Dear 300 Million Good People: You Have NO Moral Obligation to Obey Bad Laws Written by 535 U.S. Congress Critters Beholden to the Rich

The Constitution be damned! And by the way, no person living today ever voted to ratify it.

The U.S. Constitution and the Congress it claims to legitimize says that these wonderful people (pictured below) who did a wonderful thing committed an immoral act by violating federal law. This shows we need to say “To hell with the U.S. Constitution and its Congress and President and Supreme Court!”

Why do good people obey bad laws? Sometimes, to their credit, good people do NOT obey bad laws. For example, lots of good people violated the federal Fugitive Slave Act during the slavery era of the United States by protecting runaway slaves from capture by the authorities of northern states who tried to return the slaves to their “owners” in the South. But all too often good people do obey bad laws.

Why do ordinary people obey the Federal government's laws that benefit the haves at the expense of the have-nots? For example, the United States federal Taft–Hartley Act prohibits wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes (i.e., a strike by workers of one employer purely in support of striking workers of a different employer), secondary boycotts (such as boycotting a store because it sells products made by scab labor), secondary and mass picketing (sourced and explained here.) Also U.S. federal law requires male citizens and immigrants between the ages of 18 and 25 to register with the Selective Service System (the military draft) within 30 days of their 18th birthday in order to ensure that the haves will have sufficient military recruits to violently repress the have-nots when they challenge the power of the haves. Similarly, many states in the United States (with state constitutions just as wrong as the U.S. Constitution) prohibit school teachers from going on strike when going on strike is often the only way teachers can get things both they AND their students deserve.

Click here to listen to this striking Newton, MA teacher to learn why the Newton teachers on strike were morally right despite the state government saying they they were acting criminally for violating a CONSTITUTIONALLY valid law:

Good people obey bad laws not just because they fear being punished (arrested, fined, maybe imprisoned, maybe even shot) if they don’t obey but in many cases because they WRONGLY believe they are morally obliged to obey these bad laws.

The reason people think they are morally obliged to obey bad laws in the United States (to take one example) is because we have been taught that the United States government is a legitimate government and one is morally obliged to obey the laws of a legitimate government.

And why is the United States (supposedly!) a legitimate government? We’ve been taught it is legitimate because it is composed of elected representatives and people appointed by elected representatives.

But what we’ve been taught is wrong; it’s morally wrong propaganda to enable the haves to treat the have-nots like dirt.

This propaganda tells us that a mere 545 individuals (535 in Congress, 9 in the Supreme Court, and one in the Oval Office) sitting in Washington, D.C. have the right to command all 333 million of us throughout all of the United States from Hawaii to Alaska to Maine. Not only is this absurd on the face of it, but it is especially vile when one realizes that these 545 individuals are beholden to the very rich¹ and not to the have-nots, and that the laws they pass are for the purpose of keeping the very rich in power over the have-nots, to enable the rich to keep treating the have-nots like dirt.

Who says that 545 individuals have this right to command us? We’re told that they have this right because the United States Constitution says they have this right. It is true that the U.S. Constitution says this; it’s all spelled out very clearly in its words describing the federal government, the three branches, their respective powers, etc.

Yes, the Constitution says it, but so what?

Who says the U.S. Constitution has any validity? Did you ever vote to ratify it? Do you even know anybody who voted to ratify it? Did any person living today ever vote to ratify it? The answers, of course, are No, No and No!

The U.S. Constitution, with its ironic (mocking, actually!) “We the People” initial words, was written by the rich people of the day—the Jeff Bezoses and Elon Musks and Bill Gateses, whom we now are told to worship as our “Founding Fathers”—in order to create a government THEY would control that would, in contrast to the previously existing weak Articles of Confederation government, be powerful enough to enable them to violently squash entirely righteous uprisings of the have-nots such as Shays’s Rebellion, which scared the hell out of these rich people just before they wrote the Constitution (and which George Washington violently suppressed with a private army he whipped up), and the Whiskey Rebellion that broke out shortly after they wrote it. Please read about this here and here and here.

The Constitution says that the 210,000 United States Post Office workers, who went on a glorious wildcat (hence illegal) strike in 1970 against the federal government (hence illegal again) which succeeded in winning an 8% wage increase and safer working conditions and lower cost life insurance, had no right to do this because 535 people (the Congress) in Washington, D.C. wrote laws that said so. No! These striking postal workers had EVERY right to go on strike. The Constitution be damned.

