kissro / Flickr)” width=”308″ height=”476″ />(Photo: kissro / Flickr)We The People are supposed to have the power in America.
That was the idea of the Founders, but it has been taken from us.
Since the Reagan Revolution, we’ve become the land of kings, warlords and theocrats.
As Thomas Jefferson pointed out, from the founding of Samaria 7000 years ago until 1776, one of three types of people and groups ruled everyone else.
They were the hereditary kings, violent warlords or theocrats.
They justified these forms of tyranny by saying that the people could not rule themselves, and instead had to be ruled by somebody else.
One of the biggest believers in this notion was Thomas Hobbes.
In 1634, Hobbes, in his book Leviathan, stated that humans were by nature evil, and that life without the iron fist of church or state would be “war of every man against every man,” resulting in a society where lie is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Kings, warlords and theocrats had rights, and they granted privileges to the people.
Thomas Jefferson and the Revolutionaries of 1776 came along and flipped this power structure on its head.
“We the People,” they said, should be in charge of ruling, and we don’t need any kings at all.
Theocracy was a very dangerous and flawed system.
And we must be so vigilant about warlords that our Constitution explicitly says that the army can’t exist any longer than two years without renewed appropriation from Congress.
On taking the power from the kings, warlords and theocrats and giving it to the people, Jefferson once said that, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves…”
And on the dangers of a theocracy, Jefferson told Alexander von Humbolt that, “History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”
Thanks to Jefferson and our Founding Fathers, the power structure that existed for thousands of years was flipped upside-down, so that the people had rights, and could decide which privileges to the hereditary kings, warlords and would-be theocrats would have.
This new power structure worked well for over 200 years, but beginning in 1981 with the Reagan Revolution, the hereditary kings, violent warlords and theocrats began reclaiming the power that they once had.
And they made deals with each other to work together to suppress the power of “We the People,” and to take away our rights.
Today’s hereditary kings are the wealthy elite, the top 1 percent of Americans that control a staggering 43 percent of the nation’s wealth.
They continually fight inheritance taxes, so their children can take over their wealth and maintain their dynasties.
Meanwhile, America’s modern-day hereditary kings are conspiring with today’s theocrats.
Mega churches, particularly in the South, have become major power centers and organizing forces for the hereditary kings to spread their ideas and messages, and to grow their dynasties.
“Prosperity theology” teaches that you are rich because God made you that way.
The logical flip-side of this is that if you are poor, God made you that way.
In this way, the theocrats justify the existence of the plutocrats.
But even with the help of the theocrats, the hereditary kings couldn’t continue to grow in power without the help of violent warlords, which we refer to today as the military industrial complex.
The military industrial complex takes up nearly half of the entire U.S. budget each year, with much of it being privatized and its profits going to the billionaires (a.k.a the hereditary kings), and their defense corporations.
The Founding Fathers never envisioned this return to the brutal and dictatorial power structure that dominated the globe for thousands of years, and stripped rights from the people.
More importantly, it’s fundamentally undemocratic.
We need to return to the core values that this nation was built on.
Break up the hereditary kingdoms that are ruling America, by aggressively establishing and enforcing inheritance taxes on great wealth.
Next, break up the theocracy, by taking away the tax-exempt statuses of churches, and doing away with the government subsidies provided to them.
And finally, break up the out-of-control military industrial complex by increasing transparency, shutting down Washington’s revolving door, enforcing the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and bringing an end to the privatization of traditional government functions once and for all.
Kings, warlords and theocrats have no place in America today.
It’s time to give them the boot, take back our rights, and once again put power in the hands of the people.
If America is to survive as America, “We the People” must stand up, and restore the core values that Jefferson and the Founders put into place.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
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