Voice of the Environment | Campaigns | Defending the Constitution

Voice of the Environment | Campaigns | Defending the Constitution

Defending the Constitution

	Voice of the Environment's mission is to educate the public regarding the transfer of public trust assets into private, mostly corporate, hands.
	Ukiah office: 1330 Boonville Rd Ukiah, CA 95482 707-467-0329
	Napa office: 391 Crystal Springs Rd St. Helena, CA 94574 707-963-8264
	For two decades, Voice of the Environment has stood up for the people and our communities against the avarice of corporations and the misguided policies of the corporate-dominated state.

Since 9/11, and the resulting Global War on Terror (GWOT), unconstitutional violations of both international and domestic laws have become all too common.

The United States has started two wars, both of which are approaching a decade in duration without clear paths to their end. Occupation, torture, extraordinary rendition, and high levels of civilian casualties have characterized these wars.

Within the borders of what has become known as the "homeland", violations of protected rights proceeds unabated, even in the wake of the election of a new, supposedly liberal president in 2008. Denial of habeus corpus, warrantless surveillance, watch lists, preventive detention, and "free speech zones" are now an indelible stain on the domestic political landscape.

Meanwhile, no one is held accountable for war crimes first recognized and applied at Nuremberg in 1946.

Voice of the Environment has written a series of articles on many of these subjects. These have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Santa Monica Mirror, Common Dreams and hundreds of internet sites.

March 29, 2011
Foreclosure Aid Fell Short, and Is Fading
Last summer, as President Obama’s premier plan to save millions of Americans from foreclosure foundered, the administration tossed a new life preserver to homeowners.
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March 11, 2011
Then They Came for the Trade Unionists
On this day, it behooves us to remember the words of Martin Niemoller.
... more

January 25, 2011
The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy
In recent years I have become more and more concerned with the interactions between three important and alarming trends in recent American history.
... more

January 6, 2011
Weapons of Mass Coercion
It was late 1977, but early in the career of a Yale-educated attorney named Alfred Webre, a senior policy analyst at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Webre had no reason to think that trouble was brewing; he was, in fact, on the verge of an historic success: The young lawyer had successfully initiated a process for a proposed high-level research project on extraterrestrial policy analysis.
... more

January 5, 2011
Weapons of Mass Coercion (Part 2)
The Hidden Use of Energy Weapons, HAARP, and Chemtrails for Political Control
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December 16, 2010
Response to Change We Can Believe In
Dr. Granstaff's essay is very thought-provoking. Congress is such a lame institution, and it's my belief that it's lame for a reason. Another way to say that is that Congress is functioning just as those who actually run the country want it to function which is not at all. Reminds me of George Carlin's riffs on the intentional failure of public education.
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December 15, 2010
Change We Can Believe In
In a memo written on November 3, 2010, just a day after the congressional mid-term elections, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig emphasized that President Barack Obama had reneged on his 2008 election campaign’s most important pledge.
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November 29, 2010
Needed: A New Cultural Narrative
The grave challenge of our time is not to reform the current system but to replace it.
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September 29, 2010
Obama Declares Wrong Emergency
It's often said by supporters of President Obama, with some justification, that too much has been expected of him. Sure he went in with high ideals about moving the country in a more progressive direction, but the reality of money and power in the nation's capital have rendered him unable-at least in the two years he's been in office-to achieve the objectives he so glowingly promised.
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July 17, 2010
Pandora’s Box in the Gulf: Does Hope Remain?
Americans, especially those unfortunate enough to reside along the Gulf coast, are beginning to get a glimpse of what life is like in an occupied country.
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June 19, 2010
Obama's Oily Waterloo
President Obama's handling of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico can be aptly described, in the words of the great Yogi Berra, as "déjà vu all over again".
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May 22, 2010
The Buck Stops on Obama’s Desk
One of the hopeful promises Barack Obama made to the country in 2008 was that if elected, his administration would reinstitute science-based decision making.
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April 28, 2010
The Infection Deception-II

"In the event that I am reincarnated,
I would like to return as a deadly virus,
in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation." —Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in 1988

