Time for change's Journal - The Opening of the Floodgates of the Eugenics Movement in the U.S.: The Sterilization of Carrie Buck

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Time for change's Journal

The Opening of the Floodgates of the Eugenics Movement in the U.S.: The Sterilization of Carrie Buck

Posted by Time for change in General Discussion
Wed May 21st 2008, 06:20 PM

By learning about the tyrannies of the past, hopefully Americans will learn to recognize it when they see it.

The eugenics movement in the United States is a sordid story of unbounded arrogance, hypocrisy, classism, racism, and blatant disregard for the principles upon which our country was founded. Perhaps it would not be worth learning about if we as a nation were in no danger of repeating similar atrocities.

But it is worth learning about. Edwin Black, who previously documented IBM’s role in the Nazi Holocaust, documents the sordid history of the U.S. eugenics movement in his 2003 book, “War Against the Weak – Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race”. From the introduction of his book:

Throughout the first six decades of the 20th Century, hundreds of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of others were not permitted to continue their families by reproducing. Selected because of their ancestry, national origin, race or religion, they were forcibly sterilized, wrongly committed to mental institutions where they died in great numbers, prohibited from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried by state bureaucrats…

This pernicious white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite universities, wealthy industrialists and government officials colluding in a racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics. The purpose: create a superior Nordic race. To perpetuate the campaign, widespread academic fraud combined with almost unlimited corporate philanthropy… to cleanse America of its “unfit.”

Though the roots of the eugenics movement in the United States go back to the late 19th Century, it did not establish legal legitimacy until the first state sterilization statute was passed in Indiana in 1907. That statute was based largely on similar but vetoed 1905 Pennsylvania legislation titled “Act for the Prevention of Idiocy”, which “mandated that if the trustees and surgeons of the state’s several institutions caring for feebleminded children determined procreation is inadvisable, then the surgeon could perform such operation for the prevention of procreation as shall be decided…”

Still, for the two following decades, most states, even those that enacted sterilization laws, were reluctant to proceed very far in implementing eugenic policies. The eugenics movement needed legitimacy via a test case to take before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The case for the sterilization of Carrie Buck

In 1920, Carrie Buck’s mother, Emma, was brought before a Commission on Feeblemindedness in Virginia. Hearing officials noted that Emma had syphilis, characterized her moral character as “notoriously untruthful”, and answered “No” to a question on the standard form asking if Emma “conducted herself in a proper conjugal manner”. That was enough to officially deem Emma as feebleminded and have her committed (1*) to a “Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded”, where she would remain for the rest of her life.

Emma’s daughter Carrie was then consigned to the family of J.T. Dobbs, a peace officer, to raise her. Carrie did well in school, but the Dobbses withdrew her from school (2*) in the 6th grade so that she could spend more time on housework and be loaned out to other families for housework as well. In 1923, at the age of 17, Carrie was raped and became pregnant. Dobbs then filed commitment papers, claiming that Carrie was feebleminded, testifying that “Carrie had experienced hallucinations and outbreaks of temper and had engaged in peculiar actions.” On that basis, Carrie was quickly declared “feebleminded” and committed (3*) to the Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded.

By that time, Virginia had had so many “unfit” committed to its institutions that they were becoming a financial burden. The desired solution, strenuously advocated by the eugenics movement, was sterilization, which would allow states to release their “unfit” in the secure knowledge that they wouldn’t pass on their dangerous genes to future generations. But courts throughout the United States had reacted unfavorably to sterilization laws, so states were reluctant to proceed very far along that path. What was needed was a U.S. Supreme Court setting precedent.

The eugenics movement leaders considered Carrie Buck to be an ideal test case because there were already two generations of diagnosed “feeblemindedness” in the family (Carrie and Emma). If Carrie’s daughter Vivian could also be so branded, they could then make the case for sterilization of Carrie based on documented three generations of feeblemindedness. But Vivian was only 7 months old, and her social worker noted that there was nothing in her medical records that indicated feeblemindedness. But under intense questioning the social worker admitted that “There is a look about it that is not quite normal, but just what it is, I can’t tell”. That was good enough, given Vivian’s family history, for the leader of the American eugenics movement to declare Vivian to be feebleminded (4*).

