Betrayal: Public Welfare Abandoned for Private Wealth

By Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett

Betrayal goes to the heart of US officials’ (and their partners’) self-serving injury to the health and welfare of the United States and the world.

US public officials’ abandonment of public health for private wealth leaves the world and nation reeling from one USA-made (deliberate) crisis—of violence and disease, hunger and homelessness, deterioration and diminishment of quality conditions in workplaces and public education—to another. Their all-round acts of “legalized” corruption, their international crimes with impunity, and their deregulation-driven denial of essential needs such as clean water and air, food and work safety, shelter, and life itself constitute ultimate and everlasting betrayal. The nonfiction account in the areas of US politics, domestic affairs and foreign relations, leadership, law and democracy, and war and peace cites examples of callous, crisis-driven betrayal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796097122

Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett

Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett is a lifelong nonfiction writer with interests in politics, public affairs and international relations. Her worldview is informed by her U.S. Peace Corps years teaching in West Africa and engaging with native peoples and multinational expatriates. Bennett's ethics and humanity are fundamentally informed by her formative years growing up with parents in the U.S. South and in later years traveling across the United States and to some countries of Western Europe. Having a belief in basic values of nonviolence, sovereignty of all nations and rights of all peoples to protections under law and universal conventions, she has become increasingly alarmed not by foreign threats but by internally-rooted threats to global society -- Americans' proud domestic and international code of violence manifest in endless wars and fighting words; their excused pandering, entrenched viciousness, and incompetence of public officials who have severely damaged America's world standing and virtually destroyed any vision of The Union. Bennett's teaching and government experience, her credentials in educational philosophy and ethics, teaching and learning theories, journalism and public affairs (Michigan State University, PhD; American University, MA) make hers the heart of an educator who delights in sharing ideas. Her major published include: Alphabetic SOLUTIONS (2016); Unconscionable: How the World Sees Us (2014); No Land an Island: No People Apart (2012); Same Ole or Something New (2010); Breakdown (2009); Women's Work and Words Altering World Order (2008); Missing News and Views in Paranoid Times (2006); No Room for Despair . . . Mary McLeod Bethune's Cold War, Integration-Era Commentary (2005); Talking Back to Today's News (2003); America's Human Connection (1994); An Annotated Bibliography of Mary McLeod Bethune's Chicago Defender Columns, 1948 -1955 (2001); and You Can Struggle without Hating, Fight without Violence (1988). Links: Xlibris dot com; Today's Insight News (http://todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com/), https://www.facebook.com/carolynladelle.bennett; authorswork@gmail or [e-mail]

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Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Carolyn LaDelle Bennett.

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Rev. date: 04/09/2020

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Betrayal

Defined as

Breaking a presumptive social and governmental contract

Violating trust

Failing to qualify and to rise ably and honorably to challenges

Creating crises instead of governing with

advice and consent of the governed

Deliberately causing harm at home and abroad

Producing moral and psychological conflict

within and among nations and peoples

Promoting regression

CONTENTS

Introduction : A Broad Outline of Betrayal

Chapter 1   Education (Betrayed)

K–12 US Schools

US Higher Education

Chapter 2   Health and Welfare (Betrayed)

Diseases Old, Common, Treatable, Preventable (Ninth to Twenty-First Centuries)

Health and Welfare: Water

Health and Welfare: Work

Health and Welfare: Poverty

Health and Welfare Betrayal: Deregulation

Health and Welfare Betrayal: Pharmaceutical,

Physician, Nicotine, Public Official Profiteers,

Neglect, and Old Diseases

Mental Illness

Health and Welfare: Wireless Technology

Signatories from the United States

Lawsuit Industry Betrayal of Public Health and Welfare

Chapter 3   Law, Leadership, Democracy (Betrayal)

Our Law Is Lawlessness

US Impunity: Transnational Lawlessness

Without Qualification, Unfit for Purpose:

Flawed Leadership

Our Democracy Isn’t

Chapter 4   Peace (Betrayed)

US Global Unending Aggression—

Disengagement of World Bodies

Betrayal Soaked with Blood of Millions—

Despair of Americans

Infinite Consequences: Unending

Aggression, Failed States, Forced Migration,

and Asylum Denials

Final Word

Annotated Bibliography

About the Author

My sincere appreciation to those who gave their permission where necessary and who otherwise assisted in the process of producing this work. For its conception, composition, compilation, and all-round labor, I am, as always, responsible.

