As we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, I want to post this excerpt from Thom Hartmann's book, What Would Jefferson Do? A Return to Democracy in which Hartmann describes the sacrifices that the signers of the Declaration made:


The cost to those who fought for democracy



The Declaration of Independence was the logical extension of the Revolution initiated by the Boston Tea Party, and was signed by a group bearing similar diversity to those in the various states who later ratified the Constitution.


A dozen of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were politicians, physicians, or Protestant ministers; 11 were merchants; 9 were farmers. Ben Franklin was hard to define, although at the time he was referred to as a printer and a Renaissance man; another was a musician, and one was a teacher. They ranged in age from their 20s to the octogenarian Franklin, although he was the only one who was truly elderly. Thomas Jefferson, at 33, represented the average age.


These men were the most idealistic and determined among the colonists. While the conservatives of the day argued that America should remain a colony of England forever, these liberal radicals believed in both individual liberty and societal obligations. A nation must care for the lives of its own, guarantee liberty, and ensure its citizens "happiness"--a radical concept that had never before appeared in any nation's founding documents.


....The day they each signed that document, each legally became a traitor and was sentenced to death for treason by the legal government that controlled their lands and their homes. As Ben Franklin pointed out, they stood at a point of no return, and, "Indeed we must all hang together, otherwise we shall most assuredly hang separately."


....John Hancock, the wealthiest among them, signed his name large enough that the king "could read [Hancock's] name without glasses and could now double the reward," of 500 pounds that had already been put on his head for sedition. Just six months later, Hancock would lose his newborn daughter to complications of childbirth arising from his wife's fleeing the oncoming British army. Although wealthy by the standards of the day, he would hardly qualify as "rich" by today's standards: he founded no dynasty, and no foundations today dispense his money; his legacy was our nation.


....the British...seized [Thomas Nelson's] home and lands. When George Washington attacked the British in Nelson's hometown, Nelson encouraged Washington to attack the Nelson homestead, which the British General Cornwallis had taken as his headquarters, with canons...after the war Nelson, unable to repay loans he'd taken out against it to help finance the Revolution, lost much of his property and died in debt at the age of 50.


The wealthy Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris lost 150 ships at sea in the war, wiping out his small fortune. Signer William Ellery of Rhode Island similarly lost everything, as did Virginia's Benjamin Harrison, Pennsylvania's George Clymer, New York's Philip Livingston, Georgia's Lyman Hall, and New Jersey's Francis Hopkinson.


The British destroyed New York's Francis Lewis's property and threw his wife into such a hellhole of a jail that she died two years later. Three of South Carolina's four signers--Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward Jr., and Arthur Middleton--were captured by the British and held in a filthy, unheated prison and brutally tortured for over a year before George Washington freed them in a prisoner exchange.


New Jersey Farmer John Hart's wife died shortly before he signed the Declaration, and his 13 children were scattered among sympathetic families to hide them from the British and conservative loyalists. He never saw them again, dying alone and wracked with grief three years later.


Altogether, 17 of the signers were wiped out by the war they declared.


New Jersey State Supreme Court justice Richard Stockton took his wife and children into hiding after he signed the Declaration, but conservatives loyal to the Crown turned them in. He was so badly beaten and starved in the British prison that he died before the war was over. His home was looted, and his wife and children lived the rest of their lives as paupers.



Altogether, nine of the men in that room died, and four lost their children as a direct result of putting their names to the Declaration of Independence. Every single one had to flee his home, and, after the war, twelve returned to find only rubble.


After the war was over...the survivors of the new American nation met to put into final form the legal structure of the nation they had just birthed. It was not to be a nation of cynical, selfish libertarians who believed the highest value was individual freedom from society, or that the greatest motivator was greed. It was not be a kingdom, ruled by a warlord elite. It was not to be a theocracy, where religious leaders made the rules (as had been several of the states). And it was not to be a feudal nation, ruled by the rich.


As Benjamin Franklin told Philadelphia's Mrs. Powell after she asked him what sort of nation had been conceived in the Constitutional Convention, it was to be, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."


In remembrance of those who lost so much in signing the document that declared our independence from England's King George III, as well as to all those who sacrificed and worked in whatever capacity while securing that independence, I have a few things to say.


Our George has never sacrificed anything for this country. He is the spoiled, arrogant, short-sighted son of a wealthy family who would not serve in Vietnam but sends other Americans' sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors to die in a war to, as he claims, bring democracy to Iraq, while he shows nothing but disdain for democracy in America.


