A More Perfect Union

School House Rock this was the show, early Saturday mornings in my childhood that taught me the preamble of the constitution. I can still sing that song today. I especially was fond of the stanza “We the people in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice and ensure domestic tranquility.”

The two phrases of importance herein are “we the people” and “more perfect union.” In Wisconsin, Ohio and several other stats around the country, a battle for these two phrases are underway. The consternation is that Republicans do not agree with these founding principles albeit they claim the innateness of the constitution as being sacrosanct, but what can one expect from racist, sexist, kkk, bible toting republican backing nutt sacks?

Not to mention these same folk claim to know how to correct the economy and create jobs yet the only economic prescriptions they advocate support individuality and ignore social responsibility while enriching self on the backs of the hard working citizenry. The way I see it the query remains do they? The social issues seem to be more paramount. I figure if a person doesn’t want an abortion don’t have one and if you do not want to marry a gay person don’t – a lot of my heterosexual confederates do just that. But back to the Wisconsin example.

Although many believe that the governor of Wisconsin is conducting a personal raid on pensions and attack on collective bargaining as being essential to balancing the budget – it is not What is not overtly discussed are the facts. One is that just a few days after taking office the Governor gave more than $100 million in tax breaks to large corporations. This on top of the fact that corporations really do not pay any taxes as it is in Wisconsin. More than 60 percent of Wisconsin corporations pay no taxes at all.

Factually the Governor is attempting to balance the budget on the backs of the middle class during the middle of a recession. Not to mention he desires to make up for differences in the tax breaks for corporations he gave with $78 billion in the pension fund. He like the Governor of Ohio does not want folk to have a say in their money they put in their own pension. It seems strange that while Gov."I don't need any Blacks" Kasich of Ohio takes from folks making 50k a year, he has given his chief of staff a raise of $50,000 not even being in office six months. If this is ok, then the next thing would be someone telling you they have control over what you put in your 401k, what is the difference. A pension is similar for it is just deferred pay for work done. You can’t tell me a DA working for the state makes the same as a lawyer working in the private sector. If it is ok to raid union pensions then it is ok to raid a 401k or a credit union as well as prevent class action law suits.

Across the nation, the GOP has gained almost 700 seats in state assemblies. Fifteen are considering Arizona styled immigration acts including Kentucky, Nebraska and Oregon and several others are pushing for the drug testing of welfare recipients. In North Carolina, Republicans are trying to repeal the state’s Racial Justice act – it allows inmates on death row to use statistics to appeal based on discrimination. In Wisconsin they are trying to repeal a law that requires police to record the race of folk the pull over.

Go figure, from inside the beltway to the state level, the GOP is dealing with everything except the economy and jobs. I have yet to hear of or read any job creation legislation on their behalf. And I am sure they know the US trade deficit has increased to its largest gap in four months – by 33 percent. Mainly due to extending the Bush Tax cuts (which increased their beloved deficit). We have $365 billion in imports from China while we export $10 billion there in the midst of increasing oil prices.

They complain about Obama’s budget yet admit they do not have one of their own. Although the public decree is to focus on jobs and unemployment, they seem to have formed their own Napoleonic Rhenish Confederacy while at the same time the metternichian principles of the Tea Party in congress attempts to maintain political hegemony via sleight of hand and inquisitional methods. The more I try and understand, the more confused I get. I mean where does the GOP get spending cuts, abortion and civil rights as being what the electorate wants dealt with first from when our economy is sinking? Strange for again, I thought it was jobs.

America, I hope we are not that stupid. A more perfect union is we the people, not we the corporation.

Will the real Lincoln – Douglass Debate please stand up

Well it would have been easy for me to talk about Wisconsin and Hawaii, and or to pontificate on the first week of March with the Upcoming Texas and Ohio primaries. Just as undemanding, would have been to talk about John McCain’s direct comments toward Barak Obama, or how Obama, is now pulling more voters from women, from whites and from the non college educated folks that Hillary Clinton, which once upon a time ago was suggested to me, was her base.

Instead I am going to take another stab at revising history. I’m certain my folk Badtux will chime in on this. It is well documented historically that Abraham Lincoln had seven debates across the state of Illinois in 1858. In fact the historical record has labeled these the “Lincoln-Douglas Debates.”

The debates were between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. They were battling for one of Illinois' two United States Senate seats. History also tells us that Lincoln lost these debates since he lost the election.

Douglas, a Democrat, was the incumbent Senator was a strong advocate of Popular Sovereignty, and was responsible for the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Popular sovereignty suggested that settlers of federal territorial lands could decide the status under which they would join the Union – either free or slave.

Strange thing was that although he lost the Senate race to Douglas, he beat the same man for the 1860 race for the US Presidency. Although these debates framed the issue and difficulty of having a productive union in which some states were slave states, and others were free states, the real debate from my purview was not with the Senator from Illinois, but from another Douglass – Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass was probably the biggest critic of President Lincoln. It was he who got Lincoln to practice what he preaches to move beyond his rhetoric on morality and freedom. Although most would think that these two men were on the same page politically and ideological, they were not. Lincoln believed the primary directive of the North was to preserve the Union and not to end slavery. Douglass was the first to suggest and urge Lincoln to use of black troops to fight the Confederacy. He positioned that by establishing colored regiments in the Union army. Dougless wrote “ every slave who escapes from the Rebel States is a loss to the Rebellion and a gain to the Loyal Cause I need not stop to argue…The negro is the stomach of the rebellion." He urged President Lincoln to urge equal pay for black soldiers.

Lincoln even said on the record that "If I could save the Union, without freeing the slaves, I would do it. If I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would do that. What I do about slavery and the coloured race, I do because I believe it would help to save the Union."

Truth be told, the policy of the Lincoln administration was one of pro-slavery. Douglass unlike Lincoln, incessantly focused on the face of the war and stated "the mission of the war was the liberation of the slaves as well as the salvation of the Union. I reproached the North that they fought with one hand, while they might fight more effectively with two; that they fought with the soft white hand, while they kept the black iron hand chained and helpless behind them; that they fought the effect, while they protected the cause; and said that the Union cause would never prosper until the war assumed an anti-slavery attitude and the Negro was enlisted on the side of the Union."
Douglass was instrumental in getting Lincoln to see that the civil war was a struggle between freedom and slavery. For Lincoln was troubled by the view in the North that it was seen as a war for abolition of slavery singularly. This upset Douglass and in his meetings and dialogue with Lincln made sure he understood that could have never been designed, with its talk of forming “a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility,” could not have been made and at the same time promote and maintain “a system of rapine and murder like slavery, especially as not one word can be found in the Constitution to authorize such a belief.”

He had advised President Lincoln in 1862 to free the slaves in Washington, D.C., and understood that this fight was really versus a economic system directly in contradiction to the principles on which the country had been founded.

Now I know this doesn't make much sense, but all this week I have read and heard a lot regarding the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of President Lincoln. In all of this, I have only heard Fred Douglass name mentioned briefly once, but the repeating mantra of the Lincoln-Douglass debates are batted around like the were the real debate of his time. No, the real debate was between he and Douglass, for it was Douglass, in his interaction and dialogue withe Linclon, that had the greatest impact in the long run. rdB