babycow we hate the patriot act, support a democracy& a constitution& are against corporate or government tryranny,
go troll people that support that,stop trolling this page with threats of shooting, your lucky you havent been flagged already& are making yourself look foolish.
@old hacks I would say Thomas Paine is a true internationalist, I dont think he belongs to hard left or anywhere on the old political spectrum that we need to move away from.
@joni9780 give me liberty or give me death is a pretty radical statement. and either he believed in liberty for ALL which would mean he was a democrat, or liberty for the those with the most power, which would make him a republican.
Thomas Paine would say restore the constitution with a direct democratic edge, not a representative democracy that allows uncooperative corporations2dictate. Mr paine like most american revolutionaires was a true inter-nationalist, we need to recognise a universal constitution, thats supports more real democracy universally, the world has to coordinate democratically unless we want it to fall into a toxic nuclear dump. The US is great, but we can all learn alot from switzerland
@joni9780 Thomas Pain said "Give Me Liberty or give me Death." he was a hard left radical that believed in prosperity and the common good. not hierarchical systems of control. which is what the constitution is as of 2011. Amend it by federal ballot. we should be able to vote from home on anything the congress is voting on. and it be LAW.
@boxingboycow so you like living under an authoritarian system? cuz it's one or the other. me and you should have the right to declare our positions in all legal matters that concern us and for that registry to be Valid!
@oldhacks You do get that chance, it's called voting. Look man, the only thing that the NI4D will do is make the heartland of America have no voice, facts are facts, the Coasts will run this country. I will be damned if I am going to sit by and let New York tell me how to live in Wyoming.
@boxingboycow voting for politicians to go vote for you is Not democracy. politicians are professional liars. they work for big business. not the American public.
@oldhacks LOL we are not a democracy. NEVER HAVE BEEN!! Jesus what is with people not reading the Constitution. EDUCATE YOUR FUCKING MIND!! I am so sick and tired of you people who dont even understand your own country. Yet you are so willing to change it to something it is not. WE ARE A REPUBLIC
@oldhacks LOL the hell I cant A) the 1ST Amendment grants me that right. B) If they are acting outside the Constitution I have all the right to not only bitch but also revolt. Again fella you might try reading that 16 page document before you try to change it.
@oldhacks LOL so what. That was a thing of the times. They did not start slavery anyway. Indians killed white people a hell of a lot more frequently than whites killed indians, if you actually read books you would find that out.
So let me get this right, because the founders, and only some of them owned slaves, the Constitution should be null and void? LOL Does that mean we should trace lineage to anyone who's family owned them and hang them by the neck until dead?
@oldhacks Bet you're one of these people who think a global government with no nationalism would be better than anything. Do you hate guns and hunting too? How about love abortion? Think people who believe in God are dilusional? Hate America?
@boxingboycow wtf are you talking about? either you let the elites rule via congress or you let The People rule via federal ballot initiatives. I'd rather we live in a free society. you like living under the elites. to each their own I guess.
@oldhacks The elite will control the initiative. Why cant you idiots see that? Who will fund them, who will sponsor them, who will give them value, who will push them in the mainstream media?? THE FILTHY FUCKING RICH then you do what, you give 51% the ability to take the rights of 49%. This gets passed I start shooting to defend my Constitution.
@oldhacks LOL NO I never said anything about laying down and letting them stick it to you harder, I will say it to you as simple as I say it to my 1st grade Neice, DONT CHANGE IT, OUR OWN HISTORY HAS PROVEN THAT CHANGING THE CONSTITUTION HAS BEEN FUTILE TO OUR OWN PEOPLE, RESTORE IT. RESTORE IT TO WHEN THE PEOPLE HAD THE POWER, RESTORE IT TO WHERE PEOPLE ARE NOTHING BUT FREE, RESTORE IT TO WHEN IT WORKED AND HELPED FORGE THE GREATEST COUNTRY AND BEACON OF LIBERTY THIS WORLD HAS EVER SEEN!
@boxingboycow the constitution is what gives the government the right to make laws without our consent. the patriot act is constitutional. "All legislative powers shall reside in the congress". thats what the constitution says. basically just as Jefferson said to Adams as Washington had our first inaugural address..."we just traded one king for another."
@oldhacks The Patriot act is not constitutional, anything that strips citizens of a constitutional right such as the 4th amendment must take an amendment in itself. DO YOU NOT READ THE CONSTITUTION? So I guess because congress passed it you say the Federal Reserve act is constitutional? If so fella you're too stupid to deserve that document protecting your freedoms!
@boxingboycow "all legislative powers shall reside in the congress." that states in clear english that the congress can do whatever it wants concerning LAWMAKING... get a clue.
@oldhacks I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
@oldhacks Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers: We are a Republican Government, Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy...it has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.
Anyone who sees direct democracy in places like Switzerland and parts of the US and says "we don't need more of that!" is either insane or against it for interest sake. We definitely need more direct and participatory democracy.
message to dude at the1:55Dennis and Gravel are both cool democrats but Dr. Paul is bigger then just one man and his message is even bigger then republican or democrats both could of of ever done..Freedom is for ALL of us who ever you are, and that is bigger then democrat or republican FREEDOM is what we ALL should of have what you stand for FREEDOM and liberty it stands for all of us we aether ALL are going to be FREE or slaves to the New World Order you decide if freedom is priceless to you
Dennis Kucinich doesn't support a national initiative. He's a politician. just like Ron Paul. Mikes the only one that is demanding freedom for all of us to have our own vote in the congress.
yes Gravel is cool ...I like that man the best from all democrats him and Dennis have good ideas we all have some differences but we unite with each other, with ONE general idea of Freedom and Liberty;) and that is nice to see.
The world look to America for an example, if you show them war and hate, what do we expect, the people need to run this world , because its ours, not Rockafella, some guy who took advantage of a nation and just abused us all, get them out of power along with the goverment, and move ahead.
Mike GRAVEL: What I believe in is love. And love implements courage. And courage permits us all to apply the virtues that are important in life.
And so you can pray -- I was always persuaded or struck by the fact that many people who pray are the ones who want to go to war, who want to kill fellow human beings. That disturbs me.
I think what we need is more love between one human being and another human being.
GRAVEL: And then we'll find the courage to dispel many of the problems we have in governance. The answer to governance is not up here on the dais. The answer is with the American people and the people of Iowa. That's where the answer is.
And I have a proposal, and it's the only one that talks of change. The change is to empower the American people with a national initiative.
And my colleagues, with all due respect, don't even understand the principle of the people having the power.
The American dream envisioned in the Declaration of Independence is the vision of all human beings. We have yet to realize it in America, and when we do, I predict it will race around the world like the light of the sun. Cicero defined freedom as participation in power. The goal of this book and the purpose of my life are to help people understand how they can have freedom by promoting their participation in power of government—lawmaking. It is our birthright, if we dare to claim it.
By becoming lawmakers and becoming responsible for public policy, the consequences of which we will enjoy or suffer, we will facilitate our civic maturation—a human development that will benefit all facets of human life. Civic maturity is the most important result of turning to each other to exert control over our system of representative government.
I CONCLUDE THIS MANUSCRIPT with the simple observation that the answer to the problems of human governance lies with the people and not their leaders. The design of representative government maintains citizens in civic adolescence. We want the largesse of government, but are reluctant to pay for it. We blame our elected officials when things go wrong, when, in fact, we are responsible for putting them in office. That is the definition of adolescence.
Will laws enacted by majority decisions of citizens be perfect? Far from it. But they will be much improved over the minority rule we now suffer. When people make mistakes, they will be more inclined to make corrections. That is not the case with representatives who are averse to admitting error for fear of having that information used against them in the next election.
That is not the case with representatives in government who have generic barriers in dealing with the public interest that in many cases do not coincide with their personal self interest, the financial interests of their backers or the interests of their political party in gaining or retaining power.
I do not mean to imply that the people as individuals are superior in intellect to their leaders as individuals. Not at all. But the people acting as a constituency of the whole, legislating by majority rule, do not have barriers in making decisions involving the public interest. The constituent majority identifies and votes its enlightened self interest.
THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION of representative government is not meant to be pejorative in any way. It's how I experienced and understand the process. I do not believe those within representative government can correct it. There are only two venues of change—the government and the people; the solution is obvious. People must be brought into the governing process in the only possible role, that of lawmakers.
Historically, they evolved around regional economic ideologies into a two-party monopoly, which they jealously guard with the full force of the law and the police power of government. It is this unsanctioned power that gravitate the special interests of the nation who seek to influence the direction of public policy in a venue hidden from public view.
I have yet to touch upon where the real machinations of the legislative process take place and where the ultimate control of government resides—in the political parties. They are not even referred to in the Constitution, and the Founders universally disdained them as odious "factions;" yet, they appeared in the first presidential administration of George Washington and to this day carry more clout than any power defined by the Constitution.
Add to this a committee system designed to compartmentalize the specialization and expertise of individual members who are ruled over by committee chairman and ranking members who acquire control of legislative empires by a seniority system regardless of competence.
I blame the competitive, confrontational structure of the Congress and the legislative monopoly it holds at the federal level. The Constitution distributes congressional representation geographically where the economic, resource, and social special interests of each state and each district come into competitive confrontation for the limited wealth of the whole government.
In this book, I have attempted to identify a number important policy issues that face our nation today. I have the advantage of having dealt with most of them more than a generation ago. I have had to face up to disappointments as I looked back on my experiences. I am disheartened to see that political and social issues have gotten worse in the past 37 years, and many of the solutions proposed today, in my opinion, will make matters even worse.
No force in history is more oppressive than government. There is never a guarantee that successful governance in one era will be passed down in a straight line to subsequent generations. So many factors come into chain of human events that nothing can be guaranteed, and malevolent forces are always at play.
The problem of citizen participation in government applies not only to those states with initiative law, but also to all states and at all levels of government. It has never been easy for people to participate in the political process except under the direction and control of political parties that hold a monopoly over the electoral process.
The legislative role of the people with different laws from state to state has not been consistent. Additionally, citizen lawmaking has not been independent of representative government, which has sought to use its control to continually diminish the people's legislative role.
The motivation for the Initiative, Referendum, and Recall (IRR) laws was the abusive corruption of government by the business community in the post-Civil War boom and the "robber baron" era.
THE FIRST FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE in American governance since the founding took place at the turn of the last century without amending the Constitution. Starting in 1898 and up until the First World War, more than 20 states amended their constitutions to permit their citizens to initiate and enact laws and amend constitutions.
By controlling who could get elected to federal office—president, Congress—states asserted real power many times superior to the federal power based in the Constitution. This issue is better understood as "states' rights." It has kept in contention the supremacy of the federal government. This treatise is too short to treat havoc that this issue has wrought on the nation.
From my perspective, the most damaging legacy of slavery on the Constitution, other than the exclusion of the legitimate exercise of the people's legislative power, is the control of federal elections by state governments.
The property requirements were essentially removed at the state level prior to the Civil War. The expansion of the voting franchise to male blacks was the product of the Civil War Reconstruction amendments. The way was paved for a federal amendment to include women in 1920 as a result of repeated passage of initiative and referendum laws granting women the right to vote by state governments.
The amending process described in Article V is so undemocratic that the chambers (House and Senate) of the 13 smallest states can stop any national reform—a population ratio considerably less than 10%. Little wonder why so few changes have been made to update the Constitution to meet the needs of the 21st Century since its ratification in 1788. Other than housekeeping, the only changes to the Constitution have been the expansion of the voting franchise.
Of the five features locking slavery into the Constitution, only one—that of a slave being counted as three-fifths of a person for representative purposes in the U.S. House—had been removed by the Civil War. The other four highly undemocratic features of the Constitution have remained to work their mischief on us to this day, long after the demise of slavery. They are: 1) the Electoral College, 2) Article V, 3) the U.S. Senate, and 4) state control of federal elections.
Their fears that the people would remove slavery from the Constitution if so empowered were well founded. The first lobbying act of the first Congress was an assault on slavery by Pennsylvania Quakers led by Benjamin Franklin. It was successfully thwarted by James Madison and accepted as an understanding in Congress that the subject would never be addressed again.
Nevertheless, they sacrificed the people's lawmaking right to protect the ratification of their compact with the devil—slavery. They locked into the Constitution by excluding procedures that rightly belonged in Article VII for the people to amend the Constitution and make laws.
All of the Founders and Framers believed that the people had every right to exercise their legislative sovereignty to make laws. They are quoted frequently, pointing out that future generations have an obligation to alter their governments and constitutions to suit their interests. They also pointed with pride to the seminal lawmaking act of the Declaration of Independence.
The real impact of the people being cut out of this legislative act was to alter the entire nature and the rule of citizens in American governance to this day.
Even with the success of overcoming these barriers, it was literally a miracle that the Constitution was ratified at all. Fifteen votes strategically placed in three states would have mean defeat. Would a Constitution sans slavery have fared better? I think so. At least the Framers would have had the integrity to put the ratification before the people who, as the Preamble stated, "do ordain..."
The elites then controlled the conventions. This had universal appeal. It offered a way to kill the Constitution without the existing governments being held accountable. It permitted the political elites for and against the Constitution to gather and duke it out without being pestered by the real people.
The Framers in Philadelphia were well aware of ordinary people's attitude toward slavery, so they figured out how to keep them one step removed from the ratification process; that was to have the state legislatures call for state conventions and refer the Constitution for ratification to them.
In 1778, Massachusetts placed before its citizens a constitution for ratification that included slavery. The people refused to ratify it. In 1780, a constitution authored by John Adams that excluded slavery was then overwhelmingly ratified.
THE FRAMERS HAD TO EXCLUDE the people from the ratification process in order to secure the ratification of their flawed Constitution. They had a daunting task. They had to avoid a vote in the Confederate Congress, where the Constitution would likely not have been ratified. Similarly, they had to avoid votes in the state legislatures by persuading them to refer ratification to state conventions called for that purpose.
The Swiss Constitution, written in 1848, added the people as lawmakers creating a very successful governing partnership with their elected officials. This was the intended road but the one not taken by the Framers of the American Constitution.
The Framers wrote a document that defined the first constitutional representative government in history. Representative government has since been the norm in all democracies except Switzerland, which copied our Constitution but added one very powerful change, which represents the next step in the evolution of democracy.
Our Constitution has been extensively copied around the world. Obviously, the structure of representative government does not threaten other elites governing foreign societies.
Our Constitution, creating the structure of representative government, favors elites simply because it was written by elites. And, of course, they did not fail to provide for the continuity of their own power by establishing procedures whereby they could amend the Constitution with Article V and make laws with Article VII.
The Constitutional Framers, the elites of their day, created a system of representative government that held a monopoly of legislative power that facilitated policies that shame us to this day. Regardless of how much we praise our form of government, it cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called egalitarian or democratic.
The land of the continent was there for the taking, even though the land was already occupied by the Indians. In a cruel electoral calculus, settlers used their government's military power to legalize their continued encroachments on Indian lands. Settlers voted; Indians did not. The Indians were not enslaved but nearly annihilated.
The American psyche was further coarsened by the national sense of "manifest destiny," the idea that God wished us to exercise dominion over the land. Land represented economic freedom and a chance for upward mobility.
The legacy of slavery plagues us to this day. Repeated generational transfers of cruel, inhuman norms of conduct toward fellow humans, rationalized by Holy Scripture, have damaged the American psyche, beyond repair. We are a violent people, still sustained by religious fervor. And we wonder why.
The Framers compromised the moral principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence and made a deal with the devil in order to unify a new nation and prevent the certain collapse of the Confederate States that threatened their personal wealth and power.
Delegate John Rutledge of South Carolina, backed by the delegates of Georgia, blackmailed James Madison, the architect of the convention, and the rest of the delegates into accepting slavery as the price for their states joining the new government.
I believe the point at which the American dream of freedom was eclipsed was when the delegates to the convention failed to keep faith with the principles of the Declaration of Independence articulated 11 years earlier. That Declaration was the dream, the vision—all men are created equal.