The state of Virginia then advocated for Carrie’s sterilization, based on three generations of feeblemindedness. For Carrie’s defense, the state appointed an attorney who was a staunch eugenics advocate. The case was duly appealed up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Buck v. Bell that “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve... society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

1*) J. David Smith and K. Ray Nelson. The Sterilization of Carrie Buck, 1989, pages 15-16.
2*) Smith and Nelson, pages 1-3, 5-6, 18.
3*) Paul A. Lombardo, “Eugenic Sterilization in Virginia: Aubrey Strode and the Case of Buck V. Bell”.
4*) Harry H. Laughlin, “Analysis of the Hereditary Nature of Carrie Buck”, The Legal status of Eugenic Sterilization, pages 16-17.

The opening of the sterilization floodgates

A few months after the USSC decision, Carrie Buck was sterilized in October, 1927. Her daughter Vivian was enrolled in school, despite the diagnosis of imbecile, and made the honor role prior to dying of an infection at the age of eight.

With the USSC Buck v. Bell decision of May 1927, and with a great amount of lobbying from the eugenics movement, many states lost their hesitancy about going down the sterilization path. During the 18 years between the passage of Indiana’s first state sterilization law of 1907 and 1925, there were 6,244 state-sanctioned sterilizations and castrations (5*), an average of about 347 per year. Fifteen years later, by 1940, there were an additional 29,634 sterilizations or castrations (6*), an average of 1,976 per year, almost six times the annual rate prior to the USSC decision.

Sometimes people or societies recognize their misdeeds only when they see the same trait in others. Such was the fate of the American eugenics movement. Black explains in his introduction to “War Against the Weak”:

Eventually, America’s eugenic movement spread to Germany as well, where it caught the fascination of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. Under Hitler, eugenics careened beyond any American eugenicist’s dream…. Only after the truth about Nazi extermination became known did the American eugenics movement fade…

5*) Harry H. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization 1926; Historical, Statistical, and Legal Review of Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, p 60.
6*) Human Betterment Foundation, Legal Status of Eugenical Sterilization

Fast forward to present

Thus, as eugenics came to be associated with our mortal enemy of World War II, the eugenics movement faded out of site. Yet, today we do things that are, in my opinion, just as bad, and which are characterized by many (though not all) of the same underlying dynamics:

Highest incarceration rate in the world
According to a December 2006 U.S. Justice Department report, there were 2.2 million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons or jails, representing a 33 year continuous rise in the U.S. prison population. The U.S. incarceration rate of 737 per 100,000 residents is now the highest rate in the world. Russia is a distant second, with 611 per 100,000 residents, and the highest rate in Europe is England/Wales, at 148 per 100,000 residents. The United States, with only 5 % of the world’s population, holds one quarter of the prison population of the world within its borders. Of the total U.S. prison population in 2004, more than one quarter, 530,000, were imprisoned for drug offenses, and almost a tenth of these were for marijuana only. And many of those are for mere possession, rather than manufacturing or selling. For example, of 700,000 marijuana arrests in 1997, 87% were for mere possession, and 41% of those incarcerated for a marijuana offense are incarcerated for possession only. This is not surprising when one considers that most non-violent first time offenders guilty of drug possession today in the United States get a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years with no parole, or 10 years with no parole if a large quantity of drugs is involved.

The racial and class disparities in the United States for imprisonment for drug offenses are similar to the racial and class disparities seen in the victims of the eugenics movement. Though the Federal Household Survey shows that there are five times as many non-Hispanic white illegal drug users as black users, blacks constitute a highly disproportionate percent of the population arrested for (37%) or serving time for (42% of those in federal prisons and 58% of those in state prisons) drug violations.

Whenever and wherever victimless crimes are prosecuted and punished, the opportunity for arbitrary enforcement of the law based on racism, classism or other nefarious factors is magnified tremendously.

Adding to the damage done to individuals is the damage that these laws do to families, thus creating a vicious cycle. It is likely that the major reason for single parent households in our country today is the huge number of imprisoned men.

