why play by the rules,

when the game is already fixed?

This, somewhat long essay, is not intended to answer all questions, or to be any version of final truth.  Neither my indirect or my direct knowledge is by any means perfect, which means there will be errors and flaws in what is below.  It is rather simply hoped that this essay may contribute to a much better, and healthier, conversation on American political life than has, in the view of at least this author, to have been the case in far too many venues.

Since what is living in this essay is the intention for a more healthy conversation, the author hereby authorizes and encourages all who wish to make copies to do so and/or take quotes; and, that they may do so freely and without any restraints whatsoever.  Like all my writing, this essay is a gift, since I have little or no need for more wealth.

[*Common Sense, by Thomas Paine, was one of the most important of the founding documents of the American Experiment.  Yet, in our time, we have so little political common sense among those in power (and among many voters), that there is a strong need for for that which, while once common, now has to be called: uncommon.  At the same time, the use of this phrase, "uncommon sense", has also become common, and this in itself indicates that many others believe that today we need to revive Paine's original sensibility, but with a quite different emphasis.]

Introduction: anticipating the whole

Section One - Degeneration

Section One: Part One: The Betrayal of the Left, and of the whole of American Politics, by the Democratic Party

[An Idea, in order to live in our polity, needs to be practiced.  Here we look at how it was practiced (or not) in the latter parts of the 20th Century by the Democrats.]

In the first half of the 20th Century, the Democratic Party became an umbrella organization for the less fortunate.  Blacks, workers, the poor - all those groups, naturally unable to exercise the powers and privileges of wealth, found that in cooperation within this umbrella they increased their political clout - their ability to influence the social policies of government on all levels.

Woman's Suffrage promoters, socialists, even some communists and other groups as well sought relief for their views, ideas and visions - many of these too finding a place within the Democratic Party.  Not everyone accepted at that time the tenets of unrestrained capitalism, and economic views contrary to those of wealth and privilege could be found in the Democratic Party.

The Party was a place where the holders of often quite contrary views fought over policy and power, but in the end recognized that to be effective, they would have to work together.

This was not to continue, for the Lords of Finance themselves, in order to solidify their rule, needed to co-opt the Democrats as well as the Republicans.  Thus continued a war between the Idea of the Republic and the desire to rule of the financial elites, that while it was not very visible, it was fought nonetheless behind the scenes (and had been being fought since the Constitution was created).  It was a war over ideas as well as political and economic power, for to the Lords of Finance, the necessity was for both political Parties to agree on certain fundamental economic ideas.  If both Parties could then agree, this would ease the way for the eventual total domination by a hidden aristocracy of concentrated wealth on the nature of our laws and other social rules, that would be to their advantage.

What was crucial to the elite powers of wealth, was that the public dialog no longer reflect real thinking about basic economic realities, philosophy and policy.  Deep economic thinking had to be replaced with vague platitudes and an unquestioned allegiance to the fake magic of free markets.

Out of this naked use of power and influence by the Lords of Finance, in the earliest years of the 20th Century, had been born Central Banking and the Federal Reserve System, an even then unconstitutional transfer of the American People's sovereign power to a private banking institution (see Appendix A: Money and Debt).  But the aristocracy of concentrated wealth had not yet learned how to effectively use this stolen power, and as a consequence of a far too lax control over the gambling institution called the Stock Market, a deep economic crash could not then be averted.

The full economic recovery from the Depression, via the spending power of the government, especially on the armaments industries during World War Two, stood out as a clear fact, and so government policy became, in the 1950's, devoted to anti-communism, and as much as possible a permanent war economy that was then called the Cold War (and now in our time, this economic need of the Lords of Finance for a state of permanent war is to be called the War on Terror, for with the collapse of Russian Communism, a new enemy for the needed permanent state of war had to be found.).  The power that accrued in this fashion became very obvious to a few, and so we have in Eisenhower's Farewell Address, given in 1960, the well known warning about the military-industrial complex.

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Out of this unwarranted influence, then came the drive within the American Military and Arms Industries for the Vietnam War, which need probably caused the assassination of JFK, and then led Lyndon Johnson to authorize the fake attack in the Gulf of Tonkin that was later used as the justification for our ever deeper involvement in that terrible war.

Yet, the American People still had political faith when Kennedy was elected, as can be seen by these facts: Of 109 million eligible voters, 68 million, or 63%, voted in 1960.

Then out of the Vietnam War came the anti-war movement, a progressive impulse which united the generations and involved millions until the Democratic Convention of 1968, when the Party committed suicide, and rejected Gene McCarthy (the only surviving anti-war candidate after Robert Kennedy's assassination) in favor of Hubert Humphrey, an establishment moderate liberal.   Under the influence of Chicago's Mayor Daley, the anti-war demonstrators were physically attacked, in what was later called by the Commission that investigated these events: "a police riot".

When the establishment of the Democratic Party purged itself violently of the Left Wing of American politics (its 1960's progressives in the anti-war movement - and here we need to make a distinction between the true Left Wing of American Politics, and the Far Left, which would have included various socialist and anarchist movements), the umbrella coalition was shattered and the Party was no longer a living political entity, but only became in the following years an institution of power seekers, supported equally with the Republicans by concentrated wealth, as long as the Democrats no longer questioned the established economic doctrine of the falsely called free market.

Discovering themselves to be without a voice, true progressives began to leave the Democratic Party, and in the 1972 election, which returned Nixon to power for a second term, of 140 million eligible voters, only 78 million, or 55%, voted.