Free blacks and slaves had fought in the Revolutionary War in numbers that exceeded their demographic distribution and king cotton had yet to take command of the Deep South with Eli Whitney's gin. Blacks had earned their piece of the dream.
Compounding the tragedy the Framers were about to initiate was the fact that probably the best opportunity to rid the nation of the scourge of slavery was the period from the cessation of the Revolutionary War hostilities in 1781 to the beginning of the Philadelphia Convention in May 1787.
The convention delegates were the wealthy elites of those states; any loss of civic cohesion would directly affect their personal property. Their initial preference for the structure of a new government, derived from the successful colonial experience with the town meeting system of governance, should have produced an amalgam of representative and direct citizen involvement in government.
When the Constitutional Framers met in Philadelphia, their options in designing our new government were unduly influenced by the fact that the 13 confederate states, all independently sovereign, were in the process of falling apart internally and as a confederation.
Nevertheless, we had to struggle for our freedom with blood and sacrifice in a revolutionary war. It wasn't until 1787 that the structure of our government took permanent shape, the design of which became a beacon that would guide the peoples of the world toward a system of representative government.
ALL PEOPLES DREAM of freedom and happiness, particularly those who have experienced the inequities and repressions of autocratic governments. We Americans were blessed with the opportunity to realize our dream of freedom at the confluence of the Scottish, English, and French Ages of Enlightenment in the 18th Century, when ancient Greek concepts of democracy experienced a rebirth.
I do not diminish the vital need to elect people of integrity to public office. The point I make is that such elections are not nearly enough to overcome the shortcomings of representative government.
All of our efforts at improving public policy are rooted in the structure of representative government. Unfortunately, we continue to believe that electing the right people to public office will bring about beneficial change. So we repeat over and over again something that has been proven repeatedly not to work.
My present analysis is somewhat better informed by the intervening years from the beginning of my Senate career when the book was first published in 1972 to the present. My view of the corporation—an institution lacking memory and morality—is not less harsh; however, my view of government—a tool for cooperative action—has become harsher.
The title of this chapter suggests that some force has been denying us our dream while, at the same time, bombarding us with jingoistic rhetoric that the American dream is the pinnacle of human achievement.
The dream of freedom, respect for individual sovereignty, is not uniquely American; it began with civilization. The struggle to prevent enslavement or subjugation in any relationship is universal in all people.
The title of this chapter is the same as it was 37 years ago. I thought of freedom, and personal and civil liberty, as uniquely American. I think most of us believe this without realizing that such national hubris devalues the concept.
"The present state of things is the consequence of the past; and it is natural to inquire as to the sources of the good we enjoy or the evils we suffer."
- By empowering people at home, we would advance the idea of direct democracy abroad and, in so doing, restructure the United Nations to become a global institution of governance that recognizes individual sovereignty.
- The National Initiative can restructure the global polity for world governance and, at the same time, enjoy peace and equitably share the Earth's resources with all peoples.
- We need to lead the world in new standards of international law through moral example, economic aid, and support for international law and institutions.
- To grow into civic maturity, we must admit our mistakes and learn from them to avoid repetition.
- We have established priorities that advance state interests internationally rather than addressing citizen concerns at home.
- We must abandon notions of forcing other peoples to accept our ways and instead reframe our views of what constitutes beneficial changes in undeveloped nations.
- For our national security, we must curtail subversive intrusions and clandestine activities abroad.
The National Initiative is the vehicle to accomplish a restructuring of the global polity for world governance and bring about peace and equitable management of the Earth's resources for the benefit of its peoples.
Dwight Eisenhower said, "I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days, governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."
If the OECD countries and key countries like India, China, Brazil, the United States, the European Union, and Russia come into this system, no country would choose to be left out. They would all clamor to get in, and like the European Union, they would have to adhere to a certain standard of human governance; that standard would require in the minimum that the people be empowered as lawmakers in their country.
Let's say China is a member, but does not have a complete democratic structure of governance, it would not enjoy the full weight of delegates to reflect its population. Sweden, Finland and other Scandinavian countries because of their unusual level of successful democratic governance would have their number of delegates weighted to reflect the success of governance at home. The weighted formula would take into consideration the political, social and economic performance of each nation-state.
A Council of Regions could replace the Security Council. It would be divided into geographic regions like the European Union, South American, North American, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. China and India are sufficiently populous to be entities unto themselves.
The next step to expand the National Initiative would be to seek enactment in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries (OECD), plus India, China, and Brazil. Once people in those countries are empowered to share power with their elected government officials, the people of the world could call for a convention under the auspices of the United Nations, and then restructure the United Nations to do away with the veto power of the Security Council.
If the United States were successful in bringing about the federal ballot initiative, the National Initiative for Democracy where the people are empowered as lawmakers, this advance would race around the world like wildfire and set the stage to restructure the United Nations.
How do we repair those fractures? It starts with the process of empowering the people in one country at a time, something that has started in Switzerland in 1848 and has ripened with great success; and yet the Swiss model has not been sufficiently appreciated by the people of the world to incite its widespread emulation.
The present, inadequate system of global governance fractures sovereignty, not unlike what existed at the founding of our country before the sovereign colonies were united in a federal system of United States.
The sovereign individual citizen cedes a certain degree of sovereignty at every level of government, whether it is at the local level, the state level, or national. The individual has no sovereignty left except for the brief moments when s/he exercises it on Election Day. I am suggesting that we shift a degree of sovereignty, already lost to the individual at the federal level (nation-state), to a global institution for some degree of governance in the no-man's land of world anarchy.
People attach their sovereignty to their particular nation-state to the point of jingoistic idiocy. The same emotions that we attach to athletics are superimposed in an exaggerated fashion on the nation-state. As live are lost in riots after athletic events, so too are many more lives lost in the irrational fervor of competing nation-states. This excessive patriotism for one's own nation becomes the worst form of mob action.
The answer at this point takes us back to Chapter 2, which points to the methodology for arriving at a system of equitable global governance. At heart, it is the issue of sovereignty—something a human being acquires at birth. The individual is sovereign.
It is unfortunate that at the close of the Age of Enlightenment, human governance topped out at the nation-state level, rather than progressing to the global level. The nation-state holds itself sovereign. At the last effort at global governance, after the Second World War, the victors enshrined their power in a Security Council with veto powers; thereby holding hostage the public interest of all other people in the world to their selfish foreign policy interests.
These three elements threatening the planet—nuclear annihilation, environmental extinction, and the anarchy of globalization—need not be the norm for human existence. The tragedy is that the planet has sufficient resources to satisfy the needs of all human beings if we had the capacity to manage them. That brings us to the need for a United Nations that can govern the global community.
We try with new institutions and trade agreements to regulate globalization but fail at the altar of profit. The state-less economic organizations of globalization are operating in regulatory no-man's land.
This process is lowering the national barriers that all countries guard jealousy under the name of sovereignty, and they are being lowered in a pell mell, unorganized fashion, that as a result, will cause a great deal of suffering, because corporations essentially have no morality, memory or sense of responsibility to future generations. They are motivated by profit. And so greed and profit become the operative agents of globalization.
Essentially, what we are doing through our use of energy, our despoliation of the environment is literally cooking ourselves off the planet, quite possibly within a hundred years. This dilemma of human economic outreach organized by corporate society is part of the process that we call globalization.
World War II brought to us advances in science that gave human beings the capacity to destroy the planet with a single global nuclear exchange. Science has given us the ability to destroy the planet, which we are in the process of doing over time as a result of industrialization's impact on the environment.
When we make a mistake and refuse to admit it, we likely will repeat the mistake; certainly a sign of immaturity in our personal lives. We develop maturity by acknowledging our mistakes and making the necessary correction to avoid repeating them in the future; that's how we permit our children to improve, by acknowledging and learning from their mistakes.
As a result, it brought us to the point with Vietnam where we were not able to admit our error. We refused to accept the fact that we made a grievous mistake in Vietnam and that our troops died in vain and that over three million Vietnamese and Southeast Asians died in vain at our hands.
It is just a jumble of fear that translates into foreign policy that is an aberration where we define our public interest as always superior to the public interest of the rest of the world. That kind of a definition leaves very little room for accommodation between peoples and nations. We act as if the "American dream" is the only dream that is valid; as if other nations don't have the right to their own dream.