INTRODUCTION

A Broad Outline of Betrayal

US public officials have betrayed us. They have betrayed the people and institutions, the promise and potential of a great nation. They have betrayed us by abusing and failing to improve the legacy of America’s founders and founding leaders.

They have betrayed us by robbing our public treasury and handing it to their paymasters in corporate, nongovernmental, think-tank, nonprofit (all profiteering, privatizing) industries—all the while claiming to be protecting us from demons that exist only in their minds, the products of their invention.

They have betrayed us by dumping us on the dole and making us pay for the privilege by privatizing the dole out from under us.

They have betrayed us by preferring to see their faces on the television, their posts and followers on social media platforms, and the honorable (with dollar signs) in front of their names instead of rolling up their sleeves, bending their backs, engaging in debates, and doing the hard, off-camera, honest-to-goodness work of providing for the essential health and welfare of the people of the United States of America.

They have betrayed us by failing to exert due diligence in courageously caring for (not putting up for sale) the country’s health, education and welfare, and indeed its prospects for future as determined by the quality and innovativeness of work and workers.

Their rant about socialism (like their convenient rant on terrorism), defined however they choose at any given moment, has been a tactic of unending distraction—a demonizing, us-them, good guys-bad guys, narrowly drawn, made-for-mind-control, propagandistic, surround-sound song and dance—designed to draw attention away from their failures of insightful industriousness and moral leadership.

US officials’ failures and their terminally flawed character and caliber of leadership have placed the whole world in jeopardy, including the United States—which is not an island unto itself, though they would have us believe it is such.

They have endangered all of us by ordering and engaging in unending violent aggression against and misrepresentations of world nations and peoples and withdrawing from (or refusing to join) essential international bodies, conventions, and treaties meant to encourage and provide opportunities for

• multilateral cooperation;

• verbal communication—respectful, diplomatic, and effective engagement and problem solving in areas presenting great international challenges, such as good health, prevention and elimination of preventable diseases, access to clean water, sanitation facilities, clean air, safety in workplaces, multinational transport, permanent housing, living wages for workers, access to dependable and competent medical services, prevention of money laundering and human and illicit drug trafficking, promotion of sovereignty of individual countries, peaceful (nonviolent) resolution of cross border and regional and international disputes and conflicts, active efforts toward denuclearization, removal and elimination of land mines, and prevention of and attention to environmental degradation and its effects on individual countries, islands, and dense land masses, and the whole globe; and

• principled commitment not to armed peacekeeping but to nonviolent and enduring world peace.

America, America! Something has gone terribly wrong, and it has been going terribly wrong for a long time.

Ron Jacobs, a Vermont author and frequent contributor to CounterPunch and other online sources, was asked if the US political system is beyond repair, and he answered that indeed the system is beyond repair.

The system is corrupt, he wrote, not because those who enter are necessarily corrupt; but because it [the system] serves the ruling elites whose power and riches are based on two fundamental realities: the exploitation of working people and resources and the greed the profits from that exploitation create. It is the rare politician, he concludes, who does not give in to the corruption the system demands.

I agree that the system is congenitally corrupt, like a disease. But corruption is not an it, or a thing, but a they, a person or people. I am not prepared to ignore the source, the embodiment, the expression, the perpetrators perpetuating corruption.

Corruption is man-made, created and sustained by people. The corruption the system demands is the corruption created, manifested, and personified in individuals. In this particular case, politicians, public officials, and US leaders are the personification of corruption. The entrenched crop of public officials and their partners revolving in and out of the doors of federal Washington are the corruption. These officials are so masterful at casting blame on every person, place, or thing except themselves that the general public is inclined to believe the mantra, take indoctrination passively, and sing it nightly to the children and the children’s children; and in so doing, add more American generations to the body of believers in the doctrine that the devil made me do it.