Then, after 8 years of Republican rule under Nixon and Ford, began the Carter years, with Carter himself a creature of the Council on Foreign Relations (a massive think-tank of the English-American financial establishment), and as such he was fully committed to basic capitalist doctrines regarding banking and money.  Reagan's allegiance to these powers is of course obvious, as was the first President Bush, whose closeness to the world-wide oil industry is well known.

The economic goals of these elites of finance are really very simple.  Wealth is to rule, in order to preserve its power and its privileges.  It will fight among itself, something like the feudal struggles of the Middle Ages, but the great majority of humanity is only seen as workers and consumers - a great population of modern serfs and peasants.

By the end of the Carter years, the influence of concentrated wealth on our economic thinking was now complete.  Realities were never discussed by either Party, and the horrible consequences can be seen in this remark by Senator Patrick Moynihan:

"I have served in the Cabinet or sub-Cabinet of four Presidents.  I do not believe I have ever heard at a Cabinet meeting a serious discussion of political ideas - one concerned with how men, rather than markets, behave.  These are the necessary first questions of government.  The Constitution of the United States is an immensely intricate judgment as to how men will behave, given the circumstances of the time in which it was written.  It is not at all clear that it is working well, given the circumstances of the present age.  But this is never discussed."

With Clinton, trained in his economic thinking as a Rhodes Scholar by that same English-American financial establishment, the Democrats appeared to be back on track, in favor of social policies embracing the poor and disenfranchised.  But the reality was that his whole campaign intentionally moved the Democrats squarely into the very broad Center, stealing from the Republican moderates many of their issues.  At this point, no one anymore represented the true Left Wing of American politics, except for the Greens and similar small progressive groups that gathered around Ralph Nader and Noam Chomsky.

This deepened the dismay of progressives, for in Clinton's re-election in 1996, of 196 million eligible voters, only 96 million, or 48%, voted.  Only Nader, and a few others, were able to articulate the truth of the rule of the financial elites, but otherwise the Left had no voice, and no political power.  The Democrats had been successfully co-opted.

Nixon's criminal empire, and dirty tricks election activities, meant a whole new generation of voters were unable to feel that American politics had anything to do with them or their lives.  Class warfare was afoot, and people who typically were on the Left in American politics, having no Party with whom to identify, stopped participating.

From 1960 to 1996, those participating in our public life dropped from 63% to 48%, a loss of almost a quarter of those who had been involved in 1960 (15% - or 63% minus 48% - divided by 63%, represents a net loss of 23%).  100 million eligible voters did not vote in 1996!

But the Left  was not the only group in America without a voice, for something else had happened in the last half of the 20th Century.  Religious conservatives found the culture around them changing in ways extremely contrary to their moral beliefs (the sexual revolution, feminism and so forth).   They too then abandoned political participation, for who was giving their values a voice?

Enter the Moral Majority (founded in 1979), the family values crisis, and the culture wars.

That is a whole other story in several ways, but in looking at these figures, we have to keep in mind that this voice on the Right, that was initially left out, was now finding its leaders, and becoming organized along lines which some may find problematic, but within the religious history of the United States are nothing new.  Religious fervor runs in cycles and here was another peak beginning to emerge.

Next comes Karl Rove.  A supreme genius of the meaning of numbers in politics, and a person with no political morality at all (anything goes), who was trained by Nixon's own dirty tricks guru Lee Atwater, Rove began in Texas his march to provide the Republican Party full control over American public life.  Rove wasn't even a true partisan as regards free markets - it was all about winning power for the wealthy and privileged, and ideas and ideologies were only tools.

So at the same time that the American political spectrum has no viable Left Wing, these having been betrayed by the Democratic Party, Karl Rove, using wedge issues (issues that emotionally polarize people through promoting fear of each other) and the most vicious personal attacks ever seen in American politics (always using surrogates - such as the Swift Boat Veterans), brings to power first in Texas as Governor, and then in Washington D.C. as President, an arrogant, ignorant and childish son of privilege - the second Bush.

Some will not like this characterization, but this petulant boy knows nothing of history, the real nature of our form of government, or real leadership, having slept through college, hid from the Vietnam War, and played at business and failed.  Nothing, either in formal education, or in education in the school of life, has trained him for this office; and, in his swaggering posture and smirking countenance anyone not entirely asleep can read his true character.

Yet, he is elected in the 2000 election, when Karl Rove is able to bring the  so-called "religious right" to the table, with apparently (given the voter fraud) 195 million eligible, and 101 million, or 51% voting.  The progressives, the natural Left in American Politics, are still without a voice, and turning to Nader as a surrogate for its views, embarrassingly give the election to Bush.

Then, however convenient for the Right, comes 9/11.  Between the junior Bush's incompetence, and the 19th Century imperial ambitions of the neo-conservatives, the moral capital of 9/11, belonging to the American People and not the ruling elites, is squandered on an adventure in Iraq.  Lies are told endlessly, for in the modern politics of claims of moral superiority coupled with the full hypocrisy of amoral governmental and business conduct, the truth has no use whatsoever.  It is all about gaining power and wealth by any means, and by this time the Democrats are fully complicit.

They vote for the war.   They vote for the Patriot Act.   They have already been agreeing to all the attacks by international banking on national sovereignty throughout the world - attacks buried structurally in such institutions as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement and while it failed to be passed under Clinton, there was plenty of support for the Multinational Agreement on Investments - all of which trade agreements and organizations serve only the economic needs of the Lords of Finance, who in the course of the 20th Century have become the real dominant world power through their behind the scenes control of American and English politics.