In terms of foreign policy, fear mongering has persisted more subtly than we choose to admit, from the fear of communism to the fear of Islamism, and the fear of "Jihadism." The whole attitude of fear drills right down through the national psyche with the fear of blacks, Latinos, Chinese, gays, the fear of women asserting their power, and a whole host of other fears.
Vietnam has now become a most favored nation trading partner of the United States. You can buy a Baskin Robbins ice cream cone or Kentucky Fried Chicken in Hanoi, and yet our vindictiveness over Vietnam not permitting us to "win" (whatever that means) resulted in our mean-spirited punishment of the Vietnamese with sanctions for a generation.
Since Citizen Power was first written, we have seen the implosion of communism, the realization of freedom in the Warsaw Pact countries, the opening up of Chinese and Russian market economies, China maintaining itself as a communist country, and Russia becoming a capitalist democracy.
What was apparent with the Vietnam experience, and now with the Iraq experience is the chasm of distrust that exists between the people and their government. This chasm now is being maintained through the want use of secrecy by the government.
There was a fear of communism back then, but today in Iraq we don't even that to offer. Arguments were made in fear of terrorism but that was not the case. Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the United States and, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found there.
What's more immoral today is that at least we could say we were in Vietnam for fear of communism but in fact there was more than a passing interest in the rubber and other resources of that country. Now, it's all about the oil.
Looking back 37 years, the best and the brightest of the liberal and moderate leadership were the ones that brought us into the quagmire of Vietnam. We have a replay with the best and brightest of moderate Republicans and far-right religious conservatives taking us into Iraq.
Our policy should be to strengthen the institutions of cooperation and conventions of international law. We must seize upon every opportunity to press for cooperation and the peaceful means of settling all disputes.
How can the lone citizen have an influence on these issues? It isn't as hard as it sometimes seems. First, he should see that he and other members of his community are informed. Local organizations such as world affairs councils, UN support groups, World Federalist chapters are effective venues for information and discussion.
For instance, every year thousands of Americans travel abroad and get a clearer mental picture of the world. A picture is worth a thousand words. A visit is a million pictures. Citizens are no less capable of making informed decisions on the monumental questions of foreign policy issues than their leaders.
THE COMPLEXITY AND REMOTENESS of international affairs seem to suggest that effective citizen action is impossible. On many issues an informed portion of our citizens already has at least as good a grasp on foreign affairs as their elected representatives in Congress.
In pursuing what our leaders have deemed to be our "national interest," we have too often flouted international law and prior international agreements and, by this action, reduced the effectiveness of these restraints for maintaining world peace. A policy of pursuing "vital interest" above all is a policy of "beggar thy neighbor." Such a policy by the most powerful nation on Earth guarantees that the nations of the world will remain in beggary.
They serve only to allow the executive branch to project itself overseas. They create and preserve client regimes. They overthrow obstreperous regimes that refuse to kowtow to America. They advance American business interests by bribing friendly government officials and defaming the opposition. Finally, they engage in the kind of improper and, at times, illegal activities which most Americans would object to if any country but their own were engaged in them.
The CIA and our other intelligence agencies serve as a direct arm of our interventionist policy, providing the information on which military preparations are based, subverting revolutionary governments, and, at times, organizing and leading covert armies. We need to know something about potential adversaries, but essential information can be provided today by reconnaissance satellites and by reading published information.
Equally, our subversive activities must be curtailed in order that our presence can be a legitimate one and that the small entanglements that lead to big wars can be avoided.
Our world leadership should be exercised, not through might as in the past, but through moral example, economic aid, and support for international law and institutions.
Just as we believe in the supremacy of law over might in relations within our nation, we must begin to apply these same standards in our dealings with other nations. I believe that only when we recognize this and begin to take international institutions seriously will we at last be on the road to workable arrangements for preserving the peace.
We must become, again, the champion of revolutionary change and of decolonization, leading the world in new norms of international law, appropriate to an age of economic interdependence.
Our country should not attempt to take on the tasks of the United Nations or manage political and economic change around the world, or be the police force of the world. We can only assist, with our extraordinary wealth and industrial capacity, as young countries attempt to find their own ways toward a better life.
Nor should our military power be applied to enforce our will. With the rise of sophisticated techniques of guerrilla warfare and new means of communicating ideas—and hence of arousing latent national feelings and welding popular movements together—great powers, regardless of the military force they deploy, should no longer exert control over territory not occupied by their own citizens.
We need only reflect on our inability to solve the problems we have within our own country to recognize the far greater limitations we have when we attempt to introduce change in other nations.
We must recognize that there are real limits to how much we can influence another country. Foreign affairs analyst and author of The Politics of Hysteria, William Pfaff has wisely written that "foreign policy is fundamentally a means by which the American nation is protected, and it is not an appropriate vehicle for reform or revolution of foreign societies."
The United States may want to resist these developments, but the pressures from the unhappy masses are overwhelming. In the end we will find ourselves shut out of these countries entirely, if we do not alter our view of what constitutes beneficial changes in these lands.
If all the people of these nations are to benefit from modernization there will likely be revolutionary struggles in which political control is wrested from the traditional ruling classes and a program of land reform, education, and economic reform having mass support is instituted.
babycow we hate the patriot act, support a democracy& a constitution& are against corporate or government tryranny,
go troll people that support that,stop trolling this page with threats of shooting, your lucky you havent been flagged already& are making yourself look foolish.
@old hacks I would say Thomas Paine is a true internationalist, I dont think he belongs to hard left or anywhere on the old political spectrum that we need to move away from.
joni9780 1 year ago
@joni9780 give me liberty or give me death is a pretty radical statement. and either he believed in liberty for ALL which would mean he was a democrat, or liberty for the those with the most power, which would make him a republican.
oldhacks 1 year ago
Thomas Paine would say restore the constitution with a direct democratic edge, not a representative democracy that allows uncooperative corporations2dictate. Mr paine like most american revolutionaires was a true inter-nationalist, we need to recognise a universal constitution, thats supports more real democracy universally, the world has to coordinate democratically unless we want it to fall into a toxic nuclear dump. The US is great, but we can all learn alot from switzerland
joni9780 1 year ago
@joni9780 Thomas Pain said "Give Me Liberty or give me Death." he was a hard left radical that believed in prosperity and the common good. not hierarchical systems of control. which is what the constitution is as of 2011. Amend it by federal ballot. we should be able to vote from home on anything the congress is voting on. and it be LAW.
oldhacks 1 year ago
This is bullshit, as Karl Marx said "True Democracy is one short step away from Socialism"
It has never worked in the past learn from history. It also changes the face of America and disavows the Constitution!
If this gets put into place I start shooting instantly to defend my country!
boxingboycow 1 year ago
@boxingboycow so you like living under an authoritarian system? cuz it's one or the other. me and you should have the right to declare our positions in all legal matters that concern us and for that registry to be Valid!
oldhacks 1 year ago
@oldhacks You do get that chance, it's called voting. Look man, the only thing that the NI4D will do is make the heartland of America have no voice, facts are facts, the Coasts will run this country. I will be damned if I am going to sit by and let New York tell me how to live in Wyoming.
boxingboycow 1 year ago
@boxingboycow voting for politicians to go vote for you is Not democracy. politicians are professional liars. they work for big business. not the American public.
oldhacks 1 year ago
@oldhacks LOL we are not a democracy. NEVER HAVE BEEN!! Jesus what is with people not reading the Constitution. EDUCATE YOUR FUCKING MIND!! I am so sick and tired of you people who dont even understand your own country. Yet you are so willing to change it to something it is not. WE ARE A REPUBLIC
boxingboycow 1 year ago
@boxingboycow wow... so you like the government?
oldhacks 1 year ago
@oldhacks I like the Constitution and personal Liberty!
boxingboycow 1 year ago
@boxingboycow well then you can't bitch about whatever the government does.
oldhacks 1 year ago
@oldhacks LOL the hell I cant A) the 1ST Amendment grants me that right. B) If they are acting outside the Constitution I have all the right to not only bitch but also revolt. Again fella you might try reading that 16 page document before you try to change it.
boxingboycow 1 year ago
@boxingboycow the constitution was written by slave trading land hording indian killers. jefferson had 80 children with his slaves.
oldhacks 1 year ago
@oldhacks LOL so what. That was a thing of the times. They did not start slavery anyway. Indians killed white people a hell of a lot more frequently than whites killed indians, if you actually read books you would find that out.
