it soils our national reputation around the world. The U.S. should reunite with the western civilization from which it arises. The West has evolved past the death penalty – when will we?
Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court has provided precedent for recognizing "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." American law has already prohibited the branding of humans and their drawing and quartering, so there is a basis for banning capital punishment.
One can only assume that Justice Antonin Scalia, who admires the legal doctrines of the criminal justice system of the late 1700s, would rule to permit constitution-era punishments like branding. As it stands, the self-styled "originalist" has dissented from two Supreme Court decisions: Roper v. Simmons (2005), which banned the execution of people who committed their crimes when they were minors; and Atkins v. Virginia (2002), which banned the execution of the mentally retarded. Justice Clarence Thomas and William Rehnquist also dissented on both decisions, joining the neo-con allies of Saudi Arabia , Pakistan and Uzbekistan, all of which permit the execution of minors and the mentally impaired.
Virtual Citizens condemns the Bush administration's denial that waterboarding is torture. Virtual Citizens advances the proposition that "government shall not have the right to utilize physical or psychological torture, or capital punishment, for any person under the effective control of the United States."
Abraham Lincoln once said: "Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
We say: "Whenever we hear any one arguing for torture, we feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
12. Pencil-Paper-Box No Touch-Screens or Machines - (Top) - (21 Points)
The Bush administration has apparently decided that in the future, theParty would not depend - as in 2000 and 2004 - on the brown-shirt tactics of confronting African-American voters at the polls, forcing them to fill out provisional ballots – thank you Ken Blackwell. Instead, the Party will capitalize on consumer-friendly touch-screen technology.
What most Americans do not realize is that the current electoral process could not be more degenerate; that is, there is no possibility of it getting worse: Party-backed companies receive 1) no-bid contracts; 2) to run paperless elections; 3) on secret software; 4) using private servers, and 5) then they remain in charge of actually counting the votes. There might be another way to make an election less transparent, but no one has yet thought of it.
The strategic decision to employ "virtual voting" had a further advantage in that the twin concepts of secrecy and unaccountability could be fully united in cyberspace, not as matter, but as energy, quarks akimbo.
The Democratic Party has already had several local and state elections jacked from under their noses by virtual voting, and its leaders remain silent. The Conyers Report established that electronic voting played a role in the 2004 electoral heist.
Virtual Citizens seeks to abolish digital voting and backs federal electoral reform so that the same pencil-paper-box technology is employed from Maine to California.
13. Public Elections No Privatized Elections - (Top) - (21 Points)
As Josef Stalin said: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."
In addition to the technology of electronic voting, which is inherently vulnerable to hacking, fraud and malfunctions, there is a great danger in the creeping privatization of elections.
The greatest outrage in American politics today is that the core part of any election – counting the votes – has been privatized to unaccountable corporations with a stake in the outcome of the election.
Frank Zappa, a rocker, was prescient: "The illusion of freedom in America will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre."
Virtual Citizens issues a warning: Don't look into digital voting too closely, for you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre.
14. Voter Protections No Voter Suppression - (Top) - (21 Points)
Voter protection is a simple concept – each eligible voter is given a ballot, each ballot is recorded, and each vote is counted. We agree with Mark Crispin Miller that voting, vote counting, transparency and public accountability in elections is the a priori condition for democracy. Without these simple guarantees, there is no democracy, there can be no accountability in government, and all other liberties, protections, and government obligations that are desired by a majority are a virtual nullity.
Voter suppression is now common. Consider, for example, the purges of votes in Florida 2000 and in Ohio 2004; the voter challenges (a favorite tool of now deceased Chief Justice William Rehnquist); not counting ballots (again in Florida 2000, and Ohio and New Mexico in 2004); the issuance of provisional, second-class ballots; the failure to use uniform and reliable procedures, i.e. paper-pencil ballots; and the failure to provide adequate numbers of ballots to accommodate vote turn-out (as occurred in many highly-Democratic districts in Ohio 2004).
Unless we are willing to adopt Athenian practices, whereby citizens are picked by lot to serve in the legislature and to act as judges and jurors in nearly all public events – which would demand a complete reordering and reorganization of the educational system as the means to prepare us for the duties of leadership, we believe that re-democratizing and protecting the vote is the best measure to promote equality, fairness, and justice in America.
