© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
An update has been released for the Android version of the WAMC App that addresses performance issues. Please check the Google Play Store to download and update to the latest version.

Paul Elisha: Corporations And The Human Voice

From the time of the American colonies’ declaration of independence from the Monarch-led Empire of Great Britain (on July 4, 1776), to the establishment of a democratic republic, with its first President, a Congress, Senate, unfinished draft of an as yet incomplete and un-adopted Constitution, nearly two decades would elapse. Still, their absolute belief in the certitude of their enterprise induced them to announce it to a then uninitiated assortment of nations. From the very outset they realized their undertaking might, by its very nature, have to remain a work in progress, yet they pressed on. The President, still in his General’s uniform and his most trusted aide: Alexander Hamilton, a banking genius with a street-fighter’s know-how, fresh from having authored “The Federalist” Papers, George Washington, with James Madison and Robert Morris set out to carve a disparate collection of rebellious colonies into a self -governing nation, the likes of which had never totally existed and/or endured, before.

From the outset, the new United States clung to America’s eastern shore but divisions that defined and bedeviled its originators would persist. These included southern industries with an enslaved labor force of African Negroes, whose owners refused to free for citizenship. Native-American Indian tribes also were induced to move, with treaty promises that were ignored, as the new nation’s foreign immigrants spread westward.

With a Constitution still in the making and no final governing body yet in place, especially no Supreme Court, it’s now obvious, those who envisioned this “nation-to-be,” had set in motion its character, for generations to come. What also transpired, though, was the realization that the defenders and advocates of states’ rights must equalize the balance of power at this crucial juncture or become a loyal but futile opposition, perhaps for generations. The upshot? The Jeffersonian Democrats organized a vociferous and determined opposition which it maintained throughout the months and years since the removal of the nation’s Capitol to its present, so-called bi-partisan location as a functioning adversary; capable of sustained (if not always insightful) argument.

As of this Independence Day, in the year: 2014, with a Supreme Court tethered to the ultimate falsehood, that corporate money is the equal of any human voice or conscience, those of us who understand the gross hypocrisy of such thinking, should and must continue to argue for the right of every  “genus homo” (human being) to participate in our crucial work in progress, regardless of color, gender or ideology.

Let this vital experiment continue.

Related Content