Our George sends these Americans to die in service for their country while members in his administration award no-bid contracts to greedy for profit corporations that steal billions of dollars from the tax payers to return a profit on services that are either deliberately over priced, rendered inadequately or, in some cases, not at all, as billions have literally disappeared in Iraq.


Our George and his enablers rape the treasury to finance a war in which these greedy, war-profiteering bastards short change Americans and the troops serving this country, thus producing a sky rocketing deficit that will leave the next generation saddled with crushing debt, a debt that will ensure that this next generation will face an even greater challenge as they have to rebuild what he, his administration and his enablers have worked diligently to destroy by giving ever more to the private sector and turning ever more government functions into profit making ventures for the greedy.


Our George has ensured that the next generation will be saddled with this debilitating debt while having to deal with the effects of global climate change, a challenge perhaps unprecedented in history, a problem that he has done nothing to address while those whom he has appointed to oversee agencies responsible for addressing this environmental threat impede efforts to mitigate the coming disasters.


Our George, his administration and his enablers watch the national debt spiral ever upward and send others to die and all the while, with the help of his party in congress, he has passed and signed into law tax cuts that benefit only the richest, tiniest percentage of Americans while veterans returning from combat go without the adequate medical care that they deserve and are entitled to.


Our George repeatedly lies to the American public about the war, the actions of those who serve him in his administration and his political sycophants who put into place programs to illegally spy on Americans and infringe on Americans' civil liberties, work to politicize the Justice Department, and attempt to erode the separation of Church and State


Our George secures zones around his public appearances to keep Americans' protests of his actions invisible to him and those around him, repeatedly accuses those who do not support his ill-considered and disastrously executed policies, a group of people that has for a while now included the majority of Americans, of emboldening the terrorists and uses the rhetoric fear and terror as an instrument to suppress and dismiss the legitimate grievances and concerns of Americans and their elected representatives.


Our George clings to his own deluded, self-righteous conviction that he, and the few closest to him that agree with him, are the only ones who have the knowledge and the insight to determine the future course of our nation in Iraq, relying on the self-serving belief that God is the reason that he is president and that God sanctions his convictions and actions, when in fact, the American people are the reason he occupies his position because our will, and only our will, is sovereign in this country. And yet, in his arrogance and moral certitude, he ignores the sovereign will of the people, their wiser and better judgment, and the attempts of those who were elected by the people to exert our will and judgment that we put in place a plan to withdraw our troops from Iraq and bring them home.


Our George questions the will and nerve of the American people to stay the course in Iraq in order to bring democracy to that country while he, his administration and his judicial henchman try to subvert democracy at home by claiming ever expanding executive privileges and prerogatives that undermine the separation of powers and are designed to undermine the power and prerogatives of the people's elected representatives.


Our George has supported and allowed officials in his administration and under his command to engage in torture, to hold people in detention without being charged with a crime and without recourse to a means of challenging that detention, a group of people whom only he as the authority to designate as enemy combatants, a group of people that has included American citizens.


Our George, entrusted with the power to pardon and show mercy as president and while governor of Texas, has refused to even give the slightest consideration to, and in at least one case has mocked, hundreds of convicted criminals for whom he was the last source of human mercy and leniency. Yet, right before Independence Day he renders that power of intervention and consideration to commute the sentence of a man convicted, according to our nation's laws and with every advantange and means to obtain justice within our legal system, of obstruction of justice in an investigation into the outing of a covert CIA agent, an investigation that implicates officials close to him in the White House.


The founders who signed their name to the Declaration of Independence put their lives, their families, and their security in jeopardy in the conviction that "A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." With the consideration of what they declared and the ideas that they sacrificed for, they gave us a constitutional means to remove, through impeachment, any leader from power who would break the laws of our country and hold our system of government and our democracy in contempt. If for some reason we persist through the duration of our George's last term in office without summoning the courage and the will to excercise our right to impeach this would be tyrant and his accomplice in the vice president's office, I only hope that none of George's crimes and outrages is forgotten and that we remember our George as the antithesis of that which our founders sacrificed for.


So, on this 4th of July, 2007 I have one final thing to say in remembrance of the day our country declared its independence and of the sacrifices that the signers of the Declaration of Independence made:
Fuck You King George!