In the oaths of office required of elected individuals entering the US government’s executive and legislative branches are promises routinely broken before many of these people walk through the door of their offices.

For the presidency, the oath says:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

For the House and Senate, it reads:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States … (and) … bear true faith and allegiance to the same … (and) … well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.

Provide for the Common Defense and Promote the General Welfare

Some of these people would have us believe that common defense in the US Constitution means the United States (meaning they or those they order or ply with weapons) should be killing people in foreign countries so they won’t come over here and kill us. This is a deliberate interpretation of the Constitution and a misrepresentation of people who have never threatened the United States, have never militarily surrounded and occupied countries all over the world (as does the US), and haven’t a fraction of the weaponry—including nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction—possessed, trafficked, and carelessly used by the United States.

The framers of the US Constitution were building and envisioning a new nation, and they saw strength in unity and strength in every link healthy in skills and work, in body and mind. Lincoln reinforced and died for this notion. Heirs of Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin, and later Lincoln (though these greats did not foresee or include all of America’s heirs) were charged with realizing or at least furthering a great nation’s promise and potential.

Call it ideal, but it was not pie in the sky; it was achievable, is achievable, barring the self-centeredness of public officials—people entrusted with the public good, the health and welfare of the nation and not their own wealth.

For their own gain, contemporary leaders, public officials, and their partners in mass media and elsewhere have skewed and grossly misrepresented this America (there are other Americas, though you wouldn’t think so, listening to some of these people). This is betrayal.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. (Created on September 17, 1787; Presented on September 28, 1787; Ratified on June 21, 1788; Entered into force on March 4, 1789 [defence is the original spelling of defense])

The preamble to the United States Constitution is a brief introductory statement of the Constitution’s fundamental purposes and guiding principles … affirmed by courts as trustworthy evidence of the founders’ intentions regarding the Constitution’s meaning and what they hoped the Constitution would achieve.

The first three words of the US Constitution, We the People, affirm that the government of the United States exists to serve its citizens (not some, but all of its citizens).

The drafters at Philadelphia in 1787 set the framework for ending the divine right of kings (not to be replaced either with a divine right or domination of one nation over other nations), a monarchial absolutism. The framers laid the foundation (to be built upon) for a land of opportunities" in which there is freedom for all.

At the bicentennial (1987) year of the Constitution, librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin wrote these words in his introduction to the LOC’s bicentennial booklet of the Constitution of the United States. Our flourishing federal union of states is a by-product of this document.

We have been misled by the cliché that ours is the oldest written constitution still in use. To be more precise we should call ours probably the first printed (emphasis added) constitution and surely the oldest printed constitution by which a nation still lives. This puts our Constitution in a wider, more modern perspective.

Our nation was born in the bright light of history, and we can trace the framing and detailed revision of this document in the record of the Convention which met in Philadelphia from May 14 to September 17, 1787. Some of the members were men of letters, and all lived in a culture of printed matter.

Does that not suppose or suggest the necessity of a literate electorate and therefore an obligation of government to provide for the education of that electorate? Madison spoke of this. Does it not also suggest a substantively qualified leadership?

Qualification (Requirement of Government)

When the Constitutional Convention required a printer, they selected John Dunlap and David C. Claypoole, who had been printers to the Continental Congress since 1775. Their names had appeared on the official printing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. They had proven qualifications as the official printers of the Articles on Confederation.

Literacy (Imperative of Citizenry)

The Constitution of the United States opened a new era in the history of constitutions, not only by its explicit description of the powers of a balanced representative government but also by its birth in a public forum of the printed word.

A widely literate people could read and judge the very words by which they would be governed … The story of the adoption of our Constitution can now more than ever remind us that our frame of government was born in the freedom of print and to read.

Under contemporary leaders, ignorance is perpetuated, and quality education is denied.

The Constitution that emerged from the Philadelphia Convention in mid-September 1787, according to James Madison, was nothing more than the draft of a plan … until life and validity were breathed into it by the voice of the people, speaking through the several State Conventions.