Imperial violence
What our Iraq War has shown more than anything else is how little concern the elite sponsors of U.S. policy value human lives, especially the lives of foreigners of different racial/ethnic background than us.

Keeping in mind that all justifications for the Iraq War have turned out to be lies, our illegal war against Iraq has created over a million Iraqi dead (the vast majority civilians) and more than four million refugees, out of a population of just over 25 million. What are some of the dynamics of the US military presence in Iraq that have allowed this to happen?

A report by a coalition of non-governmental groups called the Global Policy Forum sheds a lot of light on some of the reasons for the tragedies that so many Iraqis have suffered under the U.S. occupation. The report explains that U.S. forces:

have held a large number of Iraqi citizens in 'security detention' without charge or trial, in direct violation of international law. No Iraqi is safe from arbitrary arrest and the number of prisoners has risen greatly since 2003 (when the US-led war began)…

U.S. military commanders have established permissive rules of engagement, allowing troops to use deadly force against virtually any perceived threat. As a consequence, the US and its allies regularly kill Iraqi civilians at checkpoints and during military operations, on the basis of the merest suspicion…abusing and torturing large numbers of Iraqi prisoners… torture increasingly takes place in Iraqi prisons, apparently with US awareness and complicity…

The United States has established broad legal immunity in Iraq for its forces, for private security personnel, for foreign military and civilian contractors, and even for the oil companies doing business in Iraq…

U.S. prisoners outside of the United States
Whereas our internal incarceration rate is by far the highest in the world, our imprisonment of prisoners outside of the United States is even more disproportionately high. There are: known U.S. operated prisons at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq and Afghanistan, where torture and other grave abuses of human rights occur routinely; Secret U.S. prisons throughout the world where similar or worse abuses occur routinely; and “extraordinary rendition”, whereby U.S. officials kidnap (or otherwise gather into their custody) men or boys and transport them to prisons in countries where few or no barriers to the most horrendous kinds of torture exist, in full knowledge that those men are likely to be systematically tortured and never released until dead.

Stephen Grey, Amnesty International’s Award-Winning Journalist for Excellence in Human Rights Reporting, in his book “Ghost Plane”, meticulously documents the illegal and horrendous system of torture and other human rights abuses that George Bush has perpetrated upon the world as part of his so-called “War on Terror”. Here are excerpts of the U.S. torture program from the introduction to Grey’s book:

While the president spoke of spreading liberty across the world, CIA insiders spoke of a return to the old days of working hand in glove with some of the most repressive secret police in the world… Much later, when more pieces of the puzzle were in place, I thought of the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the dissident writer. When he described the Soviet Union’s network of prison camps as a “Gulag Archipelago” … After years of persecution, Solzhenitsyn described a jail system that he knew from firsthand experience had swallowed millions of citizens into its entrails. At least a tenth never emerged alive…

The modern world of prisons run by the United States and its allies in the war on terror is far less extensive. Its inmates number thousands not millions. And yet there are eerie parallels between what the Soviet Union created and what we, in the West, are now constructing… How much more than surreal, more apart from normal existence, was the network of prisons run after 9/11 by the United States and its allies? How much easier too was the denial and the double-think when those who disappeared into the modern gulag were, being mainly swarthy skinned Arabs with a different culture, so different from most of us in the West? How much more reassuring were the words from our politicians that all was well?

How many prisoners do we have? Estimates of how many prisoners have disappeared into the Bush administration’s Gulag system cannot be precise because of the secrecy. Estimates have varied from 8,500 to 35,000. An AP story estimated around 14,000:

In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former Chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had put the blame on Dick Cheney for much of the administration’s “torture guidance”, claims that the number of “disappeared” approximates 35,000.

The connection between past and present

Similarities between the U.S. eugenics movement and the above noted circumstances of the present day include a blatant disregard for human rights, unbounded arrogance, racism, and classism. The young man who is locked away for five years for possession of a minute quantity of illegal drugs because he is black, poor, and can’t afford decent legal representation; the Iraqis who are killed, chased out of their homes, or locked away for several years with no opportunity to question their detainment because they happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time; all these people have much in common with Carrie Buck: They are helpless victims against a system controlled by powerful men who don’t have any sympathy for the most basic universal human rights.

