A New Declaration of Independence

In May 2008, Larry Pinkney was among several people that discussed and signed a New Declaration of Independence:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-New-Declaration-of-Indep-by-Garda-Ghista-080530-178.html

A New Declaration of Independence

Published in OpEdNews.com on May 30, 2008
By Garda Ghista (1944-2012), President, World Prout Assembly

In the tiny Appalachian town of Radford, Virginia, the First Summit of the World Prout Assembly, with the theme “Building a New World: Radical Visions,” took place from May 22-25th. Perhaps the one distinguishing feature of this conference was the inclusion of a new Declaration of Independence in every single conference tote bag.

Written just two weeks before the conference, discussed, revised and then endorsed by nine people, and further endorsed by two more people during the conference, the Declaration is intended to serve as a catalyst for change in America, along the same lines as David Swanson and other great activists began the impeachment movement several years ago. It was an idea ahead of the times, but today millions of Americans have accepted that impeachment of criminal politicians is a necessity.

In the same tradition, we offer a new Declaration of Independence, an idea also ahead of the times, as a vehicle to inspire every American, every town, and every state, to reject a government that has become wholly criminal in its actions.

This rejection of criminality is an essential part of the process to regain our moral integrity as a people and as a civilization that may once again be respected by other higher civilizations on this earth.

People wishing to endorse this Declaration may write to wpaeditor@gmail.com.* On the other hand, all towns and communities are encouraged to write their own Declaration of Independence from an empire – a serial killer of nations and peoples – now in its death throes.

*Larry Pinkney Archives Notice: Garda Ghista, Founding Director and President of World Prout Assembly (WPA) and Editor of the former WPA website passed away on February 20, 2012.

Declaration of Independence

Presented at the “Building a New World” Conference May 22, 2008

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, a decent respect for the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that the entirety of humanity, the entire creation, constitutes one family in which no individual has been given the right to hoard wealth while the remainder of the family dies for lack of a handful of grain; in which no individual has been given the right to mass murder, in the name of perverse patriotism, for a small piece of this planet; in which no individual has been given the right to exterminate countless animal and plant species in the pursuit of profit. Rather, we affirm our commitment to fulfill our responsibility to every member of our family as part of our human family values.

We further hold that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable political and human rights – among them the right to free speech, free assembly, free press, free worship, trial by jury, and freedom from  unreasonable searches and seizures. These are our most fundamental rights to life and liberty. We assert that as all human beings are created equal, there can be only one chosen people, and that is the entire human and ecological family. No member of this family can be considered an outcast, heathen, foreigner or exploitable natural resource.

We further hold that all human beings are endowed with the inalienable right to be provided with the five basic necessities of life – including food, clothes, housing, free health care and free education. Fundamental morality demands that no human being be denied these five basic necessities of life.

We further hold that all human beings are endowed with certain inalienable economic rights – among them the right to adequate purchasing power. These are our rights to economic security and economic independence – an absolute necessity in the pursuit of happiness.

Inalienable economic rights include the right to a useful and remunerative job; the right to earn enough to provide adequate food, shelter, and clothing; the right of every farmer to raise and sell his produce at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; the right of every person to join a business cooperative in their locality; and the right to full protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.

That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among people, with those governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government.

Prudence will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; experience has also shown that human beings are more disposed to suffer, so long as oppression is sufferable, than to abolish the systems to which they are accustomed and which are the source of their oppression. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same goal, evinces a design to reduce the people under them to absolute despotism, it is the right of the people, it is their duty, to throw off such a government, and to bring strict moralists and lovers of humanity to positions of leadership for the welfare of all.

The history of the American Presidency has been one of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having as its direct object absolute tyranny over the common people. It is an unholy fusion of corporations, governments and organized crime networks. To prove this, let the Facts be submitted to the oppressed American  people.  