... more

April 27, 2010
The Infection Deception -- Unanswered Questions about the Swine Flu Controversy
On Friday October 23, President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, plunging the H1N1 controversy ever more deeply into an Orwellian world of disinformation, fear, and confusion. The government's program of swine flu vaccination was already the most ambitious of its kind since the anti-polio campaign of the 1950s. And now, this surprise declaration from the president raised anxiety levels by giving federal health officials much greater powers in the face of a supposed pandemic. The ostensible reason for Obama's heavy-handed act--at least according to the official explanation--was merely to authorize hospitals to set up emergency health-care operations in nonstandard ways and locations. Yet this explanation was odd in the extreme, given that a national emergency declaration is just not necessary in order to simply waive something as simple as hospital-tent rules; Obama could have easily accomplished the same thing with an Executive Order.
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March 11, 2010
A Challenge to Corporate Feudalism?
For the first time in more than four decades, a militant student movement is taking shape across the country.
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December 30, 2009
Leading an Empire in Decline: Obama’s First Year
Almost a year ago, in an editorial [1] published on this site we called on Barack Obama to be the hero our country so sorely needed.
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November 21, 2009
Still the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave?
The re-declaration of a national State of Emergency by President Obama on September 10, 2009 is not theoretical; it affects our civil liberties and our ability to live in a free and open society.
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October 22, 2009
Obama renews Bush's 9/11 State of Emergency
On September 10th, President Obama reinstituted the national State of Emergency first declared by George W. Bush on September 14, 2001 by placing the following language in the Federal Register.
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June 7, 2009
Obama: Complicit in Torture, Complicit in Fraud
Little has changed since Barack Obama assumed the presidency.
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May 20, 2009
Mistakes Were Made
Little has changed since Barack Obama assumed the presidency.
... more

Article Archive

May 4th, 2011

Awaken sheeple: It’s time to stand up for democracy!

Lewis Seiler & Dan Hamburg

What is a sheeple? It’s a people who keep their heads down, munching mindlessly, then trotting along with the herd. It’s a people who digest the misinformation dished out by government and the corporate-controlled media and lack the gumption to take risks in order to create positive change. But events over the last month in the upper Midwestern states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana demonstrate that the sheeple are awakening to their plight. But what will light the fuse?

Our government has strayed far from the Constitution into something that can best be described as “corporate fascism” or “corporate feudalism”. Power and money are held by an elite class of millionaires and billionaires; according to Michael Moore, a mere 400 people own 50% of the nation’s assets. With unlimited amounts of capital, the elite and the corporations they control have taken ownership of the government, amassing maximum profits while abusing workers and the environment, hiding their ill doings behind the corporate veil.

Real unemployment stands at well over 20%, over a million US homes are in foreclosure, and local governments try desperately to stave off bankruptcy. Vital personnel—from fire fighters and police to teachers and health workers—are being laid off at alarming rates. The very fabric of what we’ve come to consider civilized society is at risk.

Does the US government really believe that it can continue to attack the rights that working people have won over decades of struggle? Does it believe that the rampant transfer of manufacturing jobs overseas will continue to be tolerated by a working class stretched to the limit? Does it believe that feeding borrowed hundreds of billions to a corrupt military-industrial complex can be sustained? Does it believe that corporate tax subsidies and tax loopholes—under which corporations’ share of taxes has gone from 30% to less than 7% in three decades-can continue?

We Americans are learning that our government is in some ways as onerous and corrupt as those that have been under assault in the Middle East over the past months. We cannot allow the elites to own our government, destroy our environment, terrorize people in countries thousands of miles from our shores and rob us of our civil liberties. We’re at a critical juncture where a choice must be made—establish a true democratic republic or be satisfied with our new role as mere serfs.

We the people need to use every constitutional means of resistance available. We must never forget that there are many more of “us” than of “them” and that collectively, we can move mountains. This is the lesson of Madison, Wisconsin where teachers, public safety workers, students and farmers have come out in the tens of thousands to protest in freezing weather. Their movement then spread to challenge the reactionary governments of Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana.

Ultimately, all of the weapons and propaganda in the world cannot defeat an informed, committed, and organized people. This next chapter of US history must be a non-violent civil war of the people against the corporations. We have come full circle back to the period of the American revolution only this time it is the corporate elite that has become onerous and out of balance with society. The time of Jeffersonian revolution is coming.

Our protest is based in a pivotal and now viral concept—that corporations are not “real persons”, despite Supreme Court rulings that stretch all the way back to the 19th century, and most recently affirmed by the high court in the Citizens United case.

MovetoAmend (movetoamend.org) is a national movement seeking to amend the Constitution in order to “firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.” This organization is deserving of broad support.

History teaches that putting corporations in charge leads to the atrophy of democracy in favor of the interests of capital. Citizen control is necessary to achieve the balance between workers and owners without which capitalism devolves into something more akin in fascism. Reasserting greater citizen control of their economy, as is the case in more enlightened and prosperous) European nations, will restore well-paying, middle-class jobs and an appropriate and necessary level of respect for environmental quality. It is necessary to achieve the balance between workers and owners without which capitalism devolves into something more akin in fascism.

People from Damascus to Columbus, from Tunis to Indianapolis are asserting the basic human rights of freedom and dignity. The sheeple are looking up from their munching and refusing to follow the herd. The awakening will come not a moment too soon.

Lewis Seiler is the founder and president of Voice of the Environment, Inc. Dan Hamburg, a former US representative, is the executive director.

Voice of the Environment is a 501 (c-3) not-for-profit Montana-based corporation formed in 1991.