And as with the Nazi Holocaust, these are all elite driven activities. Most Americans have no more enthusiasm for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the highest incarceration rate in the world, or a world wide gulag system today than they had for the eugenics movement in the early decades of the 20th Century. Yet, as with the German peoples’ reaction to the Nazi Holocaust, partly because of lack of information, and partly because of apathy, most Americans have sat passively by and allowed these things to take place without much protest.

The eugenics movement in this country was defeated in large part because its similarity to Hitler’s eugenics program was too stark to avoid recognizing it as such. Hitler was our wartime enemy, and the exposure of his many atrocities caused such revulsion among most Americans that everything he did was greatly suspect in their view.

But that was a long time ago. A minority of today’s Americans were alive during Hitler’s day, fewer still were old enough to remember, and too many of them have either forgotten or never learned the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust. So, when today’s Americans witness the starkest and most widespread violations of human rights ever committed by our country’s leaders, they don’t recognize them for what they are. Instead, most Americans maintain a naïve faith in the decency (if not the competency) of their leaders that is totally unwarranted by any serious examination of the facts.

The U.S. Constitution provides no guarantee against fascism or any other kind of tyranny. It only provides a blueprint that enables us to maintain freedom and democracy as long as we care enough about those things to recognize when they are in grave jeopardy and exercise sufficient vigilance to maintain them.

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A summary of my DU posts

Time for change

The good majority of my DU posts consist of one of six general subjects: The need to remove from office the current cancer upon our nation; election fraud; the tragedy of the Bush administration; my ideas on the liberal values that we all hope will some day replace the values that our current government runs on; historical events that I believe cast light upon our current situation; and other political ideas.

The need to remove Bush and Cheney from office

In 2006, John Conyers wrote a 198 page report, documented with 1,401 references, titled “The Constitution in Crisis – The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, Cover-ups in the Iraq War, and Illegal Domestic Surveillance”. The title of his report reflected the primary reasons why George Bush and Dick Cheney must be removed from office: They have made a mockery of our Constitution – the foundation for the rule of law in our nation – by consistently violating it. Our Constitution, if we can keep it in fact and not just in name, makes our nation much more than just a democracy. By providing protections for minorities and the powerless, our Constitution adds civility, humanity, and decency to what could otherwise be a barbaric nation – democratic or not.

Aside from the continuing damage that Bush and Cheney can do to our country in their remaining time in office, including their potential to involve us in ever expanding new wars, failing to remove from office the most lawless presidential administration in our history will set an awful precedent in our nation – a precedent for doing away with our Constitution. Providing in our Constitution a mechanism for impeachment and removal from office was of utmost priority to our Founding Fathers. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “When once a republic is corrupted there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles…”

Many arguments have been put forward against impeachment. This post answers those arguments. Some opponents of impeachment mistakenly advocate the view that the impeachment of public officials requires evidence of the commitment of an actual crime – and would not be justified by such things as gross violation of the public trust, corruption, negligence, or incompetence. Leaving aside the fact that such an interpretation would leave our nation subject to rule by people who would do great and possibly irreparable harm to it, the preponderance of evidence flatly contradicts that interpretation.

Others claim that we don’t have enough evidence to proceed with impeachment. I argue here that the current evidence for impeachment is so abundant, arguing that we need more sets the impeachment bar at an absurdly high level.

Others argue we don’t have the votes for impeachment – which implies that we must not bring individuals to trial until we have counted the votes, rather the using the trial to get the votes. Such an argument ignores the likelihood that votes will accumulate as Americans watch the impeachment trial and become intensely exposed for the first time to the many outrageous crimes of George Bush and Dick Cheney. And it also ignores the fact that Senators who refuse to vote for conviction will probably be putting their seats in jeopardy.

But perhaps the most urgent reason for moving to impeach Bush and Cheney as soon as possible is that their continuing refusal to be bound by the laws and the Constitution of our nation raises the spectacle that they may be planning a coup d’etat. Why else would they go to such lengths to destroy our Constitution and the rule of law in our nation? We must preempt them by moving as quickly as possible on this.