So let me get this right, because the founders, and only some of them owned slaves, the Constitution should be null and void? LOL Does that mean we should trace lineage to anyone who's family owned them and hang them by the neck until dead?
boxingboycow 1 year ago
@oldhacks Bet you're one of these people who think a global government with no nationalism would be better than anything. Do you hate guns and hunting too? How about love abortion? Think people who believe in God are dilusional? Hate America?
boxingboycow 1 year ago
@boxingboycow wtf are you talking about? either you let the elites rule via congress or you let The People rule via federal ballot initiatives. I'd rather we live in a free society. you like living under the elites. to each their own I guess.
oldhacks 1 year ago
@oldhacks The elite will control the initiative. Why cant you idiots see that? Who will fund them, who will sponsor them, who will give them value, who will push them in the mainstream media?? THE FILTHY FUCKING RICH then you do what, you give 51% the ability to take the rights of 49%. This gets passed I start shooting to defend my Constitution.
boxingboycow 1 year ago
@boxingboycow so you're saying "the elites control us no matter what we do so why try to do anything about it"?
oldhacks 1 year ago
@oldhacks LOL NO I never said anything about laying down and letting them stick it to you harder, I will say it to you as simple as I say it to my 1st grade Neice, DONT CHANGE IT, OUR OWN HISTORY HAS PROVEN THAT CHANGING THE CONSTITUTION HAS BEEN FUTILE TO OUR OWN PEOPLE, RESTORE IT. RESTORE IT TO WHEN THE PEOPLE HAD THE POWER, RESTORE IT TO WHERE PEOPLE ARE NOTHING BUT FREE, RESTORE IT TO WHEN IT WORKED AND HELPED FORGE THE GREATEST COUNTRY AND BEACON OF LIBERTY THIS WORLD HAS EVER SEEN!
boxingboycow 1 year ago
@boxingboycow the constitution is what gives the government the right to make laws without our consent. the patriot act is constitutional. "All legislative powers shall reside in the congress". thats what the constitution says. basically just as Jefferson said to Adams as Washington had our first inaugural address..."we just traded one king for another."
oldhacks 1 year ago
@oldhacks The Patriot act is not constitutional, anything that strips citizens of a constitutional right such as the 4th amendment must take an amendment in itself. DO YOU NOT READ THE CONSTITUTION? So I guess because congress passed it you say the Federal Reserve act is constitutional? If so fella you're too stupid to deserve that document protecting your freedoms!
boxingboycow 1 year ago
@boxingboycow "all legislative powers shall reside in the congress." that states in clear english that the congress can do whatever it wants concerning LAWMAKING... get a clue.
oldhacks 1 year ago
@oldhacks I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
It is not and to the DEMOCRACY
boxingboycow 1 year ago
@oldhacks Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers: We are a Republican Government, Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of democracy...it has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.
boxingboycow 1 year ago
Anyone who sees direct democracy in places like Switzerland and parts of the US and says "we don't need more of that!" is either insane or against it for interest sake. We definitely need more direct and participatory democracy.
ProgressiveAudio 1 year ago
a good man!
C1GARET 2 years ago
Mike Gravel is always great. I hope he runs again on his Left Libertarian platform.
TheLeftLibertarian 2 years ago
i was on board for gravel till i read the language of his national initiative and it scared the shit out of me
manicmetropolis 2 years ago
just as fire used to scare most cavemen.
:)
0ldhack 2 years ago
I see your a gravel supporter. Nice! I donated a shitload of money to his campaign back when he was running lol.
I also responded with a video of me asking him a question. You may want to give it a watch, oldhacks
johncantees 2 years ago 3
Gravel is my Jesus.
0ldhack 2 years ago 2
That honestly is the way our government should be.i wish i knew what to do to help.
mushied1991 2 years ago 3
start talking to people about it. that's all any of us can do.
0ldhack 2 years ago
This has been flagged as spam show
message to dude at the1:55Dennis and Gravel are both cool democrats but Dr. Paul is bigger then just one man and his message is even bigger then republican or democrats both could of of ever done..Freedom is for ALL of us who ever you are, and that is bigger then democrat or republican FREEDOM is what we ALL should of have what you stand for FREEDOM and liberty it stands for all of us we aether ALL are going to be FREE or slaves to the New World Order you decide if freedom is priceless to you
melioped 2 years ago
Dennis Kucinich doesn't support a national initiative. He's a politician. just like Ron Paul. Mikes the only one that is demanding freedom for all of us to have our own vote in the congress.
oldhacks 2 years ago
Comment removed
melioped 2 years ago
I still get chills listening to this brilliant man. Thanks for this..
jbledsoe86 2 years ago 2
yes Gravel is cool ...I like that man the best from all democrats him and Dennis have good ideas we all have some differences but we unite with each other, with ONE general idea of Freedom and Liberty;) and that is nice to see.
melioped 2 years ago 2
Dude! Congrats on so many views!! It's your most viewed video?
uterfan 2 years ago
how about that huh
oldhacks 2 years ago
OMG look at the views for this video. Good job oldhacks.
overmind25 3 years ago 6
great video willie!
haveanopenmind 3 years ago
where you been punk? theres a major resurgence of Ni4D videos this week. make one Quick.
oldhacks 3 years ago
haha okay, been out of the country... i'll start working on one!
haveanopenmind 3 years ago
Harriet Christian Speaks of Obama Fear Tactics
watch?v=8Qx5rTHuYxA
Rev Manning Threatened too!
watch?v=4TEbIPOHNBQ
No Obama !
cancelledbysbc 3 years ago
Obama sucks but he's not as bad as McCain.
oldhacks 3 years ago
RIGHT ON!!!!!
themorningshowlive 3 years ago
cheers ladys
oldhacks 3 years ago
Laws = force
Liberatarians do not believe in force.
stratvic 3 years ago
they believe in the rule of Law. the difference is that Libertarians want Sound Laws. Not big government crooked laws.
oldhacks 3 years ago
Bob Barr - The Libertarian nominee? What a joke!
What's next, Ken Starr as VP? (lol) The sex police ticket? Going backwards folks . . .
Sad day if Ron Paul endorses Barr . . .
RonPaulGeorgeRingo 3 years ago 4
this is a video about the national initiative. Not representatives. any thoughts on us actually having the right to vote on the issues?
oldhacks 3 years ago
The world look to America for an example, if you show them war and hate, what do we expect, the people need to run this world , because its ours, not Rockafella, some guy who took advantage of a nation and just abused us all, get them out of power along with the goverment, and move ahead.
simonbayes1 3 years ago
Mike GRAVEL: What I believe in is love. And love implements courage. And courage permits us all to apply the virtues that are important in life.
And so you can pray -- I was always persuaded or struck by the fact that many people who pray are the ones who want to go to war, who want to kill fellow human beings. That disturbs me.
I think what we need is more love between one human being and another human being.
petergoesonair 3 years ago 3
GRAVEL: And then we'll find the courage to dispel many of the problems we have in governance. The answer to governance is not up here on the dais. The answer is with the American people and the people of Iowa. That's where the answer is.
And I have a proposal, and it's the only one that talks of change. The change is to empower the American people with a national initiative.