— The American Presidency is the single most dangerous institution in the world. The President has the power to murder, and obliterate by bombing, anyone, anytime, anywhere. The President is bound by no laws, domestic or international. To speak of obliterating other nations is to be a global tyrant. We are no longer a nation and planet of laws – we are at the mercy and whim of Presidential tyrants, for whom constitutions and the rights enshrined therein are mere pieces of paper. This cannot be reformed or controlled by the electoral process.   

— The Government has adopted a policy of serial, imperialist wars, for the sole goal of profit for members of the military-industrial complex. The cry of “terrorism” is a hoax and a fraud to hoodwink the people of America and the world.  The US Government has long supported terrorists who are allies of the Empire. The government lures the people to fight its brutal and bloody wars and calls it patriotism. While committing such crimes against humanity, they propose to be our moral instructors.  

— The American president is now the Torturer-in-chief, who presides over a vast network of illegal torture prisons in the US and around the world, all the while piously presiding over prayer breakfasts.  

— The Government promotes covert military actions that include illegal drug trafficking, illegal weapons trade and assassinations. It maintains nearly 700 military bases in other countries, often against the wishes of the population.   

— The Government uses depleted uranium, napalm, phosphorous and laser weapons in direct violation of international law, hence relegating itself to the status of a renegade country, and rendering its leaders open to war crimes trials.  

— The President repeatedly subverts legislation with signing statements and uses presidential orders to override constitutional rights. It has built more than 600 new prison camps in the U.S. in order to imprison people who might be regarded as enemies of the Government. 

— The Government has willingly allowed itself to be infiltrated and criminalized by corporate and elite regimes that now direct all branches of government to serve purposes wholly contrary to the true and proper purpose of government.  

— The Government promotes economic profit over humanity by failing to punish corporations that participate in sweatshop slavery, agricultural slavery and sex trafficking in America and around the world.  It engages in economic wars to destabilize nations that resist corporate takeover. Millions have died due to US economic terrorism and genocide.  

— The Government has carried out a campaign of heightened racism, evidenced by ruthless police brutality directed at minorities and the poor. It keeps inner cities in conditions of acute poverty, passes laws designed to incarcerate generations of African-American youth, whom corporations then exploit inside prisons. On their release, they are denied the right to vote, to be educated and to return to their families. They are forced back into a life of crime, and ultimately, back into prison.   

— The Government has turned over control of United States currency to private individuals, operating through the Federal Reserve, who manipulate it for their own personal gain rather than for the benefit of the world.   

— The Government supports corporate financial strangulation of the American masses who labor in poverty, often forced to work at two or more jobs and working up to 80 hours per week, only to profit those who do no labor. Furthermore it supports a judicial system that passes laws which serve to keep the working class perpetually chained in poverty, neglect, vice, disease and soon starvation.   

— The Government has made the word “democracy,” for which our ancestors fought and died, into a mockery, by giving corporations control over our legislators. Through this control, speculators have freed themselves from all regulatory controls and have made immense fortunes while bringing the global economy to its knees. It has blocked state governments from prosecuting criminals responsible for the current economic crisis and coming Great Depression. Instead, the Presidency has financed the survival of these corrupt financial institutions with the money of the American people. If a hungry man robs a store, he is jailed as a criminal, but if a financial executive robs millions of people of millions of dollars, he is bailed out by the Government and his debts are paid by the American public. This is the morality of our plutocracy. Those criminals who made money in the housing bubble now speculate on the prices of food and fuel, while people in this country face inflation and people in American economic colonies face starvation.  

— The Government has created a global economic order in which countless people face starvation so that a few nations can monopolize the world’s resources. Developing countries, in the process of raising their own living standards, now keep their own raw materials out of the grasp of Western countries. It is the greatest threat to the American Empire, and hence the US Pentagon, in the name of democracy and freedom, bombs those who resist.   

— The Government has accrued a national debt of over one trillion dollars, potentially causing untold economic suffering to future generations. 

— The Government forces struggling people to pay an inordinate share of the taxes, which are used to carry out the criminal activities of the Government, including wars, assassinations and domestic oppression. 