15. Equal Protection No Barriers to 5th and 14th Amendments - (Top) - (21 Points)
A just society is one in which the guarantees and protections of liberty, privileges and law should apply to everyone and exclude no one.
Thus, we agree with George Washington, who would not have fossilized personal liberty but would have allowed it to grow unimpeded: “As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.”
All current and proposed barriers which would frustrate the plain meaning and best implications of the 5th and 14th Amendments should be erased. There should be no exceptions to guarantees of privileges – i.e. rights, or natural and common law liberties. Further, as various civil privileges are doled out, and liberties sought to be exercised, our government should work on the side of justice to guarantee equal protection as to safe guard freedom for those who would be otherwise discriminated against due to their race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief/practice or even language preference.
For example, women should not be barred from active combat duty, as fighter pilots or any other government or private position for which they are qualified – physically and mentally.
The federal and state governments should not deny contract rights and protections otherwise extended to adults solely on the basis of gender or number of persons who wish to enter into “marriage.”
From a purely legal standpoint, Supreme Court rulings in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and Roemer v. Evans (1996), strip legislators or a tyrannical majority from applying homophobia and discrimination in a shroud of morality. Through these decisions, the Court pushed the judicial branch one step closer to a correct understanding of one of the core purposes of the Constitution – ensuring individual liberty by denying government efforts to curb freedoms which should include the ability of competent adults to choose their own marriage partners.
While certain religious sects disapprove of same-sex marriage, one’s dogmatic positions should never determine governmental policy. As James Madison said in 1784, “Religion, the duty we owe the creator, is not within the cognizance of civil government.”
The United States government is, under law, secular, as noted in Article IV (states shall have a republican form of government); Article VI (no religious tests); and in the First Amendment (prohibitions on establishment and protections for individual choice – which also applies to states through its incorporation in the 14th Amendment).
Thus, from the perspective of the Founders, theological beliefs of the citizenry or the legislators can never serve to justify limiting the full application of the 14th Amendment and the plain meaning of “privileges and immunities,” “due process” and “equal protection under the law.” Virtual Citizens has advice for people opposed to same-sex marriages: don’t enter into one!
Similarly, competent adults should be allowed to choose to live in plural marriages. First and foremost, this is because there are no legal restraints on adult cohabitation and their sexual relations. Though some might protest ideas related to blending families or communal living, such communities are also protected by our Constitution – hence we must allow for that extremely rare instance of a plural family.
The Supreme Court should overturn its baldly partisan and chauvinistic ruling in Reynolds v. United States (1878), in which the majority upheld a prohibition on plural marriages. Chief Justice Waite rendered an absurd opinion – its strongest points grounded in tautology, its weaker points misreading history, drawing on the ugliness of ethnocentrism, and making wild speculations about polygamy leading to patriarchy and despotism.
While Waite insisted that English common law always voided second marriages – making it punishable by death, a statute against polygamy only came to be in 1603. Waite added that Congress could ban polygamy in 1862 because the State of Virginia banned polygamy in 1788 and its drafters did not believe that such violated protections for religious freedom.
To justify the imposition of criminal penalties for polygamy Waite insisted first that legalizing polygamy would compel the courts to criminalize monogamy! Then Waite reasoned that as the government could restrict ritual human sacrifice, so too could it ban plural marriage – in the name of saving pure-minded women and innocent children from the delusion and evils of polygamy.
We are no longer a nation enslaved by overtly racist and ethnocentric views and our government should and does tolerate a host of individual behaviors once criminalized or stigmatized be it devil worship, vegetarianism, or the use of Christmas trees. Virtual Citizens has advice for people opposed to plural marriages: don’t enter into one!
Finally, Virtual Citizens anticipates that as the economy worsens and the two major political parties continue the politics of divide and conquer, we will see another round of proposals for “English Only” laws.
Like instances of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, when localities and States sought to criminalize Africans, Native Americans, Mexicans, Irish, Germans, Poles, Italians, Chinese and Japanese merely for speaking, whether they were immigrants or born in the United States, any recycled English Only initiatives will still appeal to the most racist elements of American society. All the while the real aim of such laws will be, as it was in the past, to distract voters from problems with the economy and foreign adventurism.
Counties, states and the federal government should not be prohibited from duplicating textual material in languages they see fit. And minimal translation services, required by the 5th and 14th Amendments (in the civil context) will provide a greater benefit than economic or social cost of shutting out large sections of the American community.