And my colleagues, with all due respect, don't even understand the principle of the people having the power.
petergoesonair 3 years ago 3
#6 - Most Responded (Today)
#1 - Most Responded (Today) - News & Politics
#72 - Top Favorites (Today) - News & Politics
oldhacks 3 years ago
---End of Chapter 12---
CITIZEN POWER
by Mike Gravel
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The American dream envisioned in the Declaration of Independence is the vision of all human beings. We have yet to realize it in America, and when we do, I predict it will race around the world like the light of the sun. Cicero defined freedom as participation in power. The goal of this book and the purpose of my life are to help people understand how they can have freedom by promoting their participation in power of government—lawmaking. It is our birthright, if we dare to claim it.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
By becoming lawmakers and becoming responsible for public policy, the consequences of which we will enjoy or suffer, we will facilitate our civic maturation—a human development that will benefit all facets of human life. Civic maturity is the most important result of turning to each other to exert control over our system of representative government.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
I CONCLUDE THIS MANUSCRIPT with the simple observation that the answer to the problems of human governance lies with the people and not their leaders. The design of representative government maintains citizens in civic adolescence. We want the largesse of government, but are reluctant to pay for it. We blame our elected officials when things go wrong, when, in fact, we are responsible for putting them in office. That is the definition of adolescence.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Will laws enacted by majority decisions of citizens be perfect? Far from it. But they will be much improved over the minority rule we now suffer. When people make mistakes, they will be more inclined to make corrections. That is not the case with representatives who are averse to admitting error for fear of having that information used against them in the next election.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
That is not the case with representatives in government who have generic barriers in dealing with the public interest that in many cases do not coincide with their personal self interest, the financial interests of their backers or the interests of their political party in gaining or retaining power.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
I do not mean to imply that the people as individuals are superior in intellect to their leaders as individuals. Not at all. But the people acting as a constituency of the whole, legislating by majority rule, do not have barriers in making decisions involving the public interest. The constituent majority identifies and votes its enlightened self interest.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
THE ABOVE DESCRIPTION of representative government is not meant to be pejorative in any way. It's how I experienced and understand the process. I do not believe those within representative government can correct it. There are only two venues of change—the government and the people; the solution is obvious. People must be brought into the governing process in the only possible role, that of lawmakers.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Historically, they evolved around regional economic ideologies into a two-party monopoly, which they jealously guard with the full force of the law and the police power of government. It is this unsanctioned power that gravitate the special interests of the nation who seek to influence the direction of public policy in a venue hidden from public view.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
I have yet to touch upon where the real machinations of the legislative process take place and where the ultimate control of government resides—in the political parties. They are not even referred to in the Constitution, and the Founders universally disdained them as odious "factions;" yet, they appeared in the first presidential administration of George Washington and to this day carry more clout than any power defined by the Constitution.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Add to this a committee system designed to compartmentalize the specialization and expertise of individual members who are ruled over by committee chairman and ranking members who acquire control of legislative empires by a seniority system regardless of competence.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
I blame the competitive, confrontational structure of the Congress and the legislative monopoly it holds at the federal level. The Constitution distributes congressional representation geographically where the economic, resource, and social special interests of each state and each district come into competitive confrontation for the limited wealth of the whole government.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
In this book, I have attempted to identify a number important policy issues that face our nation today. I have the advantage of having dealt with most of them more than a generation ago. I have had to face up to disappointments as I looked back on my experiences. I am disheartened to see that political and social issues have gotten worse in the past 37 years, and many of the solutions proposed today, in my opinion, will make matters even worse.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
No force in history is more oppressive than government. There is never a guarantee that successful governance in one era will be passed down in a straight line to subsequent generations. So many factors come into chain of human events that nothing can be guaranteed, and malevolent forces are always at play.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The problem of citizen participation in government applies not only to those states with initiative law, but also to all states and at all levels of government. It has never been easy for people to participate in the political process except under the direction and control of political parties that hold a monopoly over the electoral process.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The legislative role of the people with different laws from state to state has not been consistent. Additionally, citizen lawmaking has not been independent of representative government, which has sought to use its control to continually diminish the people's legislative role.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The motivation for the Initiative, Referendum, and Recall (IRR) laws was the abusive corruption of government by the business community in the post-Civil War boom and the "robber baron" era.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
THE FIRST FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE in American governance since the founding took place at the turn of the last century without amending the Constitution. Starting in 1898 and up until the First World War, more than 20 states amended their constitutions to permit their citizens to initiate and enact laws and amend constitutions.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
By controlling who could get elected to federal office—president, Congress—states asserted real power many times superior to the federal power based in the Constitution. This issue is better understood as "states' rights." It has kept in contention the supremacy of the federal government. This treatise is too short to treat havoc that this issue has wrought on the nation.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
From my perspective, the most damaging legacy of slavery on the Constitution, other than the exclusion of the legitimate exercise of the people's legislative power, is the control of federal elections by state governments.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The property requirements were essentially removed at the state level prior to the Civil War. The expansion of the voting franchise to male blacks was the product of the Civil War Reconstruction amendments. The way was paved for a federal amendment to include women in 1920 as a result of repeated passage of initiative and referendum laws granting women the right to vote by state governments.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The amending process described in Article V is so undemocratic that the chambers (House and Senate) of the 13 smallest states can stop any national reform—a population ratio considerably less than 10%. Little wonder why so few changes have been made to update the Constitution to meet the needs of the 21st Century since its ratification in 1788. Other than housekeeping, the only changes to the Constitution have been the expansion of the voting franchise.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Of the five features locking slavery into the Constitution, only one—that of a slave being counted as three-fifths of a person for representative purposes in the U.S. House—had been removed by the Civil War. The other four highly undemocratic features of the Constitution have remained to work their mischief on us to this day, long after the demise of slavery. They are: 1) the Electoral College, 2) Article V, 3) the U.S. Senate, and 4) state control of federal elections.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Slavery was so effectively embedded in the Constitution that its removal, short of a civil war, was impossible.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Their fears that the people would remove slavery from the Constitution if so empowered were well founded. The first lobbying act of the first Congress was an assault on slavery by Pennsylvania Quakers led by Benjamin Franklin. It was successfully thwarted by James Madison and accepted as an understanding in Congress that the subject would never be addressed again.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Nevertheless, they sacrificed the people's lawmaking right to protect the ratification of their compact with the devil—slavery. They locked into the Constitution by excluding procedures that rightly belonged in Article VII for the people to amend the Constitution and make laws.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
All of the Founders and Framers believed that the people had every right to exercise their legislative sovereignty to make laws. They are quoted frequently, pointing out that future generations have an obligation to alter their governments and constitutions to suit their interests. They also pointed with pride to the seminal lawmaking act of the Declaration of Independence.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The real impact of the people being cut out of this legislative act was to alter the entire nature and the rule of citizens in American governance to this day.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Even with the success of overcoming these barriers, it was literally a miracle that the Constitution was ratified at all. Fifteen votes strategically placed in three states would have mean defeat. Would a Constitution sans slavery have fared better? I think so. At least the Framers would have had the integrity to put the ratification before the people who, as the Preamble stated, "do ordain..."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The elites then controlled the conventions. This had universal appeal. It offered a way to kill the Constitution without the existing governments being held accountable. It permitted the political elites for and against the Constitution to gather and duke it out without being pestered by the real people.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The Framers in Philadelphia were well aware of ordinary people's attitude toward slavery, so they figured out how to keep them one step removed from the ratification process; that was to have the state legislatures call for state conventions and refer the Constitution for ratification to them.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
In 1778, Massachusetts placed before its citizens a constitution for ratification that included slavery. The people refused to ratify it. In 1780, a constitution authored by John Adams that excluded slavery was then overwhelmingly ratified.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The convention scenario also permitted the Framers to circumvent the people, denying them a legislative role in the ratification process.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