The Rich win and the Poor lose, while the Democrats give us Gore and Kerry, both of whom wimp out (or as Whoppi Goldberg said on HBO, "the Democrats have no balls") after their losses by ignoring the rampant voter fraud, with the result that the powers that be have risen criminally to authority in the most physically (as opposed to spiritually) powerful country in the world.  Both Gore's and Kerry's economic thinking  are in accord with the economic doctrines needed for the rule of the elites of wealth, and Kerry even supports the totally unjustified war in Iraq, in the vain attempt to appear more militant than Bush.

Let's pause and think about the Iraq war for a moment.  When a nation goes to war, the whole goes to war.  It is the people's children who are killed and permanently maimed (some 25,000 at the time of the latest revision of this essay).  It is the people's wealth, through taxes, that pays the costs of such an act.  It is the people that bear the consequences of such a war, in the sense of whatever future peril results.

War is a horrible event in human history, and should never be taken lightly, or left up to a small elite class to declare.  When a nation and a people really need to go to war there is no doubt, no question - everyone knows war is necessary.  But the Iraq war doesn't happen this way.  First the neo-conservatives already had in place, as early as 1992, position papers asserting the economic need to develop a permanent military presence in the middle-East.  So that when the second Bush comes to power, their central strategic thinkers (Chaney, Perle, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld) were already pre-disposed to such an adventure, and 9/11 gave them the excuse.

[I am of the view that 9/11 was some kind of inside job.  To what degree people within our government colluded with the terrorists is unclear, but the evidence is not unclear.  Too many questions have gone unanswered, too many questions were covered up or lied about, and too many questions were never asked in the first place.   There is only one reason for shrouding this event in so much secrecy and misdirection - there is something to hide.]

Even so, it was not the temperament of the America People to then attack Iraq, so instead our government, those who hold enormous power as a sacred trust, set out to sell us this war.  And, as we all know now, they lied at every turn.  And the Democratic Party, the opposition Party that needs to be the prime restraint on such excesses of irrational judgment, were so afraid of the power the Republicans held, that they quickly fell in line almost to a man.

Thus, in 2004 and in response to this unjustified war, the Left in American politics, even without a voice (Nader and the Greens really don't count at this point) stirs from its disenchantment and nightmare driven sleep and comes to do battle against the Bush  II administration and its attacks on world freedom, and American civil liberties.  Apparently (given the voter fraud), 202 million are eligible to vote, and 122 million, or 60%, do vote.

The Left has now been so badly abused over the years of this Betrayal, that even now, in a kind of fear of what being Left might be taken to mean, most of those from this part of the political spectrum can only allow themselves to be called progressives.  Even to be a Liberal is to be wrong in the strange world of American politics, and to be called a Leftist, a once proud label for populists and those who sought to serve the downtrodden, is to be fully marginalized.

With Clinton's move to the Center, and the ongoing betrayal of the true Left in the American political spectrum by the Democratic Party, we now can find the real cause of the rise of the Far Right to power.  Without a viable Left in American politics, with real power and with a real voice, there is nothing to balance out the excesses of the Far Right.  Into this vacuum had moved, first the Moral Majority and then Karl Rove, with all the horrible consequences so plainly seen by everyone else in the world, except the bought and sold America Press, that has more and more become in love with its own celebrity, at the expense of their duties to the Republic.

What should be clear is that the Democratic Party serves itself first, and the American People second.  Just recently I read an article which suggested that some Democrats are saying in private, as the 2006 by-elections approach, it might be better for the Party, to not regain power in the House or the Senate, because they might not have the power to really change things, and/or could get blamed for the follow-on errors the Bush II administration adds to their already too long list of incompetent activities.  Forget that the People have needs, the Democratic Party must preserve its own face above all else (or so some are saying).

That election (2006) is now past.  The Democrats claim victory, but given how unanticipated were the changes, it is clear that neither Party (or the pollsters) much understand the American People.   Two facts stood out for me.   The war was a major issue, and in this regard the general perception of incompetence among government officials a significant factor.  This was proved by the increasing disapproval ratings of Bush II.  Even more crucial to my observation was the problem of corruption.   The disapproval ratings for Congress were even worse than those for Bush II.  Given that much power (over the three branches of government), the Republicans could not restrain themselves from enriching themselves and their wealthy corporate friends.   Since the Democrats had done such a poor job as well, this left it up to the American People to speak and speak they did.

There is a lesson here for the Democrats, but not one they are likely to learn.  In addition what do they - the still voiceless progressives and true Left in America - do in the face of what seems a very dark future (for the Democrats are no less corrupt than the Republicans).

As things stand now, both the Kerry and Clinton camps are vying for power in the Democratic Party.   Even with Howard Dean as the head of the Party, there is still no place for the true Left of American Politics.  The Party's economic ideas remain locked in the cabinet of the mind control of the Lords of Finance.  No one wants to actually do anything about the elephant in the living room of American politics, namely the excess power of wealth and privilege over both parties, that has led to the absence of a voice to balance out the excesses of the Far Right.

So, what about all those activists who came out of the closet and and supported Kerry against their better judgments in order to oppose Bush?  Will they lead?  Will they find a representative voice for their interests?

On the answers to these questions the future of the American Republic may well flourish or flounder.  This is, however, not the whole problem and the reader should now move on to the next part: The Betrayal of the Republic, the Constitution and the American People, by the Republican Party.  Both Parties have failed the American People, and neither should be allowed to avoid their responsibility.