As well businesses should not be prohibited from advertising in foreign languages. Nor should parents or children be chastised for speaking more than English as has occurred in the past (Nebraska, Indian cases). Overtly any legal restriction on the speech of non-governmental actors violates the First Amendment.
Lastly, as English has evolved from that only spoken by a few conquered tribes, it is now the dominant language of global commerce, diplomacy and telecommunications. It has incorporated phrases and parts of French, Greek and Latin. It is heard in Japan, China, throughout Africa and Latin America. As the Spanish-speaking population of the United States grows, so too will the use of English and its size.16. Secure Movement and Borders No Exploitation of Migrants - (Top) - (21 Points)
Virtual Citizens does not advocate the political integration of North American countries into one superstate. We do not support "open borders."
We claim that this is a false issue in many ways, designed to fragment ordinary Americans. After all, the federal government has the power to monitor the border today with satellite technology and police accordingly. But it chooses to dump the issue into the American heartland.
While we believe that it is important to monitor the border and prevent the hypothetical "Somali terrorist" from crossing the border, we also believe in an ample and flexible guest worker program. Why? It's the best way to account for everyone here, to prevent illegal and dangerous crossings, and to maintain the pattern of circular migration by which migrants return to Mexico each year.
Few Americans understand that the so-called border "crackdown" post 9/11 has backfired. The natural pattern of "circular migration" has been interrupted. After all, migrants had been content to work in the US nine months a year. They sent money back home, and returned to their native lands for Christmas and winter. Now, migrants (mostly single and male) cannot come and go as easily as before, so they bring each of their family members across the border, one at a time, to stay.
The "circular migration" of one migrant has given way to the serial "unidirectional migration" of many – thanks to the border crackdown.
Finally, Virtual Citizens would like to remind Americans that we have been feasting on the cheapest food in the western world for decades – thanks to "illegal" workers. And it should go without saying, but not these days: Before people are "illegal" they are "human," and in recognition of all Americans complicity in this crisis we urge the use of the term "migrant" worker.
Virtual Citizens argues that any fines to be paid under "earned" amnesty should be cancelled out by the surplus wealth already extracted from migrant labor.
Remember, you too would have jumped the fence to work in strawberry fields if your family was living in extreme poverty. It's possible to be humane and work towards a more secure border at the same time.
17. Natural Health No Unlabelled Frankenfoods - (Top) - (21 Points)
Virtual Citizens speaks out against the systematic contamination of our food supply. While chemical and toxic materials are of concern, we are extremely opposed to the genetic mutilation of food, particularly when it involves plant-animal-human hybrids or terminator seeds.
Complexity theory reveals why genetically-modified foods are smeared carbon-copies of their originals. In any complex or living system – biological or social - the "whole" is always greater than the sum of its "parts." The entire system displays qualities and behaviors that transcend those of its components; and it reflects integrity above and beyond its particulars. The parts of a complex or living system are not inter-changeable; change one part, even with a small perturbation, and there can be a much larger feedback effect.
Recent studies suggest that frankenfoods may reduce human lifespan, spawn killer bacteria, super insects, and produce other harmful effects. Realistically, it is impossible to ban genetic mutilation in the United States, but Virtual Citizens urges the federal government restore labeling requirement for transgenic foods – or let the States and their citizens decide.
We also encourage foreign governments to boycott food that contains material that has been genetically-modified in a lab, beyond any means of natural selection or evolution.
18. Educational Reform No Psychotropics/Standardized tests - (Top) - (21 Points)
Educational reform should include the improvement of the student/teacher ratio, so that students receive more attention. It should also include the elimination of standardized testing, which is a sop to testing companies and which hollows out the curriculum.
Educational reform should also include an increase in teachers' pay – and the revenue streams for these salaries – in order to attract more qualified people to the profession.
Beyond these simple structural and financial concerns, student health is a key component to having better schools, better students and a better tomorrow. As we are long beyond Reagan's declaration that ketchup is a vegetable, educational reform depends upon improving the diet of students in schools.
Further educational reform must include rolling back the march of Ritalin and other chemical straitjackets. It is unbelievable that legions of children require psychotropics. According to a new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, as of September 2005 there were over 2.5 million children are being medicated for so-called attention-deficit disorders. We wonder how long adults could sit still and endure endless hours of drill for tests which leave vapid and uncritical minds?