THE FRAMERS HAD TO EXCLUDE the people from the ratification process in order to secure the ratification of their flawed Constitution. They had a daunting task. They had to avoid a vote in the Confederate Congress, where the Constitution would likely not have been ratified. Similarly, they had to avoid votes in the state legislatures by persuading them to refer ratification to state conventions called for that purpose.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The Swiss Constitution, written in 1848, added the people as lawmakers creating a very successful governing partnership with their elected officials. This was the intended road but the one not taken by the Framers of the American Constitution.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The Framers wrote a document that defined the first constitutional representative government in history. Representative government has since been the norm in all democracies except Switzerland, which copied our Constitution but added one very powerful change, which represents the next step in the evolution of democracy.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Our Constitution has been extensively copied around the world. Obviously, the structure of representative government does not threaten other elites governing foreign societies.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Our Constitution, creating the structure of representative government, favors elites simply because it was written by elites. And, of course, they did not fail to provide for the continuity of their own power by establishing procedures whereby they could amend the Constitution with Article V and make laws with Article VII.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The Constitutional Framers, the elites of their day, created a system of representative government that held a monopoly of legislative power that facilitated policies that shame us to this day. Regardless of how much we praise our form of government, it cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called egalitarian or democratic.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The land of the continent was there for the taking, even though the land was already occupied by the Indians. In a cruel electoral calculus, settlers used their government's military power to legalize their continued encroachments on Indian lands. Settlers voted; Indians did not. The Indians were not enslaved but nearly annihilated.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The American psyche was further coarsened by the national sense of "manifest destiny," the idea that God wished us to exercise dominion over the land. Land represented economic freedom and a chance for upward mobility.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The legacy of slavery plagues us to this day. Repeated generational transfers of cruel, inhuman norms of conduct toward fellow humans, rationalized by Holy Scripture, have damaged the American psyche, beyond repair. We are a violent people, still sustained by religious fervor. And we wonder why.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The Framers compromised the moral principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence and made a deal with the devil in order to unify a new nation and prevent the certain collapse of the Confederate States that threatened their personal wealth and power.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Delegate John Rutledge of South Carolina, backed by the delegates of Georgia, blackmailed James Madison, the architect of the convention, and the rest of the delegates into accepting slavery as the price for their states joining the new government.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
I believe the point at which the American dream of freedom was eclipsed was when the delegates to the convention failed to keep faith with the principles of the Declaration of Independence articulated 11 years earlier. That Declaration was the dream, the vision—all men are created equal.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Free blacks and slaves had fought in the Revolutionary War in numbers that exceeded their demographic distribution and king cotton had yet to take command of the Deep South with Eli Whitney's gin. Blacks had earned their piece of the dream.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Compounding the tragedy the Framers were about to initiate was the fact that probably the best opportunity to rid the nation of the scourge of slavery was the period from the cessation of the Revolutionary War hostilities in 1781 to the beginning of the Philadelphia Convention in May 1787.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Unfortunately, the pall of slavery gripped the convention's proceedings, holding hostage any possible truly democratic success.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The convention delegates were the wealthy elites of those states; any loss of civic cohesion would directly affect their personal property. Their initial preference for the structure of a new government, derived from the successful colonial experience with the town meeting system of governance, should have produced an amalgam of representative and direct citizen involvement in government.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
When the Constitutional Framers met in Philadelphia, their options in designing our new government were unduly influenced by the fact that the 13 confederate states, all independently sovereign, were in the process of falling apart internally and as a confederation.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Nevertheless, we had to struggle for our freedom with blood and sacrifice in a revolutionary war. It wasn't until 1787 that the structure of our government took permanent shape, the design of which became a beacon that would guide the peoples of the world toward a system of representative government.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
ALL PEOPLES DREAM of freedom and happiness, particularly those who have experienced the inequities and repressions of autocratic governments. We Americans were blessed with the opportunity to realize our dream of freedom at the confluence of the Scottish, English, and French Ages of Enlightenment in the 18th Century, when ancient Greek concepts of democracy experienced a rebirth.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
I do not diminish the vital need to elect people of integrity to public office. The point I make is that such elections are not nearly enough to overcome the shortcomings of representative government.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
All of our efforts at improving public policy are rooted in the structure of representative government. Unfortunately, we continue to believe that electing the right people to public office will bring about beneficial change. So we repeat over and over again something that has been proven repeatedly not to work.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
My present analysis is somewhat better informed by the intervening years from the beginning of my Senate career when the book was first published in 1972 to the present. My view of the corporation—an institution lacking memory and morality—is not less harsh; however, my view of government—a tool for cooperative action—has become harsher.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The title of this chapter suggests that some force has been denying us our dream while, at the same time, bombarding us with jingoistic rhetoric that the American dream is the pinnacle of human achievement.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The dream of freedom, respect for individual sovereignty, is not uniquely American; it began with civilization. The struggle to prevent enslavement or subjugation in any relationship is universal in all people.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The title of this chapter is the same as it was 37 years ago. I thought of freedom, and personal and civil liberty, as uniquely American. I think most of us believe this without realizing that such national hubris devalues the concept.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Chapter 12
Who Stole the American Dream?
"The present state of things is the consequence of the past; and it is natural to inquire as to the sources of the good we enjoy or the evils we suffer."
--Samuel Johnson
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
---End of Chapter 11 of Citizen Power---
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
- By empowering people at home, we would advance the idea of direct democracy abroad and, in so doing, restructure the United Nations to become a global institution of governance that recognizes individual sovereignty.
- The National Initiative can restructure the global polity for world governance and, at the same time, enjoy peace and equitably share the Earth's resources with all peoples.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
- We need to lead the world in new standards of international law through moral example, economic aid, and support for international law and institutions.
- To grow into civic maturity, we must admit our mistakes and learn from them to avoid repetition.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
- We have established priorities that advance state interests internationally rather than addressing citizen concerns at home.
- We must abandon notions of forcing other peoples to accept our ways and instead reframe our views of what constitutes beneficial changes in undeveloped nations.
- For our national security, we must curtail subversive intrusions and clandestine activities abroad.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Global Governance
- Americans must recognize we have wandered far from our intended national purpose and world leadership role.
- Failures in Vietnam and Iraq have taught us that we have lost our moral compass, departing dramatically from America's long anti-colonial tradition.
- The gulf between the government and the people has grown even greater, furthered largely by pervasive secrecy structures.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The National Initiative is the vehicle to accomplish a restructuring of the global polity for world governance and bring about peace and equitable management of the Earth's resources for the benefit of its peoples.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Dwight Eisenhower said, "I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days, governments had better get out of the way and let them have it."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
In summary, what we're talking about is that the source of sovereignty at all levels of government is the sovereignty of individuals.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
If the OECD countries and key countries like India, China, Brazil, the United States, the European Union, and Russia come into this system, no country would choose to be left out. They would all clamor to get in, and like the European Union, they would have to adhere to a certain standard of human governance; that standard would require in the minimum that the people be empowered as lawmakers in their country.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
We need not worry about the tyrannies of the world or the countries which are not mature enough to move to this level of governance.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Let's say China is a member, but does not have a complete democratic structure of governance, it would not enjoy the full weight of delegates to reflect its population. Sweden, Finland and other Scandinavian countries because of their unusual level of successful democratic governance would have their number of delegates weighted to reflect the success of governance at home. The weighted formula would take into consideration the political, social and economic performance of each nation-state.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The restructuring of the UN General Assembly would be based upon population and quality of governance within each nation.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
A Council of Regions could replace the Security Council. It would be divided into geographic regions like the European Union, South American, North American, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. China and India are sufficiently populous to be entities unto themselves.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The next step to expand the National Initiative would be to seek enactment in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries (OECD), plus India, China, and Brazil. Once people in those countries are empowered to share power with their elected government officials, the people of the world could call for a convention under the auspices of the United Nations, and then restructure the United Nations to do away with the veto power of the Security Council.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
If the United States were successful in bringing about the federal ballot initiative, the National Initiative for Democracy where the people are empowered as lawmakers, this advance would race around the world like wildfire and set the stage to restructure the United Nations.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
How do we repair those fractures? It starts with the process of empowering the people in one country at a time, something that has started in Switzerland in 1848 and has ripened with great success; and yet the Swiss model has not been sufficiently appreciated by the people of the world to incite its widespread emulation.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The present, inadequate system of global governance fractures sovereignty, not unlike what existed at the founding of our country before the sovereign colonies were united in a federal system of United States.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The sovereign individual citizen cedes a certain degree of sovereignty at every level of government, whether it is at the local level, the state level, or national. The individual has no sovereignty left except for the brief moments when s/he exercises it on Election Day. I am suggesting that we shift a degree of sovereignty, already lost to the individual at the federal level (nation-state), to a global institution for some degree of governance in the no-man's land of world anarchy.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