Anchored and Open (Perfect and Perfectible)

Public print, especially newspaper-print, was the clearest testimony that the institutions of government were only human, always improvable, and so always perfectible (emphasis added).

Perfectible implies that neither the government then established nor the document framing it was set in stone or the final word for all times. In the original constitution is an important legacy of principles, promise and potential for a more perfect Union bequeathed to generations; and dependent on those later generations of able leaders and citizenry to further perfect.

However, what we have witnessed over many years are seated officials who uphold not the Constitution of the United States but rather their own personal, partisan, financial, and ideological interests—most often

• contrary to the health, education, and general welfare of the country and its people;

• contrary to law and decency and failing in moral character and substantive qualification for leadership contributive to democratic processes; and

• contrary to the principle and process of peace at home and abroad.

This, to me, feels like betrayal.

Some writers have described America’s domestic and international situation as a national emergency or a national crisis or an empire in the throes of falling but not yet fallen. Many engage in the distraction of blaming not only the Russians and Chinese but something else conveniently contrived as left, right, conservative, progressive, socialist, capitalist, and many cavalier variations on the theme of divide and distract. Never self-reflect, amend, or alter course. Americans (those with big microphones and bankrolls, their puppets and sycophants) never blame themselves. It is just not the American way.

It is as if they are too weak (morally and intellectually) to say, Yes, I did it, and I will set about fixing it. They cast blame instead of solving problems. They are the potential creators and destroyers of health, education, and welfare; of law and leadership; and of peaceful global-to-local relations. The pattern plays out within the United States and across the world. This is the pattern, the blueprint of US officials.

When I began this work, I thought of sabotage. We are in the throes of self-sabotage. Then I thought of hostage-taking. When public officials in Washington decided to pull a government shutdown for more than a month, I thought that’s what was going on—sabotage or hostage-taking. But that wasn’t personal enough. Betrayal is personal and strikes at the heart of our being as a nation and as a people.

Before the mantle passed from President 44 to President 45, I thought matters could not get worse. But matters did get a whole lot worse—out loud, violent, and vulgar. Where the predecessor had been equally violent, equally inept, and morally impaired but dressed up in posh language, the successor was blatantly, maniacally ruthless.

Long years of breakdown have become piercing betrayal in essential areas of life—health, education, welfare; law, leadership, and democracy; and internal and external relations, peace, nonviolence, and integrity.

US foreign policies and practices and their capriciousness—from one congress and executive administration, one partisan or ideological swing to another—are inextricably intertwined, wedded, and bound up with domestic conditions and particularly the health and welfare of the people of the United States. The health and welfare of those who are invaded, threatened, sanctioned, occupied by the United States, in one way or another, affects the health and welfare of the people of the United States.

War and the expense of war implements and the promotion of war industries and related contractors effectively waste and deny realization of the enormous human potential in the American masses, the great majority of all kin and kind.

A concentrated and privatized war economy as well as a concentrated and privatized medical and heath establishment ensures the status quo of sickness, violence, and unnecessary deaths on the streets of the United States and in the towns and villages of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Gaza, Venezuela, Somalia, and other places of US-led aggression and interference.

America’s throwaways (to the streets, literally, and otherwise reduced to mere consumers, customers of plunderers’ waste and technological excess)—consigned to low-wage work and denied healthy growth and development and proper care and education—cannot study, aspire, and become desperately needed good teachers, physicians, electricians, innovators, social workers, diplomats, plumbers, inventors, small merchants, artists, psychologists, government workers and municipal leaders, repairers, and other helpers in their own neighborhoods or in America’s many towns and mountain hollows and rural villages.

In all the years of politicians’ baby-kissing and voter-courting in Midwestern and plains states, in faltering New England states, and homeless-encampment Western states, not one of these men and women has taken the courage to boldly articulate and defend substantive promises and detailed plans and, on election, sustain the follow-through to change America’s disastrous course.

Not one has truly led — not merely postured and blamed. No politician or public official has argued consistently and convincingly among elected colleagues and to the public at large for the substantive overhaul and uprooting of regressive politics and practices at home and abroad.