Section One: Part Two: The Betrayal of the Republic, the Constitution and the American People, by the Republican Party

[Now we come to how the Idea of the Republic was practiced by the Republicans.]

Everyone assumes that the Two Party system in America has been a bulwark for freedom and enlightened democratic government.  Such an assumption could not be further from the truth.  There is only one party, with two faces - the party of wealth and power.   In Part One: The Betrayal of the Left, and of the whole of American Politics, by the Democratic Party, I looked at this problem from one point of view.  Here, this destruction and betrayal of the Republic is viewed from another.

While the Democratic Party was historically seen (at least in the early 20th Century) as more the Party of the common man, the Republican Party has long been recognized as the Party of the elites of wealth and power.  To be realistic, we shouldn't expect otherwise.   Concentrated wealth will exert an influence - this is simply a lesson of history.

There are really two facets here.  One is the need of the Lords of Finance to dominate, and the other need is for American business people and conservatives to have a political voice.   Yet, the true facts are that the elite powers of wealth have been moving behind the scenes, sculpting and shaping the Republican Platform, while those with more normal business and conservative interests often innocently join for mutual support.

The question we face here is: What happens when a political Party so unites its soul with an such extremely tiny minority of the population, so that it no longer represents even those who vote for this Party, but only the wealthy elite that stand behind it in the role of puppeteer?  The oligarchy of the dominant banking and finance families needed a political front, and the Republican Party was glad to oblige.

Now we need to make a distinction between a Party whose ideology seemingly is conservative, and supportive of business, and a Party which really only serves the interests of the super rich.  This latter influence has for a long time been hidden,  while the Republicans appeared to stand for certain principles - principles that attracted the likes of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Barry Goldwater - clearly men of conscience.

But something happened with the Party which attracted these two men of restraint and conscience.  After a number of years without power (the Roosevelt and Truman terms), the Republicans won with Ike the war hero, only to lose to Kennedy and LBJ, after which the gloves came off.   Subsequently, the Party of wealth and money went with the very flawed Nixon, and began spending in a massive way in the new era of TV.  The power of TV was made clear in 1960 when Kennedy soundly defeated Nixon in the first televised debates.  Thus, in 1964, both presidential candidates spent about $170 million, and then in 1968 about $300 million.  This may seem paltry when compared to the 2004 spending from both sides of $1.2 billion (only in the Presidential campaigns, total political spending was far far higher - about $6 billion - $6,000,000,000.00), but this was the point in time (1964) when raw money power began to outwardly dominate our politics, and for most of the last half of the 20th Century, the Republicans, the Party of the wealthy elites, had the most.

By 1968, the Presidency was now for sale, and there appeared soon after a book: "The Selling of the President", by Joe McGinniss, which explored not just the need for massive money in Presidential campaigns, but also the beginning dominance, in national elections, of the strategies of the advertising profession.

With recourse to raw money power, and with knowledge of the new rules created by the dominance of television, the nature of national politics changed completely.  No longer were ideas and character of any moment.   It was all about which candidate was the most telegenic and who could out spend who.

Seeing this coming the Lords of Finance recruited an actor for the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, and brought him carefully forward, first as governor of California, and then as President (his actor successor, Arnold Swartzenagger, is now being like-wise carefully developed).  Since it was now all about image and media manipulation, truth became irrelevant.  As long as he could read and deliver a good speech, and as long as the tame press itself abandoned the discussion of ideas for the vanity of a good story (such as who is  ahead, who is winning), the craft of politics became a craft of subterfuge.  A good pollster was more crucial than real character and leadership skills.   Clever sound bites became more important than sound ideas.  The ad campaign, with its carefully structured language, born in the tight control of advertising based focus groups, became more important than a Party platform.

The truth disappeared in a overload of manipulated and false images and slogans.

The hucksterism of the advertising business became more essential than knowing how to govern.  Win first, and then rule later, with the American Citizen just another consumer to be sold patent political medicine, and its actual effectiveness be damned.  We see the fruit of this trend today in all those people who vote for the Republicans, on the basis of what the Republicans say, well all the while what the Republicans do is completely against the real interest of their voting base.

For example, the Republicans have made a near art out of blaming so-called liberals for all the cultural decay that disturbs their base, when the reality is that the dominant force producing cultural decay in America is unregulated big business.   Hollywood doesn't make movies with sex and violence because a liberal elite bent on seducing our children is loose in the world, but because sex and violence make a lot of money for the large media corporations (and also distracts the American public from perceiving the nightmare rule of the Lords of Finance).

Our health care system isn't in a shambles because liberal Democrats want to tax and spend, but because the Republican Party has so carefully defended the prerogatives of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, that the only health cared about is not our physical and emotional health at all, but only the economic health of unrestrained greed and capitalism.  All the same, the propaganda machine of the Republicans is so well oiled and financed that whatever Big Lie it sells is bought by many.

This machine has created a completely false picture, for example, of Ronald Reagan.   It is 100% Myth, with Reagan fast becoming a kind of minor Republican deity (Yes, he was a nice and a kind man, but he lacked the mind and the character to actually understand the real world consequences of his actions).  So it is no wonder then that the rising Religious Right, an incursion into public life by people with a rigid and fundamentalist moral agenda, is so easily brought into the Republican fold.    For both, the Republicans and the Religious Right, the truth is less important than belief, such that myth, ideology and dogma rule their minds and hearts.  They both have the same basic view: Don't disturb me with facts or ask me to think, my mind is already made up.

