What Rights Are Left

What Rights Are Left?

Everyone has a right to use pesticides – according to a Maine pamphlet on pesticide use 

Equal rights is a relatively new concept historically. In Classical Greece, rights were enjoyed only by a few, the hippes, or those who could afford a horse. For thousands of years subsequently, rights were reserved for the elite, the very top of the political food chain. The wealthiest, most powerful, most remorseless individuals contested their own rights between each other while denying any rights whatsoever to subjects, serfs, servants, spouses or slaves. It wasn’t until late in the 18th century that the American Revolution offered an example to the world of structuring that promised equal rights for all, though in practice full citizenship had been extended from bloodline nobility only to white male property owners to neuter their growing financial potency by absorbing them into centralized banking. Gradually, other informed groups of oppressed people struggled for rights for themselves – working people, women, colored people, and later disabled people and homosexuals, accomplishing a wave of revolutions around the globe that alarmed aristocrats. At the debut of the 21st century the Jeffersonian notion of equality for all was recognized globally. However as a practical matter, the bulk of the population is stuck with second-class status. The average person in any country today is subject to warrantless intrusion, detention, interrogation, rendition, elimination without warning, appeal or recourse, making any lofty rhetoric about rights utterly meaningless. 

Human rights are not incurred because humans deserve it, but because without human rights, a person cannot be a human being. 

Human rights include the right to exist, the right to identity, the right to procreate, the right to perambulate, the right to pursuit of happiness. These are the very rights that must be violated for continuity of corporate/government. Belief in human rights as inalienable makes people hard to govern. 

Human rights remain on the table, but property rights are incontrovertible. Even the poorest peasant, the most radical revolutionary, the severest socialist, the most devoted democrat, the most fatuous philanthropist, the most nihilistic anarchist knows a sawbuck on the sidewalk belongs to SOMEbody.

Civil rights likewise are not a gift offered by civil structuring, but because without civil rights there is no civilization.

Civil rights include the rights embodied in the Bill of Rights: the right to assemble, to speak, to worship, to publish, the right to privacy, the right to equal and just treatment, the right to participate, the right to retain non-delineated rights. Civil government is constituted to uphold and protect these civil rights. When instead a government violates these rights it changes from civil to criminal.

Criminal governments routinely disobey constitutional limitations on their power.

It is often said government has stripped away the People’s rights, but that is impossible. Don’t believe it. Rights are an idea, which once conceptualized cannot be abridged, confiscated or terminated. Rights can only be upheld, or violated. They say police have the right to download your device, corporations have the right to vote, and the government has the right to spy on anyone. But police, corporations and governments cannot have rights because they are not people, they are pests. This truth is self evident: We The People have a right to use pesticides.

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