Not one has led the charge for stopping the social, economic, health, and welfare bleeding at home and abroad.

Not one has relentlessly (as they have relentlessly funded US foreign aggression) addressed the underlying causes and mended and removed conditions that have left America’s masses no recourse except to fight among themselves for crumbs left by the likes of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, Catholic charities and Bill and Melinda Gates, Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen (Bezos) and the Donald Trump family, the Saudi Kingdom and lord mayor of London’s bankers, and hangers-on and wannabes revolving in and out of government offices eager to serve the exclusive club of the status quo at home and abroad.

This character and custom, this arrest and denial of human health and welfare—denial of aspiration, advancement, and service by all to all—is the ultimate and unpardonable betrayal.

CHAPTER I

Education (Betrayed)

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall

be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental

stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory.

Technical and professional education shall be made

generally available and higher education shall be

equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

Education shall be directed to the full development

of the human personality and to the strengthening

of respect for human rights and fundamental

freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance

and friendship among all nations, racial or religious

groups, and shall further the activities of the

United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

—Article 26 (1–2), Universal Declaration of Human Rights

United Nations General Assembly

Paris, December 10, 1948

Everyone has the right to education, and it shall be free—at least in the elementary and fundamental stages—but not in the United States of "Exceptionalism."

Public officials concerned with maintaining their seats in public office, increasing their wealth and, toward that end, helping ensure the concentration of inordinate power and wealth in others must depend on mind control. The body politic, the masses, and the young must be indoctrinated with a barrage of surround-sound distraction. Education is devalued. The powers that be seem value conditions of illiteracy, inferior schooling; a general population lacking in natural or learned propensity for critical reflection and aspiration, and satisfied with a limited vision of victimhood, dependency, and ignorance. Perhaps America’s greatest betrayal is the denial of quality education.

The failure of leaders to make education a substantive American interest—as they have made war and war materials, arms sales to dictatorships and oppressive governments a matter (though a fraudulent one) of American interest — is a betrayal of the country and its people. The governmental pattern of contracting, grant making, and soft money projects and enterprises of various kinds handed out by public officials’ pandering to one or another person or entity is indicative of a country’s lack of commitment to and devaluing of education in the national interest. The commitment to learning for its own sake and to raising the nation’s future plumbers, physicians, teachers, scientists, diplomats, and reasoned technological innovators, poets, writers, and musicians is a commitment that has been foreclosed in America. The young are left to conclude that they are throwaways or the prey of sundry predators of mind and body. They are not expected to be part of a great movement forward that takes hold and fulfills the promise and potential and enhances the legacy left by the nation’s founders.

Education to a nation must be its permanent and enduring commitment, not a whimsical undertaking. Public leaders have misinterpreted and misappropriated wealth. A good education is freedom, and to deny it is to deny freedom—freedom of thought; freedom of choice in movement, association, and occupation; and freedom to develop lifelong health in mind, body, and spirit. Having the right to speak is not enough if one is unable to speak clearly and correctly in the language of one’s nation of birth or naturalization.

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people, the fourth US president is reported to have said. These institutions throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty. They are the nurseries of skillful teachers for the schools distributed throughout the Community. They are themselves schools for the particular talents required for some of the Public Trusts … on which depends ‘the able execution of … the welfare of the people.’ Madison’s phrasing was of his day, but the meaning rings true today.

US leaders, for all their convenient talk about the founding fathers and America’s founding documents (in proposing or opposing impeachment), are in practical, everyday matters of policy and legislation and essential national priorities dismissive of the sentiment and vision of the founders. They have betrayed the country and its people by offering consistently substandard schooling and indeed selling off basic education for private profit and fraudulent schemes. They have failed to vest value education as an instrument for the betterment of the individual and society.

Education in America has been undermined by politics, prejudices, and private ideologies and has further diminished in value by the easy irresponsibility that defers to and perverts, as with many misuses of US Constitutional text, the doctrine of States’ Rights. The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution says this:

The powers