We now have then three streams of historical process joining together in the modern Republican Party. Behind the scenes, the Lords of Finance make their moves, provide their expertise and take their pound of flesh.  In the forefront, the Party of Lincoln, once devoted to true free enterprise, and once devoted to true conservatism and character, is now addicted to money and power.  To this unholy alliance now joins another - that same fundamentalism that disturbs the world out of the Religion of Islam, has emerged from Christianity seeking to force, by political power and the law, all in its path toward the acceptance of its narrow views of moral absolutes and apocalyptic vision. 

Fundamentalism is reactionary, not conservative.  It wants to go backwards into a imagined past that never actually existed, as a kind of retreat from a present it refuses to understand.  This is why the joining of this vain and self serving religious impulse has moved the Republicans so far to the Right as to almost be off the scale.  Religious fundamentalism, as a political impulse, only can destroy - it never creates.

Think about it.  What were the big issues for this group in the 2004 election?  They were against abortion and against gay marriage.  They are now (as of this writing) also against activist judges.  Everywhere we turn they look at social progress, find it against their moral absolutes, and seek to destroy it.

They also seek to impose on others their moral ideology (a frightening form of tyranny), as if they were better than the rest of us assumed degenerates.  In doing this out of Christianity, they violate their own teachings, for Christ was very clear in separating moral teachings from the civil law: "Render therefore unto Caesar, the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's"

This leads us squarely to the problem of ideology, which is a way of thinking about social reality that can only fail.

An ideology claims to be a set of principles or goals - a way of viewing the social and political world as to how it should be.  The problem is that the world is how it is, and while it is occasionally malleable, its reality is such that most of the time it cannot be coerced into being something it isn't.  This is one of the fundamental lessons of history that political leaders, whether kings or presidents, and political movements, whether of the Right or the Left, so often fail to observe.  The social world changes by rules inherent in its own structure, and most efforts at forcing change really only cause problems that later have to be solved.

Let's look at the War on Drugs, which was instituted by Nixon in 1972, as an example of an ideology that founders on the rocks of social reality.

During the 1960's drug use in the United States escalated, often in part because of the black (illegal and secret) operations of the US government itself.  The hearings on the Iran-Contra affair were designed primarily to hide the fact that the same planes that took arms to Central America, returned to their bases in Florida full of cocaine, which was then sold by the CIA to fund its off the book - black - operations.  This operation was overseen by two military officers who had previously had the same duties in Vietnam, where there they aided Cambodian forces in exchange for heroin. 

It is a policy of the Lords of Finance to make sure that harmful drugs are available to the lower classes (of whatever race) in order to ensure that such places, where leaders might arise who will tend to urge radical changes in social policy, must first fight their way through what is essentially a consciously disabled cultural and social order.

In addition, drugs are very big money.  Money so huge that law enforcement is frequently and easily corrupted in order to look the other way.   In addition, anyone who actually knows anything about drug use knows that this is not a problem for the criminal justice system, but for the health-care system.  Those who manufacture and sell drugs are criminals, but the users are victims of treatable inner weaknesses.

But in our moralistic ideology about drug use, with its vain hypocrisy that excludes alcohol (which still kills tens of thousands a year on our roads), we criminalize drug use, especially of marijuana, until our justice system is in full overload with too many users of mildly euphoric drugs, serving excessive sentences.

We spend billions a year trying to stop drugs, when the only real social effects are to corrupt many levels of law enforcement, and send three quarters of a million minority youth to serious prison time for the simple "crime" of being caught with small amounts of drugs in their possession.

This ideologically driven social policy is an abject failure, because it seeks to impose on society a view of existence that is contrary to social and human reality, and in the end creates ruin and devastation, while solving nothing.  At the same time, this policy does serve the social control needs of the Lords of Finance.

This is then what has come to live in the Republican Party.  Morally absolute ideologies, that cannot create for they make no effort to understand human social existence, but rather only insist it conform to their assumptions, which when you check their rate of success, always fail.  And, which morally absolute ideologies are also encouraged from behind the scenes by the mal-intentions of elite wealth concerning social control.

The Democrats are not free of this either, for the War on Poverty was also lost.  So has been the War on Drugs (a Republican creation), and so will the War on Terror, for the thinking behind these activities has nothing to do with social reality, and everything to do with pretense, hypocrisy, ignorance and arrogance - logically these policies are stupid, until one takes the view from high above in the realms of elite wealth, where such policies serve quite other purposes then what we are told via the bought and sold political parties.

With the 2nd Bush years, and the dominance created by the amoral and destructive political activities of Karl Rove, a religiously intolerant fascism has now begun to emerge into our shared public life.  As well, the financial elites get from the Republican controlled Congress everything they want.  These elites now even get to write the legislation that is to "regulate" their activities.  And then to make matters worse, the 2nd Bush Administration has abandoned two Centuries of careful evolved international relations to vainly seek to become an imperial world power.  Meanwhile, the Religious Right is everywhere being allowed to assert its moral absolutes into all our lives.

We see now the horror that appears when the power that corrupts begins to see itself as absolute and unlimited.  Our government turns against its own People, and the assault on the last bastion of our freedoms, our civil liberties, is slowly moving forward.  Bit by bit, our civil rights are disappearing, and no longer is there any evidence that the majority of our pubic officials understand their real duties to the People and to the Republic.

Let us now look at the specifics of this attack on our civil liberties:

Fascism doesn't arrive all on once.  It sneaks up on us, as government more and more assumes it possesses the prerogatives to control our freedoms.  Sometimes these changes are subtle and sometimes they are overt, but by whatever path the result is the same - the government more and more asserts its powers to the detriment of the citizens.