— The Government has promoted a medical-industrial complex that provides obscene profits to pharmaceuticals, private hospitals, doctors and insurance companies, and has silenced development of far less profitable but often far safer alternative medical treatments. Senators and congressmen who vote to deny health care to millions, while provided their own health care at taxpayer expense, are complicit in the premature death, nay murder, of thousands of American citizens. 

— The Government has intentionally promoted a system of education that keeps the people dumbed down rather than developing their vast intellectual potential. There is a total lack of accountability to parents and student and communities in the inner cities and a diluted accountability elsewhere. The Government has further allowed corporations and organized religions to control school curriculums. 

— The Government has deliberately employed deceit and violence to rob the indigenous people of America of their lands and their resources. It has deliberately sponsored puppet leaderships in these communities so that their members continue to live in conditions of abject poverty and exploitation.  

— The Government has promoted an unsustainable culture of waste that multiplies corporate profits while devouring natural resources and producing mountains, rivers and seas of toxic wastes.  It further allows corporations to carry out unbounded torture of cows, pigs and poultry, destroy groundwater and farmlands, carry out rampant deforestation, and create dependence on pesticides and fertilizers that eviscerate economies but rake in huge profits for those corporations.  

— The Government colludes in the monopolization of the world’s media by a handful of corporations, which promote a culture of violence and vulgarity throughout the world. These corporations first debased American culture and now market that pseudo-American culture to the rest of the world. They encourage their minions in other countries to debase their own cultures. While criminalizing dissent, the Government allows criminal networks to globalize pornography, which promotes violence against women.  

— The Government, in an unholy nexus with corporations, promotes the infiltration of GM organisms into the general food chain, for the express profit of those corporations and potential endangerment to humanity. 

— The Government, in an unholy nexus with other governments, promotes the rise of a global police state in which every person will be monitored with cameras, ID cards, thumb prints, retina scans and microchips. Much dissent is either criminalized, suppressed or punished in any number of ways.  

— The Government consistently legislates in favor of a petro-based economy that multiplies corporate profits while causing ecological havoc in the form of greenhouse gases, to the point that entire humanity is threatened with the dire effects of global warming and consequent climate change. The Government has bound us to filling our gas tanks with oil laced with Iraqi blood or ethanol made from food taken from the mouths of the starving in Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines. 

In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by newer and greater oppressions. The American Presidency, when characterized by acts of tyranny, is unfit to rule the people.  We have warned the government repeatedly regarding their flaunting of the constitution. We have reminded them repeatedly of the fundamental rights of all human beings as laid down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and numerous other treaties and conventions of international law.  We have appealed repeatedly to their sense of justice and magnanimity, but have been met only with inhuman injustice.  The government has been deaf to the call for equity and justice by millions of Americans and our brothers and sisters around the world who have suffered the most from its crimes.  While our government builds concrete walls at home and abroad, we the people assert that our hearts recognize no borders, because we believe that to live is to love without limits.

If we define evolution as gradual change and revolution as accelerated change, then we the people declare that the time has come for radical, accelerated change – a revolution – in America and in the world. The criminal nature of the present government leaves the moral, law-abiding citizens no alternative. The network of global tyranny mandates that the multitudes of humanity must unitedly resist and remove the dictatorship of multinational corporations and the governments they own. We start this process today by facing the corporate government of America with this Declaration of Independence. 

We, therefore, the people of the United States of America, having the sanctity of all life as the basis for our intentions, do, in the name and authority of fundamental human decency and dignity, declare that we the people are absolved from all allegiance to the present government, as well as to any future government that continues to deny the people their political and economic rights; that all political connection between the government and the people is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as interdependent states, we will endeavor to promote economically sovereign and sustainable bioregions.

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.  

Signed: William Blum, Mitchel Cohen, Tom Feeley, Garda Ghista, Stephen Lendman, Larry Pinkney, Ralph Poynter, Lynne Stewart, Charles Sullivan, Clark Webb, William Woodward