By 2010, if trends continue, there could be as many at eight million children – mostly boys – drugged with Ritalin and other SSRI, especially if profit-driven "diagnoses" and "prescriptions" are allowed to continue. Countless scientists link Ritalin to growth problems and insomnia, and they claim that many children experience withdrawal symptoms similar to those of pill-deprived "speed freaks." Worse yet, increasingly, parents refuse to drug their kids, or secretly take Billy off the pills, are being charged with child abuse through "medical neglect."
Now, the Republican-backed "New Freedom Initiative" will permit psychological testing in schools and hospitals and mandatory medication: No Child Left Unmedicated, New Freedom-style. That's right: Shut Up and Take Your Drugs. Virtual Citizens will continue to expose the abuses of this industry and its lackeys in Congress.
19. Reproductive Autonomy No Intrusion on Medical Privacy - (Top) - (21 Points)
Virtual Citizens recognizes that abortion is a tragedy. However, many would-be parents are young, unprepared, and determined not to be parents; thus, abortion must remain a safe and legal option.
Despite legal rulings that guarantee women access to doctors or qualified health professionals in the area of reproduction ( e.g., Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which built upon Roe v. Wade), the legal battle against women in states like South Carolina and South Dakota rages on. And more frequently, nurses and pharmacists claim some right to practice a profession that leaves women without proper care or necessary drugs. We see, as a worst case scenario – in conjunction with tools of voter suppression and Rovian tactics in the politics of fear – that women's reproductive freedom may be forced underground.
In addition to strengthening protections for good reproductive health care, and those social mechanisms that reduce unwanted pregnancy (open and honest sex education, women's literacy, and better wages for young women of childbearing age), local, state and federal government should take a more proactive approach to improving foster care and processes of domestic adoption.
20. Science and Information No Government Propaganda - (Top) - (21 Points)
Sixty scientists – and 20 Nobelaureates – signed an open letter to President Bush expressing their concern over the political manipulation of science. What was the reason? This regime has systematically distorted scientific findings in order to protect their puppet-masters in the petroleum and energy sectors. In fact, as recently as 2005, Bush said that global warming was an uncertain matter.
The Republican Congress now prevents the federal government from disseminating warnings about products if industries can produce, with junkyard science, countervailing data. As a tribute to George Orwell, this is called the "Data Quality Act."
Worse, the Bush regime is actually increasing the incidence of AIDS in Africa by pushing the counter-productive ABC model of Uganda (Abstinence-Be Faithful-use Condoms). Such an increase was suggested by the report of Human Rights Watch, aptly titled "The Less They Know, the Better."
This administration refuses to fully recognize the dangers of psychotropic drugs given to children and teen-age boys, mad cow disease, artificial sweeteners like Aspartame, and genetically-modified foods.
The U.S. Constitution, in Article 1 Section 8, empowers Congress "to promote the progress of science." It's time to hold Congress to that duty.
21. Modernism with Belief No Theocratic Fundamentalism - (Top) - (21 Points)
Christianity is – or should be – about recognizing the divinity in all people and, above all, about being kind. At its best, Christianity should be a tool to guide citizens and government officials to promote justice and equality. Christianity played this role in the fights to abolish slavery and promote civil rights .
Virtual Citizens supports mainstream Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but we reject fundamentalist claims that monopolize truth. We argue that Radical Right televangelists are advancing a Counterfeit Christianity, Jesus as pro-war, pro-rich and pro-death penalty. They seek to erase Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation" between Church and State.
As James Madison said: "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries."
As the French national Marquis de Lafayette said, a General in Washington's Continental Army: "If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy."
Virtual Citizens is opposed to the encroachment of theocratic dogma into the public sphere: the ludicrous claim that an anti-conception pill is an abortion pill; the reluctance to promote condom use to prevent AIDS; and the goal of pushing of neo-Creationism into public schools.
Virtual Citizens exposes the shenanigans of preachers who turn their backs on their congregations to pursue power in Washington. On radio reaching much of South America, we blasted the Ayatollah Robertson and his fatwa (death decree) against the Venezuelan President. We also publicized his connections to the machete warlord Charles Taylor.
Virtual Citizens reaffirms the freethinking and anti-clericalism of the Founders. Thomas Jefferson: "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." Amen.
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