To hell with those 535 people telling good people they have no right to resist being treated like dirt by the rich!

We the have-nots need to re-think what makes a government legitimate. I hope you will read my long answer to this question here. The short answer is here (and in the short articles it links to.)

Don’t listen to those who tell us the solution to our problems is to get back to truly following the U.S. Constitution

The U.S. Constitution is part—a BIG part—of the problem, not at all the solution. The Constitution wrongly claims to legitimize what is in fact a dictatorship of the rich. The much ballyhooed “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” have nothing whatsoever to do with making the federal government actually be of, by and for ordinary people. No! These parts of the Constitution are about protecting the rich against the possibility of a single rich person becoming a tyrant over the other rich people. This is hardly a reason for us, the have-nots, to praise the Constitution!

But what about the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution, you might ask? Well, what about it? Is it fine for 535 people to have the power to write a law prohibiting workers from going on strike just because there is a Bill of Rights? Are we supposed to accept the right of the rich to treat us like dirt in exchange for the Bill of Rights? Keep in mind that the Bill of Rights is always interpreted, by the people to whom the Constitution gives the real power, in a manner that keeps the very rich in power over the have-nots.

Take, for example, the First Amendment (freedom of speech) that reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

No “abridging the freedom of speech,” uh? Read this account (excerpted below) how the Supreme Court interpreted the First Amendment to DENY freedom of speech to pro-working-class people, and how it was ONLY massive resistance by the have-nots that eventually forced the government to allow some freedom of speech to the have-nots:

Hartford’s Amalgamated Trades Union wanted to use Bushnell Park for a mass meeting in 1884. The Board of Aldermen approved the rally. The Mayor vetoed the Board’s action. Special meetings were called to reject the veto and uphold the union’s request. “The general argument was that the park belonged to the people,” the Hartford Courant reported.

Despite that democratic sentiment, local authorities’ right to limit rallies or speeches on public property was affirmed by a US Supreme Court ruling (Davis v. Massachusetts) in 1897 when a reverend challenged a Boston law. The Court wrote that the Constitution “does not have the effect of creating a particular and personal right in the citizen to use public property in defiance of the Constitution and laws of the state.”

For the next four decades, local Connecticut activists suffered the consequences of that decision. Enforcers frequently targeted groups, including unions, suspected—rightly or wrongly—of being aligned with socialist or communist politics. In 1904, for example, union organizers were arrested for violating Torrington‘s “hand-bill law” when they distributed leaflets. In 1912, socialist Cornelius Foley tried to speak in downtown Hartford but was denied permission, forcing him to a corner where hustlers hawked medical cures and novelties. In 1914 another socialist began to talk in front of Parson’s Theater but was interrupted by a police officer. The soap-box orator was charged with breach of peace for speaking in public without a license.

Workers Use Civil Disobedience Tactics

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), popularly known as the Wobblies, devised a strategy to win the freedoms that the law denied them. The radical union mounted “free speech fights” wherever authorities banned their organizing efforts. They defied local laws and filled the jails, forcing local governments to go broke or give in. Despite the terrible hardships they faced in jail, the Wobblies compelled cities from Spokane to San Diego to rescind legal prohibitions.

Read here how YOU can help build the egalitarian revolutionary movement to make a truly legitimate government of, by and for ordinary people and not the rich.

1. They are beholden to the very rich because in our society based on money, money is power: the power to control elected politicians by controlling the funding they need to win elections, by controlling the funding of lobby organizations that write legislation for the politicians to rubber stamp, by bribing politicians with cushy jobs for them when they retire or for family members, by using threats such as the threat to move a big business elsewhere and have the politician be blamed for the loss of jobs and by using blackmail such as Jeffrey Epstein was probably doing by getting video of politicians in compromising acts with young girls on his private island. It is simply naive to believe that billionaires don’t control elected politicians and that it is just an accident that the laws written by these politicians happen to be laws that keep the rich in power over the have-nots. The rich will control the government as long as they are allowed to remain super-rich. This is true no matter how large is the font used in the Constitution for the phrase “We the People.”