Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Happiness

President Abraham Lincoln's dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg became the most remembered speech in America's history.  The president closed the Gettysburg Address by saying that the thousands who died there, did not gives their lives in vain.  President Lincoln said, "... this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

In this modern age of endless campaigning and corporate lobbying, the people are no longer being represented by the politicians they elect.  We are fast becoming a government of the corporation, for the corporation, by the corporation.  The endless hemorrhaging of taxpayer money spent on corporate welfare, money that does not trickle down in America, is sucking this nation dry.  Since 1980, we have been combining tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthy with massive spending increases at the top.  Our politicians are using the taxpayers' credit card to borrow, borrow and borrow.  The deficits and borrowed money will have to be paid back with tax dollars.  In short, the very politicians who promised no tax raises, used the back door to load the largest tax burden in the free world square on the backs of America's middle class taxpayers!

In the Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  In this age of record corporate profiteering, the politicians are telling us that we can not afford a living wage, health care, parks, pensions, public education, libraries, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, or even the United States Post Office.  All while we continue the insane deficit spending on massive corporate welfare programs that have impoverished our great nation.       

I am sure that Abraham Lincoln and the soldiers who died at Gettysburg are all "rolling over in their graves" as America's representative democracy perishes from this earth.  So long as our nation's political institutions are for sale, the people will not be represented and the pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness are in jeopardy.  As patriots, it is our duty to demand that campaign reform and lobbying laws be changed so that we are once again a nation of the people, by the people, for the people.