Defeat Tyrants

We must defeat tyrants to preserve, protect and defend our rights and our environment.
In 1776, British colonists in St. Augustine, Florida burned our Declaration of Independence and (in effigy) John Hancock and John Adams. Our Declaration first recognized the human right to self-government and to alter or abolish dysfunctional forms of government. This angered the British, who still lack a written constitution.
In 2010, British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon drilling platform killed eleven employees and emitted a huge oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico. BP has reportedly issued gag orders to Gulf cleanup employees. BP often retaliates against employees, as in Alaska, where Alyeska Pipeline hired Wackenhut to identify and help fire whistleblowers, paying millions in settlement. BP managers must be prosecuted. Whistleblowers everywhere must be protected.
BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill is growing – it is now bigger than our Seventh Congressional District, which is poorly represented by lobbyist-loving Rep. John Luigi Mica, an other-directed supporter of offshore oil drilling (and oil drilling in the Everglades National Park), whose brother is Big Oil’s Florida lobbyist and whose children toil for petrochemical interests.
To save our state’s environment and tourism economy, Florida deserves an “emerald necklace" of new national seashores and parks, including one in St. Augustine. Destroyed wetlands everywhere must be restored – including more than 106,000 acres of Florida wetlands the St. Petersburg Times found were destroyed since 1991, when the first President Bush declared “no net destruction of wetlands.”
In 2010, St. Johns County Administrator Michael Wanchik wrongfully suspended Amphitheatre Manager Ryan Dettra only three days after Mr. Dettra wrote an E-mail to Wanchik, four other county employees and the Record, concerned about alleged government waste and wrongdoing.
That suspension cannot stand. Insecure government officials too often violate First Amendment rights of employees and citizens alike. Everyone needs to adopt strong whistleblower protections, like those adopted by the Anastasia Mosquito Control District of St. Johns County last year.
The First Amendment, in its majesty, protects the rights of government employees to speak truth to power. Dettra’s E-mail went to government managers (protected by Florida’s whistleblower law) and also went to Margo Pope, Record Opinion Editor (protected by the First Amendment).
Local officials long expected that their employees would never speak or attend commission meetings without permission, thinking it “bad form” to speak out. The state constitutions of Tennessee, North Carolina and New Hampshire state that “The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.” I agree. Employers that treat employees as if they were robots or slaves are all of those things. They’re wrong.
Too often, unjust stewards won’t obey and won’t enforce whistleblower laws, preferring to practice nonenforcement (desuetude). Everyone has a Right to Know and Freedom of Conscience. Violating those principles kills, maims and destroys. NASA killed fourteen astronauts and destroyed two Space Shuttles by suppressing employee safety concerns.
Ben Franklin, asked what type of government our Constitution had created, replied, “a republic, if you can keep it.” It threatens our republic, endangers our democracy, and needlessly risks lives whenever managers retaliate for asking questions, raising concerns and speaking the truth. Ethical people everywhere must be empowered to speak their minds, whether in our polluting, mismanaged, government of City of St. Augustine; in St. Johns County government; at British Petroleum; or at NASA. Let freedom ring! Let justice be done.
As Robert Kennedy said, “it is not enough to allow dissent, we must demand it, for there is much to dissent from…. We dissent from willful, heedless destruction of natural beauty and pleasures.”
-------
Ed Slavin (B.S.F.S., Georgetown University, J.D. Memphis State University School of Law), is CIO of Global Wrap LLC. Ed won declassification of the world’s largest mercury pollution event (Oak Ridge, Tennessee, nuclear weapons plants, 1983, resulting in the DA’s recommendation for a Pulitzer Prize). He also reported the City of St. Augustine’s solid waste and sewage pollution (2006-2009). Ed worked for Senators Ted Kennedy, Gary Hart and James Sasser during undergraduate school and clerked for U.S. Department of Labor Chief Administrtive Law Judge Nahum Litt after law school. Ed has published seven articles on human rights issues in American Bar Association publications (two in the ABA Judges’ Journal). He formerly represented nuclear, environmental and other whistleblowers (including nine judges, among them an EPA judge and a majority of the Administrative Law Judges in the U.S. Department of the Interior, who were harassed, intimidated and threatened with firing for insisting upon judicial independence).