Election fraud

The DU apparently was born as a result of the 2000 November-December election fraud that began the long nightmare that is the George W. Bush administration.

I went to bed on Election Day 2000, shortly after Bush was announced as our new President, feeling as if the end of world civilization was near at hand. My wife woke me up a couple hours later to tell me the good news that the announcement of Bush’s Presidency had been temporarily cancelled. Thus began a period of 36 days that I followed more intensely than any other news event of my life – ending in the infamous and disastrous Supreme Court decision that marked the beginning of our long road to dictatorship.

My son (EOTE) joined DU in January 2001, a few days after it began, but I did not, for reasons that now escape me. I did, however, do a lot of writing about the 2000 election, including a desperate plea to my Maryland Senators, to please demand a real recount of the 2000 Florida vote. And I also contributed an article to DU on that subject, in my son’s name (I did not use my own name because I was a federal employee and I was afraid that I could get into trouble for writing such an article), in the spring of 2001.

The fraudulent 2004 Presidential election is what brought me into DU. I had worked as a volunteer in the Kerry/Edwards campaign, I had followed the presidential polls obsessively, and by Election Day 2004 I was about as confident as I could be that John Kerry would be our next President. Thus, the reported results of that election were both profoundly disappointing and difficult for me to believe, as they were for the great majority of DUers.

I immediately began an effort to acquire as many election statistics as I could, in a feverish and desperate attempt to prove that the election was a fraud, which I hoped would aid in its overturning. In late November I had my son post an analysis that I did of the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official election results (Note: My son supplied the title, which I feel is too strong, which you can see if you read the article). And finding that it was awkward to have my son post my articles, I joined DU a few days later.

Since then I have posted dozens of election fraud related threads, a small number of the most important of which I have included in my journal.

In particular, I have come to believe that the main mechanism by which the 2004 election was stolen was the massive and illegal targeted purging of Democratic voters in Ohio, especially in Cleveland. This thread contains a great amount of evidence to support that contention.

In addition, I believe that there is good evidence that says that large numbers of votes in Cuyahoga County were deleted by its central tabulator, as explained in this thread, which also discusses an early 2006 partial audit of Cuyahoga County. And, I think that the death of Raymond Lemme, who while investigating Clint Curtis’ sworn allegations of vote switching computer programs, was found dead in a Georgia hotel room, just a couple weeks after telling Curtis that he had traced the corruption “all the way to the top”, is extremely suspicious to say the least. Here is my explanation of the controversy over the discrepancy between the 2004 exit polls and the official 2004 vote count. And here is a summary of several reasons I have written about for believing that the 2004 election was stolen.

Finally, here are my ideas for preventing another stolen election in 2006 and 2008.

The tragedy of the Bush administration

The fake war on terrorism

I believe that a crucial requirement for a good understanding of the Bush administration’s actions since September 11, 2001, is the realization that its “War on Terrorism” is nothing but a colossal fake. Only with that realization do numerous Bush administration characteristics and actions make sense, including: Its disinterest in Osama bin Laden; its great urge to rush into a war with Iraq at any cost; its utter contempt for international law and the rest of the world; its succession of no-bid contracts for its wealthy friends; its lavish tax cuts for the wealthiest of our citizens and corporations during ‘time of war’; the Dubai port deals; and, its attempt to turn our democracy into a dictatorship.

With that in mind, I wrote in this post about the main reasons why I believe that the Bush administration was complicit in the 9-11 attacks. There are many reasons why I believe that now, but the initial and still most important reason is the utter failure of our military, the mightiest military that the world has ever known, despite repeated warnings and more than ample time on 9-11 itself, to protect its own capital city.