The Republic is meant to be a limited grant of power,  and the public servants holders of a sacred trust.  When the public servants substitute their personal religious and ideological agendas for true service to the People, they usurp powers that do not belong to them.  In point of fact, neither Party has won with a majority for years, given that most People, by not voting, are essentially voting for none of the above.

The result is that the Party in power, has more and more assumed that it is the voice of the People, and that as such it can and should do whatever it is capable of doing that accords with its ideology.  But the fact is that whether it is the Republicans or the Democrats, only about 30% of the eligible electorate (never more) voted for that Party, while another 30% voted for the other guys and the rest couldn't even bother.  This is no majority, nor can it ever honestly be called a mandate.

Let's look now at how the current Party in office has been exercising its power (but not its mandate or trust).

For example, in recent years, first the Republican Party and now the Democrats too, have taken to making their gatherings free of any show of dissent.  The public is not to see the candidates confronted by demonstrators, and so, with the cooperation of the Secret Service and local law enforcement, there have been created "free speech zones" far from the political gatherings and out of sight of the cameras (remember those changes that came with TV).

The television lawyer-writer, David E. Kelley, even has one of his characters, a woman on trial for reacting violently to being forcibly removed from her place of protest to one of these zones, say: "I thought the whole of America was a free speech zone!"

There are also many city ordinance that give the police the power to evaluate the "safety" of public assemblies, to require permits in certain circumstances, and if determined by law enforcement to be "unsafe", authority is given to disperse the crowds.

All of this in the face of the clear language of the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech,..or the right of the people to peaceably assemble..."

Yet, in the arrogance of the time, the Right moves with the power of an advancing glacier toward the goal of ever increasing social control and more and more theft of our freedoms

For example, there are the "decency" rulings being made by a small body (three men) on the Federal Communications Commission.  These rulings, prompted by the manic whining of just a few groups on the Religious Right, have created a whole new level of assault on modern culture.  The Congress has joined in, and now threatens, not just the so-called public airwaves, but cable, the Internet and other means in which "free speech" is transmitted, with huge financial penalties and even criminal incarceration for violations of "decency". 

We need to keep in mind what was noted above, that 40% of eligible voters did not vote in the last election.  The remaining 60% was almost equally divided between the Democrats and the Republicans, which means that only 30% of eligible voters approved the Republican lies.   Of that 30%, at the most only a third (10% of the whole) represents the Religious Right.  Of this group of the population, perhaps only one in a hundred thousand are activists of the Right (part of organized groups, who agitate for their views)  Thus, the decency rules are in response to a group that represents less than .01% of the public.  The Republican Party now spends so much time courting what they call "their base", that we really do now live in the time of a tyranny of a minority as regards cultural issues.

Of course the real question is who gets to decide what is "decent", a vague term with almost no meaning.  The idea, that three men, all appointed by the Republican Party, and responsive to a very small percent of the People (the whining Religious Right), should determine what the whole of us should be able to hear and see over "our" airwaves, is the real indecency and obscenity.  Just consider the loss to our culture, of the humor we need to hear and see, in order to still be able to laugh in this time of increasing dismay and chaos.  These marching minority powers of "decency" not only would rid us of the apparently liberal Bill Maher on HBO, but also the genius of the seemingly conservative Blue Collar Comedy on cable's Comedy Central.

How long before certain kinds of  "political speech" are deemed "indecent"?  Don't think so?  Consider this scenario.  The FCC starts to find some speech (remember, this is not tested in Court, but involves the use of power applied by a regulatory body) "offensive", such as might demean someone, for example a religious leader.  If this can be established, then it is not too far to find criticism of a public official as "offensive", and there goes freedom of political speech.

At the time of this writing, new laws concerning sedition are being urged in Congress - sedition being basically a crime of ideologically wrong thought, characterized by speech and political organizing that seeks to replace an existing goverment.  Our founders were all guilty of sedition.  It is one of the last steps toward facism that goverments need to make - namely to insure that they make criminal active opposition to their abuses of power.

To top it off, revelations continue to come forward showing the clearly illegal wiretapping authorized by Bush II shortly after 9/11.  Then, only a few weeks later, it is discovered (by leaks within an increasing courageous - but still frightened - government bureaucracy) that millions of telephone records were sold by large communications corporations to the National Security Agency, again in violation of the Federal Communications Act of 1936 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1979.

Then of course there was the Patriot Act and the assault on Civil Liberties that followed.

In our constitutional system of checks and balances, when the Executive Branch exceeds it constitutional authority, the main restraint is the Judicial Branch, which cannot act immediately, and must not only await an appropriate court case, but also has to await the sometimes over lengthy appeals process, before our highest Court can settle the matter.

Into this time-void, the 2nd Bush administration has leapt, asserting all kinds of extra-constitutional powers, powers never previously claimed by any prior administration.  This includes the right to detain prisoners of war at places outside the United States, and because they are outside our borders, the powers of the Courts are supposed to be unable to reach them.  This is not only wrong, but silly.  The very idea that one part of the Republic had an arena of activity, where the checks and balances of the other two Branches could not reach, is absurd.  The Republic is a whole, and where the Executive goes, so goes the rest.

The Administration has also claimed the power to declare a United States Citizen to be an "enemy combatant", and thereby strip this citizen of their civil rights.  Further, the Administration claimed the power to make this determination in such a way that no U.S. court can review it.  Again a power was asserted quite at odds with the fundamental nature of the Republic.

