Questions of Power and Slavery
Clive Hambidge
There are many spiders spinning webs of corruption. But the main supporter of this corruption has the stars and stripes on its thorax. And it will be on that and the American Constitution which I will focus on this evening.
Nothing is so corrupt and corrupting as the lack of morality, ethics, lack of a free press, an independent judiciary, and of course the free will of the people (rightly informed) to determine the course of their (always uncertain) destiny.
Here then we have a wrong, and as found, illegal use of power. As someone put it “to take away a man’s freedom of choice, even if his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.”
America has Trump, who has inherited a bankrupt U.S financially, politically, and morally (nearly all states are insolvent and seek secession).
This has led to inequality, human slavery, trafficking, the erosion of human rights, and the ultimate devaluing of the human as an individual. The individuated evolving human his/her neurological ecology ripe for Pavlovian conditioning to authoritarian rhetoric.
When a president of America call out the press as “an enemy of the people” and not representatives of the people’s concerns, then democracy is under grave threat. I predict Marshall law in the U.S and or civil war in the next decade.
It is on slavery I will now concentrate because of the above I further predict this will increase dramatically. Human beings to be treated as mere commodities.
We have however confidence and indeed owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the souls of Assange and Snowdon, and all those who have, are, and do this very moment take up like a hot coal the cause of freedom from tyranny in the twenty first century. The tyranny of neo slavery and disinformation where human beings are seen as disposable products to be moved and abused in “underground trading”: mere commodities. Their souls are otherwise engaged seeking freedom and right human expression through empathy and compassion.
Many have remained unaware of such realities but are beginning to get an idea of the immense scale and complexity that indeed and shamefully “Underground trade in human beings in the twenty first century still exists. Regions heavily involved in the trade include Eastern Europe, West Africa, South America, and South Asia. Contemporary slavery comes in various forms, including generational bonded labour, early and forced marriages, forced labour, slavery of decent (especially in India with the Dalits) and human trafficking.”
The figures are as staggering as they are sobering “Today, 27 Million men, women and children are held; sold and trafficked … this modern slavery … this age old evil persists.” This must be addressed. Volunteerism, the developing culture, is proof that when a person rids themselves of fear, volunteerism becomes a natural expression for all human beings who ask such fundamental questions as how I can help, who can I help and where can I help. Now!
Governments and the business world would persuade us subliminally, or crassly, to buy into an all pervasive pathology of consumerism: acquire what we don’t need, increase the ever rising tsunami of personal debt and the all consuming fear that feeds it, chain us to a subconscious consumerist slavery that saps energy and the will to help those in in forms of deprivation in developing nations, indeed our own nations.
The outcome is a pandemic rise in mental and physical breakdown and relationships break-down where reality is relegated to the back of the mind. Only to rear up to catch us unawares; no more so than in America where “Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 22.1% of Americans ages 18 and older -about 1 in 5 adults- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. When applied to the 1998 U.S. Census residential population estimate, this figure translates to 44.3 million people. In addition, 4 of the 10 leading causes of disability in the U.S. and other developed countries are mental disorders – major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time.” And of course continues to rise. The UK is no different in this regard.
So beware the law-makers, and those who unscrupulously, would make of us the gullible, bound with visible and invisible chains, intelligence gathering agencies, so called think-tanks, corporatists and politicians on the make.
Think right-wing and you will find it in America. No country is more skillful than America when it comes to enslaving its citizens to market forces. This of course pertains to all developed and emerging economies where the leadership is found wanting, including my own country of birth and residence: England. It is a sad affair. What energy of love would be released if minds and hearts consciously turned to the plight of the exploited? If America would be an educator in values, it must first become literate in morals and ethics. Right-wing, it must find its left wing for the dove of peace to fly.
In Propaganda and The Public Mind, Chomsky relates a pernicious statement of a group of business leaders which captures the very essence of corruption “we have to impose on people a philosophy of futility”, and insure that they’re focused on “the superficial” on “the superficial things of life fashionable consumption.” They have to try to pursue what were call “fanciful wants,” or invented needs. We create the needs and then get them to focus their attention on it. Then they don’t bother us, they’re out of our hair.”
It is a fact that we are influencing each other all the time. May it be that over the long haul and for the benefit of all human kind we become golden influences, burnished with love. At the present time, we are whisked, whipped and tossed, into a state induced nightmare. Automated and corralled into small mental places creating ever more tension. Someone wrote recently “even the grass is depressed”, and as I have pointed out before, the leaders whom we have mandated to address these issues at the ballot box act with all the speed of a sloth on diazepam.