Abuse of the human rights of prisoners for no apparent purpose

To me, the most sickening and disgraceful aspect of the Bush administration’s “War on Terrorism” is its complete lack of concern for human rights, demonstrated among other ways by the indefinite confinement, without trial or even bringing of charges, of thousands of prisoners of war, and its frequent use of torture. I have discussed this issue in several OPs, starting with this one. Here I describe the issue as seen through the eyes of a U.S. Army Muslim Chaplain who had ministerial responsibilities for hundreds of our prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, who witnessed the severe and daily abuse of his charges over a period of several months, and who eventually was imprisoned himself when it was felt that he was making too many waves over what he had seen. Here is my summary of what the great journalist Seymour Hersh had to say on this subject, based on his numerous high level sources. Jimmy Carter felt so strongly about this issue that he broke the unwritten rule against ex-Presidents criticizing sitting Presidents, with one of the most scathing attacks on this policy that I have ever seen. And Senator Richard Durbin was the victim of continued public verbal abuse from the right for daring to make public how our government was treating its prisoners.

Lying us into war

It is evident to most informed people that one of the biggest motivations for Bush's "War on Terror" was to provide a justification for the invasion of Iraq. Seymour Hersh’s excellent account of how the Bush administration manipulated and twisted intelligence in order justify a preemptive war against Iraq is a must read for anyone who still supports this administration and thinks that the Iraq war was necessary. And as for Bush's excuse that we are now fighting that war for the benefit of the Iraqi people, Democrats should start talking about how the Iraqi people actually feel about us being in their country.

Just how bad are Bush and his cronies and how much danger do they pose to American democracy?

George w. Bush and his administration and fellow travellers in today's Republican Party are about as bad as they come. They are anti-science ignoramuses. They are chicken hawks. They have no consciences. They are torturers. They are cowards. They are evil. And I doubt that there are any moral boundaries beyond which they will not go to get their way.

I think that in the interest of preserving our democracy, we should be aware of the similarities between the Bush administration and Hitler’s Nazis (which I wrote about even before the revelations about Bush’s warantless wiretapping), and understand that if we aren’t vigilant, yes it CAN happen here too.

Moral values that separate us from today’s Republicans

It makes me so mad to hear people ridicule what they consider to be “liberal values” and compare them unfavorably to the wonderful moral values of George W. Bush and his Republicans friends. In the vast majority of cases these people don’t even have a vague idea about what liberal values really are. They have simply been conditioned by our corporate media over several years or decades to believe that liberals encourage irresponsibility, are ‘soft’ on national defense and ‘law and order’, and are wild spenders. These ridiculous myths about liberals have in turn encouraged the Democratic Party to disavow the liberal label and in some cases to veer way to the right. I submit that, rather than running away from the liberal label we should be proud of it, and we should challenge those that seek to disparage it. And to further make this point I posted a tribute to several historical and current political leaders who have been unafraid to speak out loudly for what they believe in, and I suggested an answer to those Republican morons who accuse liberals of hating America.

Let's take a look at some of the specific moral values that separate Democrats from Republicans:

Republicans like to pretend that they're more moral than us because they're more "religious"

Many of those who disparage liberals are fundamentalist Christians who repeatedly invoke the name of Jesus Christ, and who believe that the superiority of their moral values to those of liberals and Democrats is proven by their repeated references to Jesus. Don’t these people understand that Jesus was a liberal, whose moral values were much closer to those of the Democratic Party than to those of the Republican Party, with whom they align themselves and vote for? Isn't it an astounding paradox that the Republican Party has usurped for their own purposes one of the most liberal religious leaders in world history, while at the same time showing nothing but contempt for liberals and liberal principles?

The movement for privatization of government functions

One of the biggest threats to our democracy is the privatization movement. In the name of “freedom” and “self-reliance”, the leaders of this movement advocate the freedom of powerful corporations to destroy our environment and to run our elections, our schools, our social safety net programs, and our prison system, as well as every other program which has long been considered a legitimate function of government. The fact that government is elected by the people to serve public functions, whereas the purpose of private corporations is to make profits for their investors, is either totally lost on these people, or else they simply feel that the above mentioned programs should be run for profit rather than for service.

Al Gore alluded to this issue in his great film, "An Inconvenient Truth", where he discussed the unholy alliance between government, private industry, and the press, whereby a corrupt government, in exchange for legal bribes from the industries they are supposed to control, propagates false information and policies that are favorable to those industries instead of the public that they are elected to serve. I discuss my own personal experience with that unholy alliance, where the FDA withdrew an about to be published scientific article I had written, under pressure from a manufacturer who stood to be economically hurt by the information in that article.

