FDR's Four Freedoms: Diminished and Defiled by Paul Buchheit

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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/01/28-1



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Freedom from Want? Poverty Keeps Getting Worse.

For every three people in poverty in the year 2000, there are now four. Almost 50 million people were impoverished in 2011. Over 20 percent of our children live in poverty, including almost half of young black children. Among industrialized countries only Romania has a higher child poverty rate than the United States.

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Freedom from Fear? The New Jim Crow.

In the decades before FDR young black men were under constant threat of arrest for 'vagrancy,' and the resulting slave-like conditions of forced labor. Today vagrancy has been replaced by petty drug offenses. In "The New Jim Crow," Michelle Alexander documents the explosion of the prison population for drug offenses, with blacks and Hispanics the main targets even though they use drugs at about the same -- or lesser -- rate as white Americans. In Colorado and Washington and New York City and Seattle the patterns are disturbingly similar: minority arrests are vastly out of proportion to their percentages of the population.

Freedom of Worship? Distorted by Visions of The Rapture.

In 2005 Bill Moyers wrote about the far-right evangelical beliefs that dominate much of conservative American thinking, and which impact social and environmental policies. He repeats a theology professor's summary of the Rapture credo: "The world cannot be saved." Believers are not responsible for the environment, and should focus only on personal salvation. Droughts and floods, which have been occurring with greater regularity as the earth warms, are simply signs of the apocalypse as foretold in the Bible, and thus should be welcomed.

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Freedom of Speech? No, Surveillance and Harassment.

In De Jonge v. Oregon, 1937, the Supreme Court decided that the right of peaceable assembly is "cognate to those of free speech and free press and is equally fundamental."