From his salient The New Rulers Of The World, John Pilger writes in matters of war and death that “When American Vice-President Cheney said that the ‘war on terrorism could last for fifty years or more, his words evoked George Orwell’s great prophetic book, Nineteen Eighty Four … We are to live with the threat and illusion of endless war; it seems, in order to justify increased social control and state repression.” This is no longer an illusion it is a fact.
We the people must peacefully push, shove, cajole, remonstrate with our presidents, our prime ministers making known the depth of your feelings for others, laying aside your apathy and realising our potential, indeed our very self, through selfless activism.
Jefferson expressed a hope for and of a more benevolent power, expressed in law, natural law, and institutional law as interpreted in the American Constitution.
The Constitution when understood expresses the American opportunity where the majority could lead creative, fulfilling, simple and responsible lives, if given the chance, and the right education; education being the universal unlocking key to greater understanding and the bedrock of the Constitution. Read it. Learn from it. Implement it. And above all protect it as it protects you. Then as understood, one can challenge a president’s actions, a PM’s machinations and that of his/her administration. Not least their alacrity, the right use of power, their honesty.
America inviolate, has given a natural form (even when ignored) to that said Constitution where all Americans are invited to share in moral and ethical justification for actions they undertake. If one salutes the flag, then a natural step is to challenge the administration to respect the Constitution. The Constitution is for all people and proffers protection, if adhered too; for an evolving integrated, intergraded, understanding of consciousness indeed conscience, the applied rules of governance and the collective and individual response to that governance. Toward this, the ethical compass of the mind is inevitably, inexorably drawn, when fear is swept away by the broom of intelligent reasoning. It then the mind would strive north and blossom into the south as integrity personified.
Measured, the Constitution remains radical, in that Americans are judged or judge in the execution of its executive, judicial and legislative light. It is wise in that it is ever new, a florescence, because justice and freedom are always present when forensically advocated, much as an elder brother hovering in a moral ethical dimension looking for signs of maturity sorely lacking in the adolescent sons and daughters of successive American Administrations and their increasing connivance with “unaccountable private power”. Nevertheless, the Constitution, its light remains undimmed drawing to it all those who seek a road map towards justice, equality and freedom.
“The supreme law of the United States of America” looks for the investment in moral and ethical judgments arising from the inclusive idea we are all one. That this does not pertain where American administrations and Presidents act unilaterally is clear. We speak, they speak of “notions of democracy” rather than the real deal, where influence of the people doesn’t end at the ballot but is then ever nascent as actions of The Constitution … The Constitution is not meant to reflect oppressive actions, neither is it meant to “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” who spoke of the “dangers of democracy.” Democracy is dangerous for elites because democracy would inculcate and be welcomed by all souls that reflect the movement toward an evolutionary freedom of expression, that expression gilded by the rule of law and its benefactor love.
The past is not over as it elides cyclically with today’s arrogance of power in corporations that seek to “eliminate democracy.” This is a serious debate in elitist groups, where radical takes on a dark stately cloak. Chomsky makes clear in a interview with John Nichols entitled “Radical democracy” and turning to Aristotle, makes clear rightly that we need to “eliminate poverty” he (Chomsky) talks of the “welfare state” not in the re-al politic propaganda where slackers are lazy and happy to survive on “handouts” nonsense, but the deep concern for the welfare of the true sovereign wealth of any given country, its beleaguered citizens whom should not only move the executive levers, but the social mechanisms of governance, polity and its execution.
The very heart of American leadership- [if they are ever willing to find it] should be beating in rhythmical time with the hearts of those less fortunate and those more able. The growing demand for social justice and equality rise from convulsions of suffering and paroxysms of pain. Then you would have an American people clear about what it can do for their country reminded of the benevolence of Its Constitution and the battles ahead for Democracy and the natural law of Justice.
Chomsky warns us that what’s developing is a kind of “Corporate Mercantilism with huge centralized, more or less command economies, integrated with one another, closely tied to state power-relying very heavily on state power, in fact … and enforcing social policies and a conception of social and political order that happen to be highly beneficial to the interests of the top sectors of the population, the richest sectors.”