The need for a free and independent press

Another great threat to our democracy is the ownership of our country’s news media by a very small group of wealthy individuals who have strong ties to the Republican Party, and whose motivation in providing “news” is to maintain satisfaction with the status quo, rather than to report what is important and true. Two prime examples of corporate media shills and pseudo-journalists who pretend to be real journalists are Chris Matthews and Tim Russert. Bill Moyers explains how this situation threatens to destroy our democracy, and how this came about through the dismantling of rules and regulations which were meant to prevent the monopolization of our news. And Robert Parry explains why he started his web site to help combat the misinformation we get from our corporate media.

Health care

Liberals, and most other decent people, believe that people should be entitled to decent health care. That is why, prior to the "pro-life" administration of George W. Bush, infant mortality rate in the United States had been steadily declining for several decades. But shortly into the Bush administration, due to the starving of women and infant health programs for federal funds, infant mortality rate began a steady rise. Nor do Republicans care much about veterans' health, as indicated by the rejecting of this much needed veteran's health bill in the U.S. Senate by virtually a strict party line vote.

An enquiring mind

One of the many tricks that our corporate media uses to squelch alternative viewpoints is to label anyone who substantially disagrees with their “correct” version of the news as “conspiracy theorists”. Well, I have news for them. The views of us “conspiracy theorists” are usually much more closely aligned with reality than is most of the trash that we hear from the corporate news media these days, such as the stories about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which were used to justify our illegal preemptive invasion of that country. We “conspiracy theorists” believe that it is not only the right of American citizens to challenge the corporate news media story lines, but it is our responsibility as well, as good citizens who care about our country.

The dignity of all human beings

Perhaps the most important value held by liberals is a belief in the dignity of all human beings – hence the 19th century movement by liberals to abolish slavery. Here is one of my favorite stories on that subject.

A summary

And here is a post where I talk about all the major values that separate Democrats from Republicans.

Historical events that help us understand our present

Though there is little doubt that George W. Bush is by far the worst president we’ve ever had, our past history is at least partly responsible for preparing the way for this tragedy. The history of our nation is full of examples of failures to live up to our ideals. In addition to our long history of slavery and our near extermination of the Native American population of our present day country, we began a long history of overseas imperialism beginning in the late 19th Century. The long standing history of extreme hostility to socialism by the elites of our country has been responsible for much of this imperialism, as well as domestic repression against labor unions and others who would speak out against the status quo. The usurpation by our Executive Branch of the war making powers given to Congress by our Founding Fathers did not originate with George W. Bush. And the attitudes fostered by our long history of slavery are still with us today, especially in the areas of our country where slavery thrived for so long.

Today, as the transgressions of George Bush and Dick Cheney threaten the existence of our nation as we know it, we would do well to recall how the German nation was led into tyranny more than six decades ago. The parallels between Hitler’s war on terror and George Bush’s war on terror are extraordinarily striking in my opinion. And the better able we are to recognize the danger, the more likely we are to take steps to prevent a similar fate.

Political ideas

Republicans have 3 great advantages in elections against Democrats, whereas the only advantage that the Democratic Party has is that its policies are meant to serve all Americans, rather than just the select few. In addition to electoral fraud and huge sums of money donated to the GOP by their corporate masters as legalized bribery, Democrats have to contend with a multitude of news media whores.

But those advantages are not sufficient for a Party that has nothing of value to offer to our country. So, when we suggest investigation of their corrupt deeds they call us conspiracy theorists. When we suggest policies such as making basic affordable health care available to all Americans they accuse us of class warfare. And when we criticize the rampant corruption at the highest levels of government they accuse us of "hating America". And when none of that works they try to scare us by telling us that if we don't give them unlimited power over us we risk being killed by terrorists.

If there was ever a presidential administration that needed to be impeached, this is it. Grass roots efforts are under way to accomplish this, and we can all help. Our Democratic leaders need to seriously consider and talk about this. And they must be united and avoid inter-party warfare.

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