…Clearing away the Bush-Cheney trainwreck will require that we do three different jobs well:
First, we need to morph from milquetoast, directionless consumers back to regular, rights-demanding, well-organized, American citizens — and organize nationwide. Second, we need to organize and control our materials for Election 2006. Third, we need to get into a 2nd NCC (national constitutional convention) as soon as possible, with controls to protect the convention from predator elitist take-over, and with interactive tools for delegates and their constituencies.
We need to renew the Constitution, so that nothing similar to the criminal and treasonous, dual-party, three-branch, Bush-Cheney proto-despotism can ever happen again. Nobody said it would be easy. And there are no rose-garden promises…
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Part One of a Four-Part Series
Citizens, Not Consumers
Clearing away the Bush-Cheney train wreck will require that we do three very different jobs well.
First, we need to morph from milquetoast, directionless consumers back to regular, rights-demanding, well-organized, American citizens. We’re not there now, but we’ve been there before.
“Liberty or death”, and “live free or die” were American realities in the pre-Revolution 1770s. Liberty, freedoms, and rights — voiced in the 1776 Declaration Of Independence (DOI) — drove fighting American patriots throughout the War for Independence. From July 1776 in New York to the improbable 1777 wins at Saratoga, from the 1778 agonies at Valley Forge to the English-smashing 1781 victory at Yorktown, the DOI was continually read to assembled troops.
The DOI’s extraordinary rights of Americans were far beyond the traditional rights of Englishmen. Ordinary Americans knew that they were worth fighting for.
The elites, however, had other plans. The elites used the DOI to fuel their army. But before the victory was fact in the 1783 Peace of Paris, the elites began reneging on the DOI’s implied promises. The new states’ constitutions excluded them. The extraordinary rights of Americans were buried beyond reach in the 1782 Articles of Confederation and the illegally ratified 1787 Constitution. The Bill of Rights, forced onto the elites as a quid pro quo for ratifying the Constitution, and then carefully controlled by the elites, was about the traditional rights of Englishmen, not the extraordinary rights of Americans.
Rights, freedoms, and liberty, after all, maximize citizen equality and minimize profits and power to the class-race elites. The elites were true to their class, not to their nation.
The extraordinary rights of Americans became realities again in the midst of predator elitism’s, slavery-driven Civil War. Lincoln was forced by the war over slavery to deal with it. He obviously saw that the DOI’s great freedom statement — all men are created equal — mated with the Constitution’s separation of church and state to overwhelm Biblical backing of slavery. The DOI’s extraordinary rights of Americans reached into the Constitution and drove emancipation.
Again, predator elites, led by the South’s white supremacists, buried the DOI beyond reach. It was buried — law, facts, and truth — in lynchings, race riots, and denial of African-Americans’ political rights.
The DOI’s extraordinary rights became realities again in the abuses of ordinary people by government-backed predator elites during the Guilded Age, 1880s to WW1.
The citizen backlash against the massive corruptions of the Guilded Age was the Reform Era. The people demanded direct legislation, so that they could have the republic promised to them in the nation’s founding. The ordinary people understood that corruption negated republic. The people demanded that corruption be minimized. They demanded their sovereign right to control the output of legislation.
Well-organized, with political sophistication booming due to the good fight lost by Populists and the outrageous expose’ of the muckrakers, citizens of 26 states resurrected the DOI’s extraordinary rights of Americans. They did it with the petition processes of initiative, referendum, and recall — citizen lawmaking. Many of the nation’s highest courts, including the Supremes in 1912, affirmed that the mix of citizen lawmaking with representative government is a republican form of government intrinsic to the Constitution.
Again, the predator elites buried the extraordinary rights of Americans. This time, citizen lawmaking was jammed with unconstitutional interferences masquerading as “administrative law”. Statute-mandated “separation of powers” violations and “binding judicial review” violations gave government officials and judges the unconstitutional and arbitrary powers they needed to delay, alter, and/or reject any citizen-proposed law offensive to money-power. The will of the sovereign people was toast — unconstitutionally, feloniously, and treasonously. There’s been no change for the hundred years since. What officials and judges do to citizen-proposed law would get them immediatley impeached and removed if they tried it on legislature-proposed law. But there sit the people, on their hands, waiting for government to save them.
Now, in our 2nd Guilded Age, abuses of ordinary people by predatory government and predatory elites are again unearthing our need for initiative, referendum, and recall — this time, fully independent of government interference and at the national level.
We can’t do it as directionless consumers. We’ve got to morph back to well-organized citizens.
The second job that we must do well is to impeach and remove Bush-Cheney and as many criminal minions as we can, near simultaneously. Job 2’s Part B is the criminal prosecution under federal statute 18 USC 241 of the many felony conspiracies committed by the Bush-Cheney Illegitimacy.
All of Job 2 will require that we control our materials for Election 2006. That means eliminating the Hack-O-Matic vote-counting software from Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia so that we can fairly get an impeachment and removal Congress with enough juice to quickly get us a new “Special Prosecutor” law past certain presidential veto. It also means a massive voter-registration effort, targeting the 100-million-plus voting age Americans who are not registered voters.
The third job we must do well is to renew the Constitution, so that nothing similar to the criminal and treasonous, dual-party, three-branch, Bush-Cheney proto-despotism can ever happen again. The Bush-Cheney Illegitimacy is not Constitutional governance. It is anti-democracy, anti-rights, fascist thuggery masquerading as Constitutional governance.
None of our three jobs get done with mealy-mouth, or constantly over-thinking nuances. or with us sitting on our hands. All of it requires brute-force, blunt-force-trauma politics. We do the nuance stuff first, on the Internet and face-to-face across the country. We design our complex systems (hello, Erwin Laszlo’s microshifts into macroshift), decide when they’re right, and then shift gears and slam the turn-key systems into place. We do not listen to the predator politicians’ screaming and screeching.
Yeah, well, no — no nation’s citizens have ever done a rack of reforms against a super-power government. This government’s social, economic, and political power is wide and deep. It’s power anchored in horrendous and treasonous violations of the nation’s own constitutions and laws. It’s power protected by collusions among its players that illegally break checks and balances all over the political landscape. It’s power sold to the servile with lies on lies in lies. It’s power buttressed by the religious rapture of medieval end-days fuzz-think. It’s power entrenched in global mega-resources, on-planet and off-planet.
As FDR’s then-Vice-President Henry Wallace wrote of American corporate fascism in 1944, “Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.” Wallace’s words, in that NY Times op-ed, published 09 April 1944, had iron in them.
OK, big breath. Nobody said this would be easy. It is, however, very real. Options are do the work-arounds, or die enslaved. And there are no rose-garden promises. Dying enslaved is a distinct and very real possibility if we don’t handle these three jobs well.
Coming in Part 2 on Thursday, May 25th: Renewal Objectives & Interactive Tools
Written by Stephen Neitzke [send him email], who is the founder of the Direct Democracy League. He is the author of “The State of the Republic, 1776-2004″ as well as a number of other works, which can be found at www.ddleague-usa.net and on his blog at http://ddrevived.blogspot.com. Stephen is a featured columnist at www.populistamerica.com