People attach their sovereignty to their particular nation-state to the point of jingoistic idiocy. The same emotions that we attach to athletics are superimposed in an exaggerated fashion on the nation-state. As live are lost in riots after athletic events, so too are many more lives lost in the irrational fervor of competing nation-states. This excessive patriotism for one's own nation becomes the worst form of mob action.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The answer at this point takes us back to Chapter 2, which points to the methodology for arriving at a system of equitable global governance. At heart, it is the issue of sovereignty—something a human being acquires at birth. The individual is sovereign.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
It is unfortunate that at the close of the Age of Enlightenment, human governance topped out at the nation-state level, rather than progressing to the global level. The nation-state holds itself sovereign. At the last effort at global governance, after the Second World War, the victors enshrined their power in a Security Council with veto powers; thereby holding hostage the public interest of all other people in the world to their selfish foreign policy interests.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
These three elements threatening the planet—nuclear annihilation, environmental extinction, and the anarchy of globalization—need not be the norm for human existence. The tragedy is that the planet has sufficient resources to satisfy the needs of all human beings if we had the capacity to manage them. That brings us to the need for a United Nations that can govern the global community.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
We try with new institutions and trade agreements to regulate globalization but fail at the altar of profit. The state-less economic organizations of globalization are operating in regulatory no-man's land.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
This process is lowering the national barriers that all countries guard jealousy under the name of sovereignty, and they are being lowered in a pell mell, unorganized fashion, that as a result, will cause a great deal of suffering, because corporations essentially have no morality, memory or sense of responsibility to future generations. They are motivated by profit. And so greed and profit become the operative agents of globalization.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Essentially, what we are doing through our use of energy, our despoliation of the environment is literally cooking ourselves off the planet, quite possibly within a hundred years. This dilemma of human economic outreach organized by corporate society is part of the process that we call globalization.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
World War II brought to us advances in science that gave human beings the capacity to destroy the planet with a single global nuclear exchange. Science has given us the ability to destroy the planet, which we are in the process of doing over time as a result of industrialization's impact on the environment.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
When we failed to admit the mistake of Vietnam, we set ourselves up to repeat that mistake in Iraq.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
When we make a mistake and refuse to admit it, we likely will repeat the mistake; certainly a sign of immaturity in our personal lives. We develop maturity by acknowledging our mistakes and making the necessary correction to avoid repeating them in the future; that's how we permit our children to improve, by acknowledging and learning from their mistakes.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
As a result, it brought us to the point with Vietnam where we were not able to admit our error. We refused to accept the fact that we made a grievous mistake in Vietnam and that our troops died in vain and that over three million Vietnamese and Southeast Asians died in vain at our hands.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
It is just a jumble of fear that translates into foreign policy that is an aberration where we define our public interest as always superior to the public interest of the rest of the world. That kind of a definition leaves very little room for accommodation between peoples and nations. We act as if the "American dream" is the only dream that is valid; as if other nations don't have the right to their own dream.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
In terms of foreign policy, fear mongering has persisted more subtly than we choose to admit, from the fear of communism to the fear of Islamism, and the fear of "Jihadism." The whole attitude of fear drills right down through the national psyche with the fear of blacks, Latinos, Chinese, gays, the fear of women asserting their power, and a whole host of other fears.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Vietnam has now become a most favored nation trading partner of the United States. You can buy a Baskin Robbins ice cream cone or Kentucky Fried Chicken in Hanoi, and yet our vindictiveness over Vietnam not permitting us to "win" (whatever that means) resulted in our mean-spirited punishment of the Vietnamese with sanctions for a generation.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Since Citizen Power was first written, we have seen the implosion of communism, the realization of freedom in the Warsaw Pact countries, the opening up of Chinese and Russian market economies, China maintaining itself as a communist country, and Russia becoming a capitalist democracy.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
What was apparent with the Vietnam experience, and now with the Iraq experience is the chasm of distrust that exists between the people and their government. This chasm now is being maintained through the want use of secrecy by the government.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
There was a fear of communism back then, but today in Iraq we don't even that to offer. Arguments were made in fear of terrorism but that was not the case. Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the United States and, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction were ever found there.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
What's more immoral today is that at least we could say we were in Vietnam for fear of communism but in fact there was more than a passing interest in the rubber and other resources of that country. Now, it's all about the oil.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Looking back 37 years, the best and the brightest of the liberal and moderate leadership were the ones that brought us into the quagmire of Vietnam. We have a replay with the best and brightest of moderate Republicans and far-right religious conservatives taking us into Iraq.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Our policy should be to strengthen the institutions of cooperation and conventions of international law. We must seize upon every opportunity to press for cooperation and the peaceful means of settling all disputes.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
How can the lone citizen have an influence on these issues? It isn't as hard as it sometimes seems. First, he should see that he and other members of his community are informed. Local organizations such as world affairs councils, UN support groups, World Federalist chapters are effective venues for information and discussion.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
For instance, every year thousands of Americans travel abroad and get a clearer mental picture of the world. A picture is worth a thousand words. A visit is a million pictures. Citizens are no less capable of making informed decisions on the monumental questions of foreign policy issues than their leaders.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
THE COMPLEXITY AND REMOTENESS of international affairs seem to suggest that effective citizen action is impossible. On many issues an informed portion of our citizens already has at least as good a grasp on foreign affairs as their elected representatives in Congress.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
In pursuing what our leaders have deemed to be our "national interest," we have too often flouted international law and prior international agreements and, by this action, reduced the effectiveness of these restraints for maintaining world peace. A policy of pursuing "vital interest" above all is a policy of "beggar thy neighbor." Such a policy by the most powerful nation on Earth guarantees that the nations of the world will remain in beggary.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
it's not on most discussed at all! wtf
jandrewmurphy 3 years ago
They serve only to allow the executive branch to project itself overseas. They create and preserve client regimes. They overthrow obstreperous regimes that refuse to kowtow to America. They advance American business interests by bribing friendly government officials and defaming the opposition. Finally, they engage in the kind of improper and, at times, illegal activities which most Americans would object to if any country but their own were engaged in them.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The clandestine activities in which our government engages today do not truly defend our nation.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The CIA and our other intelligence agencies serve as a direct arm of our interventionist policy, providing the information on which military preparations are based, subverting revolutionary governments, and, at times, organizing and leading covert armies. We need to know something about potential adversaries, but essential information can be provided today by reconnaissance satellites and by reading published information.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Equally, our subversive activities must be curtailed in order that our presence can be a legitimate one and that the small entanglements that lead to big wars can be avoided.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Our world leadership should be exercised, not through might as in the past, but through moral example, economic aid, and support for international law and institutions.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Just as we believe in the supremacy of law over might in relations within our nation, we must begin to apply these same standards in our dealings with other nations. I believe that only when we recognize this and begin to take international institutions seriously will we at last be on the road to workable arrangements for preserving the peace.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
We must become, again, the champion of revolutionary change and of decolonization, leading the world in new norms of international law, appropriate to an age of economic interdependence.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Our country should not attempt to take on the tasks of the United Nations or manage political and economic change around the world, or be the police force of the world. We can only assist, with our extraordinary wealth and industrial capacity, as young countries attempt to find their own ways toward a better life.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
Nor should our military power be applied to enforce our will. With the rise of sophisticated techniques of guerrilla warfare and new means of communicating ideas—and hence of arousing latent national feelings and welding popular movements together—great powers, regardless of the military force they deploy, should no longer exert control over territory not occupied by their own citizens.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
We need only reflect on our inability to solve the problems we have within our own country to recognize the far greater limitations we have when we attempt to introduce change in other nations.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
We must recognize that there are real limits to how much we can influence another country. Foreign affairs analyst and author of The Politics of Hysteria, William Pfaff has wisely written that "foreign policy is fundamentally a means by which the American nation is protected, and it is not an appropriate vehicle for reform or revolution of foreign societies."
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
The United States may want to resist these developments, but the pressures from the unhappy masses are overwhelming. In the end we will find ourselves shut out of these countries entirely, if we do not alter our view of what constitutes beneficial changes in these lands.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago
If all the people of these nations are to benefit from modernization there will likely be revolutionary struggles in which political control is wrested from the traditional ruling classes and a program of land reform, education, and economic reform having mass support is instituted.
BamaGravelian 3 years ago