America has put herself forward unasked as the protector of democracy, at home and abroad but, She America has been built on racism having coming close to exterminating the indigenous inhabitants, subduing them and relegating them to reservations asserting a predominantly white supremacist world view it was then but a simple ideological step toward the slave trade, shipping sensitive intelligent human beings from Africa. Thus, constituting one of the most shameful episodes in America’s short but on going violent history.
How then does the American Constitution sit as mere words against the backdrop of a world in turmoil and where reasoning in fine words denies action as right practice at home and abroad? Herein lies American failure, but equally, when understood by the American people; the solution. That the true needs of the world must be commensurate to decisive and compassionate actions by America and her allies. A new Marshall plan is sorely needed in this regard and context. It is needed now. America grow up and do the right thing. Take those parts of the Constitution which glow with the light of justice. Don’t dismember though other parts of the Constitution. But remember it is your vehicle to ride in and change your world. Whilst not inferring with other nations sovereign right to self-determine and govern.
“[N]ature’s God” and that God -not government- had endowed each of us with rights, first among which were life, liberty, and property, the combination of which allowed the pursuit -but no guarantee- of happiness. (It is precisely because the power of this argument was understood that those who advocated slavery denied the full humanity of slaves.)”
Power in reasoning seeks and finds in the rhetoric of power close alignment with these terse words from Niccolo Machiavelli from his 16th century Treatise The Prince “it is safer to be feared than loved” Aristotle though, gently bends our ears another way toward a reasoning power for man’s good “Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and for the purpose of making man a political animal she has endowed him alone among animals with the power of reasoned speech.”
History surely shows that the ideas of Machiavelli where cruelty and barbarity leave scars in the hearts and minds, power as this damages the mind, narrows the heart, mines deep into our insecurities and in the end leaves countries in corruption, oft destitution for its struggling majority and always, always deep distrust as where to place the ideas of authority with no philosopher king at the helm, a moral prince or an ethical leader.
The next step usually is wholesale destruction as we frack with subversion under the value of honesty of intellect Nations have been decimated by American policy and with her allies, it is the tsunami of warring factions coming to a deteriorating ‘hot spot’ near you that will bring countries to the point of anarchy as they implode throughout the Middle East, Russia and the Far East. They, the elites are not safe now, they never were, and neither are we, even though we the moderates, for the most part, would save this glorious globe by exploring the natural part of power its virtues and the wisdom of the virtuous. If we do reason so then, let our speech be reasonable, our actions kind, our institutions compassionate, our instrument for any action, love “For lawful power is still superior found, when long driven back at length it stands the ground.”
To quote Dacher Keltner in his 2007 article for The Greater Good The Science of a Meaningful life “True power requires modesty and empathy, not force and coercion…a new science of power has revealed that power is wielded most effectively with the [real] needs and interests of others. Years of research suggest that empathy and social intelligence are vastly more important to acquiring and exercising power than are deception or force.”
The Preamble to the American Constitution: “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, Insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the Common Defence, promote the General Welfare, and Secure the Blessings of Liberty, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United State of America.” The crux is simple eliminate poverty, eliminate poverty, eliminate poverty. Using the American Constitution as a catalyst for education, that sharing is wealth gained, moral wealth, ethical wealth, and spiritual wealth. This is the way to overcome “Historical capitalism,” which has been the master of oppression; in this understanding there is no place, no time to rest for those who campaign for change in our collective conscience.
Also we and others seared by the conflagration of willful violence as practiced by the so-called super powers to keep whole nations in line with acrid military/corporate and State sanctioned declaration of “war is peace” we will make ending poverty a peaceful movement through peaceful awareness, our right war. Walking with our God, other’s God, our brothers and sisters, recognising none are more equal than others therefore with duty of care find a natural order in a recognised equality.
With our information and practicable action we can turn to the NGO Free the Slaves and thousands of others; where there is a “focused strategy in the context of efforts around the world to enable people to meet their basic needs.” There are according to (Free The Slaves), “thousands of NGO’s working toward a better future … the worlds civil society is on the rise.” We are that society and growing fellowship in recognition that all forms of slavery must be exposed and overcome. This “age old evil” of slavery banished to its inimical space. As Facilitate Global, Human Development Director, our small London based human rights NGO has, is and will continue to play its part to herald a compassionate reasoned world.
Clive Hambidge is Human Development Director at Facilitate Global. Clive can be emailed at clive.hambidge@facilitateglobal.org .