From: odin@world.std.com (Hank Roth)
Subject: The Constitution
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 23:32:27 GMT

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THE CONSTITUTION: A document of, by, and for the rich for control of the 
laws by which a government operates. 
                           by Hank Roth

Charles Beard in AN ECONOMIC INTERPRETATION OF THE CONSTITUTION, 
MacMillan 1936) wrote: "Inasmuch as the primary object of a government, 
beyond the mere repression of physical violence, is the making of the 
rules which determine the property relations of members of society, the 
dominant classes whose rights are thus to be determined must perforce 
obtain from the government such rules as are consonant with the larger 
interests necessary to the continuance of their economic processes, or 
they must themselves control the organs of the government." The 
founders of Amerikkka knew full well they had to control the government 
directly or control the laws and that was what was in the minds of those 
55 men (women were also disenfranchised) of wealth, who gathered in 
Philadelphia in 1787 to draw up the Constitution. 

Though the people had to be checked, Madison wrote in his Federalist 
Papers, men of substance and property, did not have to be checked because 
they had investments and would therefore somehow be better citizens 
because they had their investments to protect and that was the naivete of 
James Madison and the other founding fathers. 

My evidence is in the irrefutable fact that wealthy men of substance are 
moving their investments wherever it profits them and in so doing 
destroying this republic that Madison and others established to protect 
these same men of substance. 

We cannot afford their practices or their theories. This country doesn't 
need these stable institutions of skewed republican democracy, a 
democracy for the few. 

"Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle 
class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of 
slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This brought loyalty. And to bind that 
loyalty with something more powerful than even material advantage, the 
ruling group found in the 1760s a wonderfully useful device. That device 
was the language of LIBERTY and EQUALITY, which could unite just enough 
whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either 
slavery or inequality." (A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, by 
Howard Zinn) 

That was the stage for class struggle in the United States, a struggle 
of survival for poor people in order to maintain an elite privileged 
class in power and riches. Zinn points out that the Declaration of 
Independence, like John Locke's SECOND TREATISE ON GOVERNMENT, "talked 
about government and political rights, but ignored the existing 
inequalities in property. And how could people truly have equal rights, 
with stark differences in wealth?" 

Zinn wrote that "the characteristic of the new nation: finding itself 
possessed of enormous wealth, it could create the richest ruling class in 
history, and still have enough for the middle classes to act as a buffer 
between the rich and the dispossessed...."

In OUT OF OUR PAST, Carl Degler writes, "The men who engineered the 
revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class." George 
Washington was the richest person in America and John Hancock, Benjamin 
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson were all very rich men.

Charles Beard also noted in his book that four groups were not with 
representation at the Constitutional Convention: those without property, 
slaves, indentured servants and women, and thus the Constitution did not 
really reflect the intersts of these disenfranchised. The Constitution 
was written for the benefit of the wealthy. Qualifications for voting at 
state levels required in most cases the owning of property and excluded 
women, Indians and slaves and there were no popular elections to higher 
office. The Constitution only ensured this greater permanent division of 
society into a rich ruling class and poor working class.

An interesting point is made by Robert E. Brown in CHARLES BEARD AND THE 
CONSTITUTION, that the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of 
happiness," although it appears in the Declaration of Independence, was 
altered to appear in the Constitution as "life, liberty, and property."

We don't need anymore lies about the Constitution. The Constitution was 
written for the rich. What this country needs is change and creative new 
institutions and an honest president who stands for the interest of all 
the people, not the special class interests of the rich.

We desperately need a clean environment, affordable housing, decent mass 
transportation. The nation needs sanity and to vigorously move away from 
the conspiratorical hypocracy that rules. We need democracy for all the 
people and in the words of Michael Parenti, "we don't have it, not enough 
of it and we aim to get it and that's human nature---or to put it in 
another way in the nature of our humanity, to insist on decency, peace, 
and social justice."

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