In many of the cases above, the Courts have held that the Administration does not have such power.   Yet, there have been a few cases where judges have accepted the argument that Executive power is nearly unlimited - something our Founders clearly intended to totally  prevent   However, the point here is not that the Courts eventually tended to side with the prisoners and the citizens, but rather that the Administration asserted such powers at all.  This seeking after extraordinary power is the real cause for concern, for the reality is that such claims of power actually amount to a violation of the President's oath of office - a violation that ought to lead to impeachment, but given the powers currently exercised by the Republican Party, there is no doubt they will not bring any such indictment against the 2nd Bush.

We need to keep in mind that the framers of the Constitution did not make the oath of office of the President an oath to the People or the Nation, but to the Constitution: "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute of Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

This oath was created by people who understood that the Constitution and the Republic were the most delicate of Ideas, and that these Ideas would need great care lest they be abused by the natural hungers of men for power and wealth.  We now live in the time of their greatest fears.  A Party has come to authority that has inwardly succumbed to a frightful "addiction to power", the same fateful arrogance that led George the 3rd to the abuses of the Colonies that was later to lead to revolution.  There is nothing the current Republicans will not presume to judge or know or claim power over.

With the Religious Rights assaults on an "activist judiciary", we now see the effort to not only control the Executive and the Legislative Branches, but also the Judicial Branch of our  government.  A tame judiciary, believing it must bow to the fickle will of a religious minority, will be the final blow to our Constitutional Republic.

Even so, we have yet to discuss any details of the Patriot Act, which contains the most clear assault on our Civil Liberties of all...

Here is a summary of the key phrases (section 802):

 A person engages in domestic terrorism if they do an act “dangerous to human life” that is a violation of the criminal laws of a state or the United States, if the act appears to be intended to:  (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.  Additionally, the acts have to occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States and if they do not, may be regarded as international terrorism.



Section Two: Part One: Rediscovering true Democratic and Republican Virtues, within the Idea of Citizen Governance

[Now we get to look at little more closely at the Idea of the Republic in the sense of what can we do to restore it to the natural pre-eminence which its Noble Purpose (a nation of the people, by the people and for the people) deserves.]

It would be nice to start right out with something more kind, but to see more clearly what needs to be redeemed, it is necessary to make a few general statements about what is wrong at a fundamental level.

The first aspect of this problem is: the absence of reason in public life.

It is human nature to reason to a foregone conclusion.  We have an end in mind, and then find the thoughts and reasons that support that end.  We see this often in the votes in our Legislative Halls, wherein individual Senators and Congressmen vote along Party lines.  Such votes show unequivocally that reason had nothing to do with the judgments being made, and only a fool (of which there are many in our Legislative Halls) would claim in the face of this evidence that reason and rational judgment can lead to votes along strict Party lines.  We are left then with a quite serious unanswered question:  If it is not reason and rational judgment that leads to votes in our Legislative Halls, what stands behind the results?

In modern times we are right to obey the dictum common in television crime shows: follow the money.  If we follow the money, or look for related motives (such as the raw exercise of arbitrary power), we find the rationale for most of the decisions in our former temples of government.  The Parties have sold their souls for power and money, and no longer does reason or rational judgment determine the nature and results of government action.  This we saw clearly in the historical analysis in the preceding two Parts of Section One: Degeneration.  The love of money (the root of all evil) and the addiction to nearly unlimited power are now the main base motives ruling our Republic, that is if there is any Republic left at all.

A second aspect of the problem is: the absence of the truth in public life.

Let's look at some fundamental present realities.  Politicians routinely lie.  Everyone knows this, although some will try to justify it.  There are a variety of lies.  The most common is just the general level of bullshit - exaggerations, meaningless platitudes, and not answering questions that are asked, but wandering off into some other subject.  Next are the lies by omission - there is so much today that is hidden, made secret and otherwise never told to the public.  Then there is spin, which is a very clever lie in part because it is so acceptable.  If the truth or facts or their interpretation can be made to slide in a direction favorable to the politician, there goes honesty and the truth.  Then there are the outright lies - we saw a lot of those leading up to the Iraq War.  Less obvious, but often much worse, are what are called the Big Lies.   The Lords of Finance like the Big Lie.  I leave to the  reader the thinking up of examples, but the fact remains we live in a political culture that is so filled with lies, the truth is almost impossible to find.

Now imagine, for example, what would happen if every speech by a politician had to be delivered in a court of law, after which they could be cross-examined, and evidence offered to impeach their credibility.  Little political speech would pass such rigorous testing, and this includes the statements and writings of commentators and other talking heads on TV or in the written media.  Our public discourse takes place in venues where it is not immediately critically examined.  In the absence of ongoing and immediate critical examination, it is unnecessary for political speech to require of itself either reason or truth.  No one, it is assumed, is going to question authority, whether it is a politician or a TV personality.  It is far past the time for all that to change, and if one is paying attention to the Internet - the truly free and awake media - that change is already in process (although even this is threatened, by a increasing incursion into the basic structures of the Internet by corporations seeking to control the pipeline and determine which websites will have the easiest access).

There was a time we thought that the Press would supply this counter-force to the irrational lies of politicians, but the Press has become solely about making money, and is no longer even capable of serving this function, much less actually interested in undertaking such a responsibility.

It is then up to us, to supply the missing critical functions by providing both truth and reason to public discourse - that is if we want to change our public life.  To some extent we can find this already happening in various places.  Yet to help provide some more potent guidance, lets now look at the virtues that were once the core of either Party, the Republicans or the Democrats.

