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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rickyb" data-source="post: 5781967" data-attributes="member: 56035">"I wouldn’t say they are destroying democracy; I would say they have destroyed democracy. You have held up throughout this conversation the founding fathers. And I want to go back to Thomas Paine, who was the real radical, who called for–he didn’t use the word socialism, but a type of socialism, who was an abolitionist, who was a proponent of direct democracy, which the founding fathers were not, who opposed the genocidal campaigns against Native Americans, which all of the founding fathers embraced with relish, who wanted rights for women. And I think Zinn points out that all of these freedoms that you talk about were reserved for a very small, select group of largely slave-holding white males, our aristocratic class, who replaced the aristocratic class of Britain, and that it was–Washington, by the time he was president, was the wealthiest person in the United States, largely by seizing Indian lands with land speculators and selling it for profit–of course, he himself was a large slaveholder–And that through the constitutional conventions that were held after independence, you really saw a rolling back of that populism and radicalism that Paine, who himself became a pariah, spoke so eloquently about, and of course Common Sense and his journalism were used to fuel–most of the people fighting the revolution were yeoman farmers.So they created mechanisms by which we would never have a voice–the Senate, the Electoral College. That’s how you had Al Gore win 500,000 more votes than Bush and Bush still wins or Nader did not lose the election. Everything was built into the system to create a kind of protection of rights for a very select few. And we saw throughout American history–and Zinn does this in his book–the struggle by labor, by women, by African-Americans, the Communist Party."[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.truthdig.com/articles/video-chris-hedges-to-robert-scheer-why-do-you-respect-americas-founding-fathers-part-57/[/URL]</blockquote>

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