The Democrats were inclusive - everyone was welcome under their tent.  Sure this made for loud and disorderly meetings, with lots of arguments and conflicts, but in the end people understood that they had to come to a consensus to have power.  They also at one time questioned the reality of free market capitalism.  They tried to understand the secrets of high finance (see Appendix A), and refused to accept the conventional wisdom that holders of capital needed maximum freedom or that the competition of the market place would overcome the temptations of greed.  If we saw anything in the 1990's, we saw the falsification of that view.

For the Democrats, the ordinary workers and their families - the citizens - were the bedrock of the nation, and had to have the greatest voice in public affairs.

For the Republicans, there did need to be certain ideals - certain conventions which allowed business to flourish in a way that benefited all, and that the conduct of public life needed to be virtuous.  Small government was preferred to large government and taxation would thereby be kept to a minimum (of course, with the current fake Republicans in office, government spending - and borrowing - grows at alarming rates in order to benefit the military-industrial complex, while taxes on the very wealthy are reduced and the taxes on the middle class and the poor are increased (often indirectly by increasing social security taxes, and so-called luxury taxes such as on gas and cigarettes).

Now within these natural divisions there were certain tensions that went all the way back to the original framers of the Constitution.  One was do we have a strong federal government, or do we have a weak central government, with most of the true power in the States.  For a long time there was a lot of well reasoned virtue in the idea of State's Rights, of which the beginning considerations of Barry Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative" gives a decent explication (the later chapters are falsified by his ideological tendencies).  The problem was that social progress was being held back within the States by this assertion of weak powers for the central government.    So for example, first slavery, and then segregation was justified as a matter for the States alone.

There then came a time when the majority of Americans could not any longer tolerate this intolerance, and while State's Rights were valid in the sense of the original ideas of the framers, the whole Society needed a more cogent moral center, and the only way for this to happen was for Federal powers to be expanded.  In a similar way, during the first half on the 20th Century, the use of police powers was often excessive with regard to the poor and weak, so that the same social conscience appeared for a time in the Warren Court.

In these examples we can see an important general underlying social law (not an ideological principle, but how societies actually work).  Societies will progress in spite of the rules and ideals which were honored in the past.  While there is law and order on one hand, there is also the will of the People and their interest in social justice on the other; and, this will for social justice is stronger than law and tradition.  Law and tradition would have made the colonies remain allied to England, but social justice - the conscience of the People - required something else.  And, when the resistence to social justice by those in power is too strong, violent revolutionary change becomes necessary.

Even today, where the Lords of Finance work behind the scenes in all manner of ways to exert social control and manage large populations of people, the force of conscience for social justice is stronger.  In a great sense, violence in a society on any large scale connected to social justice is always the fault of those in power, who prefer to cling to their privileges rather than admit to the wiser will of the social conscience.

What does this mean for the future?

Well for one thing it means we are on the cusp of considerable danger.  The more the central authority tightens the screws of social control, the more injustice they will create.  The more injustice is created, the stronger will have to be the response of the social conscience.

What I tried to portray in Section One: Degeneration, was that the Parties cannot any longer be looked to for healthy social leadership.  They are too involved in perpetuating themselves and far too addicted to both the power and the money provided by the Lords of Finance.  In this, Section Two: Redemption, we are trying to outline how Citizen Governance (see Appendix B) can step into the vacuum, and provide the needed leadership out of its own forces.

Step One: Come together locally.  The house which has been currently divided against itself, by the amoral activity of the Parties, will have to find its own way to mutual appreciation and understanding.  Democrats and Republicans, Greens and conservative Christians, will have to begin to talk together.  Not all in the beginning, but at least some.  There is no greater service any individual citizen can offer to this time in which we live, than to step past the forced divisions and begin to recognize their neighbor as just another struggling human being.

If we pay enough attention to the subtleties, this is already happening.

Step Two: Change the conversation.  Reason and truth must become what we share with each other.  This will not be easy, and I have written a little about this problem in the essay on Renewal Groups (see Appendix C).  In every local area where people of divergent political opinions begin to gather in recognition of their mutual humanity, conversation about the deeper aspects of public life becomes possible.

This two is already emerging, if we realize a Renewal Group doesn't have to be called a Renewal Group (it could be called Code Pink, for example.).

Step Three: Take the discussion as deep as possible, for example, all the way into whether the current Constitution is any longer adequate and ought to be rewritten from the ground up.  This is a profound social and political discussion, and it is not necessary to reach a conclusion.  Merely by taking the conversation that deep, and finding and sharing resources that help such a conversation, we change at the ground level the whole nature of public awareness.  We change ourselves, and in doing so make it imperative that the politicians and the Lords of Finance begin to address us in new ways.

In a sense, we take the Enlightenment, which at one time was the sole property of an educated elite, and make it the common possession of the ordinary citizen.  This was the Jeffersonian Ideal, that the citizen would be enlightened as to the fundamental issues and questions of what it means to be a citizen, and a member of a People and a Nation, where self governance of the People, by the People and for the People was the highest ideal.  When we take up this discussion and change the conversation, we take up a power far superior to the mere vote.  This power of the citizen to grasp the fundamental questions of governance will force the public conversation, previously dominated by the politicians and the Lords of Finance, onto entirely new tracks.

Is there more?  Should we look deeper into ourselves?   While it seems as if the Lords of Finance and the Two Parties have become the enemy of the American People, is that how we should treat them?  With these questions we get to the inner most core of the question of Redemption, which then leads us to: