why play by the rules, when the game is already fixed?

[*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 - no doubt due in part to changes in education that have left aside a proper teaching of Civics), that there is so little of that former common sense appreciation of the true nature of our form of government, that we now have to call such an appreciation: uncommon.  At the same time, the use of this phrase, "uncommon sense", has also become more 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.]

preface

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.  To endeavor to write of the complex in simple terms means always to oversimplify - to skip past this or that historical nuance.   While I have then painted the picture with broad strokes of the brush, I believe the central themes are rendered correctly.  Basically, I hope that this essay may contribute to a much better, and healthier, conversation on American political life.

Since what is sought here is 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.

some acknowledgments

I got some very important help with language from Harvey Bornfield (http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/HarveyBornfield.html - see also the book Silent Passage).  I also received a great deal from my 16 years participation in the Center For American Studies at Concord, under the stewardship of Stuart Weeks.  Helpful challenges to my thinking on many occasions came from Steve Burman, Frank Fawcett and Kelly Sutton.  Special inspiration came from Carl Stegmann, author of The Other America: the West in the Light of Spiritual Science.

 

table of contents

Introduction: anticipating the whole (page 4)

Section One - Degeneration

Part One: The Betrayal of the Left, and of the whole of American Politics, by the Democratic Party (page 5)

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

Section Two - Redemption

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

Part Two: America as Mystery

Part Three: A Pragmatic Solution to the American Dilemma - writing a Second American Constitution. This section includes an updated version of the Declaration of Independence

Section Three - The Real Power of Citizenship, both as an American and as a Citizen of the World - as lives in our moral powers for: speaking the truth, using reason and occasionally applying individual acts of sacrifice.

Appendices: elaborations of certain particular themes

Appendix A: Money and Debt: the Company Store in the 21st Century 

Appendix B: Citizen Governance

Appendix C: Renewal Groups

Appendix D: Civil Society

Appendix E: The original Declaration revised

Appendix F: Some material about the author, Joel A. Wendt

Appendix G: a wonderful contribution by the author of Babylon Five

Appendix H: Counter-Moves

Appendix I: Jim Garrison's summation at the Clay Shaw trial concerning the JFK assassination (from the public record).

Appendix J: Dennis Burke's Eulogy to Granny D. (Doris) Haddock

Introduction: anticipating the whole

What is being described below is a picture of American Political life that can only be partial.  Primarily the latter part of the 20th Century (and up to the present) is discussed, and this in a context intended to place the reality of America in its proper place in world events; and, in particular to see what potential lies yet latent in the American Character (soul and spirit) that can play a role in the future of the Earth.

In a certain sense, the founding of this country through violent revolution was also a contraction of all the political wisdom of Western Civilization into a kind of seed - the U.S. Constitution.  This is a remarkable document, and the Republic that was founded through it, is itself a most unusual social Idea.

But social Ideas are fragile and delicate.  Their ephemeral nature makes it hard for them to endure, for the baser instincts of human beings always try to defeat and erase them.  Such is the case with the development of the American Experiment.

It is not so much that this Experiment failed, but rather that in the confrontation, between such a magnificent Idea and the actual workings of political and social processes, the Idea will more and more tend to become a mere Ghost of Itself, as the so-called practical leanings of human beings more and more ignore its Noble Presence over time, and substitute for this Idea their own dark yearnings and hungers.

This is the way of humanity - to move in between the Noble Ideas of our better nature, and the raw earthly urges of our appetites.

The consequence of this very natural process, as regards the Idea of the Republic, is what is described in Section One as Degeneration.  Now we come to the time, if we wish to halt such a process and turn it around, when we must again renew our acquaintance with the fundamental Idea.

This too is a natural process and is already happening in America.  In support of this already ongoing social process to return to our Ideal Roots, then comes Section Two on Redemption.

The danger/temptation is, of course, that we might have to once again experience violent revolution.  People are right to be fearful of such events, and because I feel that it is not necessary to take such a path, I then offer Section Three on the real power of the Citizen as lives in our moral powers for: speaking the truth, using reason and occasionally applying individual acts of sacrifice.

So then, this essay seeks to take us through the natural Degeneration of an Idea, towards its Redemption, by means of our individual moral powers as Citizens.

Degeneration

"Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high  places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in few hands and the republic is destroyed."*

(*attributed to Abraham Lincoln, in an article by Molly Ivins)

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, such that 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 (this term may be new to the reader, but as this essay proceeds, more and more detail will be provided), 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 to create a situation where both political Parties agreed 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.

*["The country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar . . . I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to trial and bid defiance to the laws of our country. I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies - " attributed to Thomas Jefferson in Sam Smith's Progressive News, 2007]

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 so-called free markets. 

For example, John Maynard Keynes, a recognized deep economic thinker is alleged* to have said: "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all."

*[Often quoted, but no one can find the original source - evevn so the idea remains quite apt.]

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 (some even assert this crash was intentionally caused, so that certain members of the Lords of Finance could buy up corporations for bargain basement prices*).

*[an addendum for the latest addition ... a similar process is occurring today in relationship to the so-called sub-prime housing market crisis.  Only this time, it is U.S. banks eating ordinary folks homes, and international money buying U.S. corporations.  Major financial meltdowns always draw out the jackals.  The deeper question remains: Did some of the economic predators, wolves and pirates all, intentionally and knowingly cause the housing market bubble and then its crash?]

This theft of the economic powers belonging to the American People by a private group was accompanied by a similar strangulation of technology by the same finance and banking families.  For example, consider these technological choices, which must in the end be added to all the choices the Lords of Finance have made so as to favor their economic dominance.  Around the same time that Central Banking was being put in place, the banking and finance institution run by J.P. Morgan was abandoning the work of the electrical genius Nicola Tesla, because Tesla was beginning to show that it would be possible to electrify the whole world quite cheaply using the Earth itself as a conductor.  No power lines, no dams everywhere, no privately owned energy companies - just seven major generating stations, and all you have to do is stick a properly designed rod in the ground and you have electricity.  And that was just one of Tesla's ideas that was thrown out (no longer supported) by the Lords of Finance.

In the latter quarter of the 20th Century another genius, this time Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute has been showing via his mastery of multiple technologies and the nature of energy finance problems, that there are all kinds of solutions to the oil crisis and other similar energy problems that are simply not applied because the owners of industry have no interest in providing a benefit to ordinary people, which benefit they think comes out of their already over-full pocket.  See the article in the New Yorker Magazine for Jan. 22, 2007.  You could also check out the Bioneers movement (http://www.bioneers.org/), to see that all manner of solutions to multiple ecological problems exist.   Tragically there is no will among the Lords of Finance to apply these solutions broadly for the benefit of humanity, there being no profit in it (although Lovins can usually show that there can be profit if people just occasionally work together instead of only compete).  The idea of the importance, and necessity, of competition is another essentially religious myth of the financial establishment (all kinds of viable economic organizations and arrangements exist that are based on cooperation, instead of competition).

The reader is encouraged here to realize that at the same time the Lords of Finance have been using their stolen economic powers to subvert democratic political processes for their own benefit, they have also prevented multiple and viable technology from being applied for the benefit of us all.  They would rather own the world, then be its stewards.  This is an outrageous childish excess that now has come to seek to own and control all the water in the world (as well as all the seed we need for agriculture), regardless of human need (and as absurd as it sounds, I don't doubt that if they could find a way to own the very air we need to breath, they would seek to possess that for their own selfish advantage as well).

To return to our theme...

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 (through the outside influence of the Lords) 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 a degree of 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 religious-like 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.

In the years leading up to the 1996 election, Nixon's now exposed 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.

The existence of this class warfare was recently admitted by billionaire Warren Buffett in an interview with Lou Dobbs on CNN: "It's class warfare, and my class is winning, but they shouldn't be". [The reader is encouraged to Google this conversation to hear the full context.]

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 initially trained by Nixon's own dirty tricks guru Lee Atwater (Karl has since gone far beyond Atwater, having his own unique genius), 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 appears* to be all about winning power for the wealthy and privileged, and ideas and ideologies were only tools.

*[Although at some level, it might be better to describe the actual effects of his activity as revealing him more as an agent of chaos, than an agent of order - whether he knew/knows this would be so, is a question that at present can't be answered, unless, we assume that the kind of order he sought to induce was something beyond our ability to yet imagine.  See in this regard the last essay in the appendix: Counter-Moves.]

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 at this time still without a voice, and turning to Nader as a surrogate for its views, embarrassingly seem to 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 (keep in mind, this absurd characteristic of the Kerry-Bush election - both are* members of the secretive Yale Skull and Bones Society).

*[It is an interesting questions as to when, if every, one ceases to be a member of this Yale fraternity of the elites of power and wealth.  It would appear, from the point of view of the Lords of Finance, since the conduct of the War in Iraq (as part of the now permanent War on Terror) was not at issue, nor was the general economic reality at issue either, the Kerry-Bush election was win-win - who actually won made no difference to the underlying power relationships.]

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 35,000 Americans at the time of the latest revision of this essay - with estimates in the hundreds of thousands for the Iraqis).  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 (Cheney, 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. [For a detailed legal proof of the lies behind the war, and of the crime of fraud committed against the American People and the Congress, read the book: U.S. vs. George W. Bush et al. by Elizabeth de la Vega, a former Federal prosecutor with over 20 years experience.]

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.

*[Just consider the frequent excuse, given by those inside the beltway (Washington press insiders), that they have to behave in such a fashion (toady up to power) in order to have any kind of access at all.  They like going to parties, and hobnobbing with wealth and power, and the feeling it gives them to be a part of the Court of the Lords of Finance and their surrogates the establishment leaders of both political parties.  It never seems to occur to them that it is only as true outsides that they will find the sane objectivity the American People so desperately need from the so-called free press.]

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 were saying in private, as the 2006 by-elections approached, that 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 is the thought, for 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, two ideas vie for power in the Democratic Party - hope and change (carried by a black candidate) vs. experience with power (carried by a woman candidate).   Both are centrists, and neither really challenges the underlying class warfare which causes most of our social ills.  Oh, the words are there, but Obama (who as of this edition has won) is not actually doing anything new.  Great stirring speeches, but all kinds of evidence that once in the Presidency, he will cooperate with the financial establishment (the Lords of Finance) as has every President for almost a century.

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.

This is so even though the Lords of Finance have just about destroyed the American Economy and the value of the dollar, with their latest criminal manipulation of obscure markets in fake (derivatives) financial instruments.  (Google the essay: $100 Billion and Counting: How Wall Street Blew Itself up, by Pam Martens, Counterpunch).

The system is rigged and it is now a real question of whether the rest of us are any longer morally required to play by the rules of an essentially fixed economic game.

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 for most of the 20th Century 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 true 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 such an 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 official (not including soft money) 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.  In the 2008 elections, this number will no doubt double (at least).

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 (read carefully concerning Reagan's kitchen cabinet), 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.

Any possible sense of the truth now completely disappeared in a overload of manipulated 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 imagined cultural decay that disturbs their base, when the reality is that the dominant force producing that seeming 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.

Here is a quote, from what for some will be an odd source, but I think the reader will see the wisdom.  From science fiction writer Frank Herbert's novel Dune: "When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way.  Their movement becomes headlong - faster and faster and faster.  They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until its too late."

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 (or as Herbert has it: off the precipice).  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 themselves have also 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 and advisers 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 social environments, where leaders might arise who will tend to urge radical changes in social policy, will be structured such that potential leaders must first fight their way through what is essentially a consciously disabled cultural and social order.

*[For details as to why, see appendix H: Counter-Moves.]

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.   As well, 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 to 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 than 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 public 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 whole 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 true 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 (whose leadership in the big cities is always political) 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 (if they could) of the apparently liberal Bill Mahre 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.

Recently some Republicans urged new laws be created concerning sedition - sedition being basically a crime of ideologically wrong thought, characterized by any speech and political organizing that seeks to replace an existing government.  Our founders were all guilty of sedition.  It is one of the last steps toward fascism that governments 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 increasingly courageous - but still frightened - government bureaucracy) that millions of telephone records were made available 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 leaped, 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.  [Since writing that, the Democratic leadership has come to power in the Legislative Branch after the 2006 by-election, and has so-far promised no impeachment as well!]

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 (and his fellow aristocrats) 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.

This definition of what is a domestic terrorist is so loose that all manner of protest activity would or could now be claimed to be domestic terrorism, because it is the very nature of protest to express through civil disobedience (break laws) with the intent to influence the policy of the government.  Now people can argue that making protests illegal is not the intent of the Patriot Act , but we are here not involved in someones spin on what the intent is, but are instead called to be very awake to the already proven tendency of the current Republican administration to reach beyond the rational limits of its real constitutionally limited power to effect its will in extra-constitutional ways.  What is ideally right, in the sense of our Republic (the exercise of a sacred trust), has been exceeded now by the treasonous vanity of a government choosing to do what it egotistically can instead.

Imagine the Nixon administration having this power during the heights of the anti-war protests in the late 1960's and early 1970's.  Under the already established style of the Bush II administration, leaders of effective protests could essentially be charged as domestic terrorists under the Patriot act, stripped of their civil rights, and sent off to extra-national venues to be tortured - all of which actions this administration has already taken.

Then, just recently (October, 2006), under the guise of fighting terrorism, the President was granted near absolute powers to determine, without restraint of any kind, whether someone (including an American Citizen) is an "enemy combatant", to detain such a person without recourse to habeus corpus (judicial review), and to practice rendition (sending someone to a foreign country to be tortured), or torture them at home.  This legislation was given the lame and misleading name: The Military Commissions Act of 2006"

There are two historically established facts which overcome any objection of those who would suggest this could never happen.

The first is a psychological fact of history: Leaders intoxicated with their powers begin after a time to identify their will as the real will of the People.  They lose the ability to distinguish their egotism from their actual duties as a part of the State, under the rule of law of a democratic constitutional Republic.  Nixon actually did this, as can be seen by the tapes, and the same has also been true with regard to other leaders.  This becomes a kind of megalomania, with the consequence that whatever angers or bothers the leader, the leader sees as a threat to the Nation, which then justifies any abuse of power to correct.

The second fact is as follows: power always gets used.  This also history teaches us, which is why we are currently in so much danger.  Not only that, but much of this kind of power is beyond the law.  It is properly called raw power, which means that the State can use its apparatus in illegal ways, often with impunity.  A great deal of what was done in the 1960's and early 1970's was illegal, but was justified within the apparatus of the State with all the usual twisted logic.  The FBI was used to illegally investigate political groups whose only problem was that they strongly disagreed with those in power in Washington.  The same is happening today, not only in the sense of the searching and wiretapping kinds of investigation using the special rules of the Patriot Act, but the FBI actually goes out and interviews and intimidates citizens who are doing nothing but planning on exercising their constitutionally protected civil rights.  Even the Secret Service has been used by the Administration to keep so-called protesters from exercising their civil rights to confront the Administration publicly and peaceably.  Under no circumstances is the protesters' conduct an actual threat other than that the TV would see the President being criticized.  This is already an egregious abuse of the power of the State.

I don't think we want to know what's next, but I believe we should summon the courage to examine the possibilities.

As everyone should know today, our economy is as fragile as is the environment.  They are also interrelated in significant ways.  Were one to begin to fail in any large way, so would the other.   Although the exact manner of such a collapse of civilization is not predictable, the likelihood of something happening is very high - just consider what will happen when (as it must) cheap oil disappears, or when the certain to come collapse of the housing market bubble arrives (this sentence was originally written in 2003, four years before the actually collapse that anyone with their head out of the sand could see coming).

Now the Lords of Finance are not stupid.  They can see the writing on the wall as well as anyone else can, who bothers.  We face a time in which large numbers of Americans (not to mention other Peoples) could become unemployed.  If 25% of our work force were to become unemployed, what would happen?  Well one thing that could happen is what we call civil unrest - people marching in the streets demanding the government do something.  This means that the Lords of Finance need stronger capacities for social control through their surrogates the politicians.

So we get the assertion of extraordinary powers under the Patriot Act, as well as the New Freedom Act (mandatory testing of children and adults for "mental illness").  The Patriot Act (coupled with the Military Commissions Act of 2006) would allow the government to suppress dissent (civil unrest) with ease, and the New Freedom Act would allow the government to test and medicate all manner of supposedly unreasonable people.

Don't think this is how things work?   The Patriot Act, at 300 plus pages, was not written in response to 9/11.  It was already written and waiting on the shelf for an appropriate moment to introduce.  Which it was, when Congress in shock from 9/11 and thinking it was under personal attack because of the Anthrax scare, would have passed anything without reading it, which is exactly what happened.

Neither of these Acts is about Patriotism or Freedom, but in our far too real version of the novel 1984's vision of Newspeak, black is declared white and white is declared black - or Patriotism means screw people's civil rights and New Freedom means mental drugs for anyone who doesn't pass the "test".  Neither the Bush II administration, or the Republican Party are anymore interested in public service and acts of public trust.  Everything is about the abuse of power in order to achieve whatever social control is needed in order to keep the Very Rich - the Lords of Finance and their politician puppets - on top, while any lie in support of that agenda will serve.

Remember, the new fascism, theocratic or otherwise, isn't going to arrive all at once.  Like a very nasty slow acting computer virus, it comes a bit at a time, quietly erasing our civil liberties and slowly replacing them with ever more government control.  The Lords of Finance don't mind this, anymore than they minded the rise of fascism in World War II.  Armed conflict makes money for industry and for banks that have positioned themselves with the right cleverness.  In fact, in today's world, private armies are growing at an alarming rate (there are well over 20,000 highly paid mercenaries in Iraq, for example), and the Lords, being international business folks, have made sure that there are plenty of havens in which to hide, plenty of paid security to keep them safe from terrorism, or even religious fascism.  Maybe they aren't worried, but I don't think we have the same luxury.

Redemption

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 preeminence which its Noble Purpose deserves (a nation of the people, by the people and for the people).]

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).

Some of this problem (in the sense of the absence of reason and truth in public discourse) is rooted in failures within our systems of education.  We live in a culture where everyone is encouraged (by word and example) to be in love with their own opinions.  Media is full of talking heads, touting their opinions as just as valid as anyone else's.

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. [Although Keith Olbermann of MSNBC is currently proving that strong rational dissent can be popular (his ratings are increasing, the more truth he speaks)]

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, let us 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 significant question 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 of 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 resistance 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 too 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, it would not hurt a bit to take the conversation all the way into whether the current Constitution is any longer adequate and whether it ought to be rewritten from the ground up.  This is a profound social and political discussion, concerning which 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.

We could, on looking for matters to discuss, go no further than reminding ourselves that in spite of what many politicians do today, under the corrupting influence of the Lords of Finance, there have been times that wisdom walked among us.  Here, some more words from Eisenhower's Farewell Address:

"As we peer into society's future, we - you and I, and our government - must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

"During the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

"Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

"Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war - as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years - I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

"Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

"So - in this my last good night to you as your President - I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.

"You and I, my fellow citizens, need to be strong in our faith, that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace, with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.

"To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration:

"We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love."

What does this wisdom show us?  Is there more to what we are?  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:

Section Two: Part Two: America as Mystery

[As the following is read, please keep in mind that the American Spirit is a universally human spirit.  It is rooted outside the confines of tradition, language, culture and race, for America is the beginning of a first true People of Peoples.  Everyone who, in seeking personal freedom and dignity for all human beings, puts their life at risk, participates in this universally human impulse, which was best exemplified in the 20th Century, not by a Citizen of the United States, but by the simple courage of a man standing in front of a tank in Tienanmen Square.]

Everyone understands that the world is a place of often violent destruction.  Whether by the forces of nature, or the well known inhumanity of man upon man, our times seem especially troubled and dangerous.  Raw emotions and appetites seem to drive much that happens. The Rich seem only interested in getting richer.  The Powerful only interested in more power.  Those at the top of the heap, prey upon those at the bottom.  Lets see what happens if we try to make a more whole picture of how we have come to this tragic place.

Whether we find God or Chance behind human existence and evolution, for at least the period of written and recorded history there are things we know.  History seems eventually progressive, although it goes through periods of chaos and darkness along the Way.   Ignorance gives way to greater knowledge.  In medicine, for example, blood letting by leaches is abandoned for all kinds of medications that solve many problems of disease that were once intractable.  Society changes and transforms, so that (again for example) the time of the arbitrary power of Kings and Queens gives way to the arising of new forms of government, which in America takes the name: a democratic constitutional Republic.

We need to understand this better.

Civilizations change.  For example, the time of the Pharaohs of Egypt and the Patriarchs and Kings of Ancient Israel gives way to the time of the Greeks and the Roman Empire.  Western Civilization begins and then five or six hundred years ago, natural science arises.

Humanity begins a path of mastery over Nature never before historically seen.  Faith is placed in conflict with Knowledge.  Weapons appear that could destroy all life on the Earth.   Motivated by greed and power, the Earth's climate and food supply are put at risk.  We - the human race - stand on the knife edge of either an age of great creativity, or such a fall from Grace that has never before been seen.

That the world is dominated by the feudal-like wars of the aristocrats of concentrated wealth - the Lords of Finance, who pursue their self-interest to the exclusion of other values, is nothing surprising.  That super wealth would essentially corrupt the political processes of the Western democracies is also quite expectable; and that this would be done in ways largely hidden from the general public is also not only expectable, but something historically predictable.  Think not?  Just consider the novels 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 by George Orwell and Ray Bradbury respectively.  Our artists and cultural geniuses have always seen deeper into social processes than the ordinary citizen, whose main duty has been to raise the children and create the wealth.

[If you want to see even deeper into the future, the modern novels (such as the six novels that begin with Neuromancer) of William Gibson are a good place to start - one-sided of course, but visionary as well.  If you want to see deeper into the history that created our current situation, read the 6 novel, three volume,  Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson].

In point of fact, history teaches a great deal about such processes, although it is a bit strange and tragic that our media seems to have left its mind at home as regards its examination and thinking about the broader meanings, trends and consequences of most of the political and economic activity of the 20th Century.   We have arrived precisely where the macro decisions of those addicted to power and wealth would lead - at a crisis of maturation.

Consider this.  At one time, not to long ago, there was no middle class.  Rather, there were the powerful, mostly those who were aristocrats by blood, and then there were the rest - the serfs, the peasants, the poor and the slaves.  A middle class, somewhat independent of the upper classes, is something new.  This middle class is the consequence of the slow arriving of a world economy, and processes of education that previously had only been available to a few.

When America was founded, the middle class was just appearing and far more people were in the lower classes.  It was essentially an elite educated class that stood up to England, and set us free from the overreaching of the aristocracies of blood.  Ordinary people could understand the basics of the debates however, and so the Republic was born with a broad base of understanding. Even so, the birth of the Republic was more than just a fight between the individual and the elites of power and money.

We need to have respect for what I would like to call: the Genius of History.  Whether one wants to call this a real spiritual manifestation, outside of the will of man, or simply some confusion of raw chance, the fact is that like human biological evolution, the evolution of human societies exhibits  a tendency to ever higher levels of order and direction (it also exhibits the other direction as well).  The Republic comes into being as a high point of thousands of years of human consideration of the nature of government out of questions about the freedom of the individual and how it is that a truly free people might choose to govern itself.  The Republic Itself is an experiment based upon the collected wisdom of the Enlightenment - the condensed understanding of the lessons of History and the insight and intuitions of some very intelligent and wise human beings.

It was no less than the first time in History, that an effort was made to create a form of government in which all were equal.  It was not a perfect effort, slaves, aboriginal peoples, women and others were not given the vote.  Yet, as a first step or iteration of a much larger Idea, it (the Republic) was a remarkable accomplishment, and it is out of Its Genius that America has become what it has become - the dominate Nation State at the end of the 20th Century.

This then we need to clearly see: that at the end of the 20th Century, and the beginning of the 21st, humanity stood on the cusp of its own destruction, while at the forefront of social development stood a single powerful Nation State, whose people were no longer members of one race, one language group, or even one religion.  On the contrary, not only did America possess the first iteration of the Republic, it also had begun its development as the People of Peoples.  These were real social evolutionary powers, although in this fraction of time, too many of these powers are mostly in the hands of the Lords of Finance through their corruption of the political and media classes in America.

The problem for the Lords of Finance is that everything in history undergoes change and can even end.  Their power is impermanent, whatever vain efforts they make to maintain control.  For example, the World Bank and other institutions belonging to the Lords of Finance have begun an effort to co-opt the ideas and language of what is called Civil Society.  This is an important point, so I will now add something as regards this new social/cultural organ - Civil Society (see Appendix D for details).

As the 20th Century (and somewhat before) unfolded, and as human beings became during this time more individual and morally independent, certain moral responses to the world's troubles began to be done outside the usual institutions of the Nation States.  Whether it was the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, Greenpeace, or hundreds of other non-government organizations, ordinary people all over the world began to band together to solve problems quite on their own.  It was as if the moral wisdom of a free human conscience began to seek to influence world events outside of any previously known historical process.

Eventually this collective moral activity became known as Civil Society and one can read about it in many places, which for Americans I recommend: "America's Global Responsibility: individuation, initiation and threefolding", by Jesaiah Ben-Aharon.

Civil Society has then had as a part of its agenda the unmasking of the Lords of Finance, and the turning of the attention of Nation States toward the dangers this group represents as regards National Sovereignty and personal freedom.  In addition, Civil Society confronts the International Trade Organizations over their moral poverty, in that for most of the 20th Century these Trade Organizations have lined the pockets of the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor of the world and of the cultures of the undeveloped nations
.

In response to this, these international organs of the rule of the Lords of Finance have begun to announce their interest in saving the world, a world they have spent most of their time raping and enslaving.  This vain and hypocritical posture was most recently taken by none other than Paul Wolfowitz, one the neo-con architects of the Iraq disaster, who has just been elevated to the Presidency of the World Bank as a reward by the Lords of Finance for his prior devotion to their work of control (which he soon lost due to internal politics).

In his first press conference as President of the World Bank, Wolfowitz announced that he would be directing that agency toward Africa and the corruption there, as well as toward the needs of the world's poor.  This is the new spin being put forward by the Lords of Finance after a century of pillaging the world - "see how nice we are, we have the same goals as Civil Society".

For all their seeming advantage, the Lords of Finance face one very large obstacle - the American People.  As hard as the Lords work to manufacture distraction, such as movies, television, video games and all the joys of electronic addictions, it is not enough, for there is something at the heart of the People of People's which is far too strong to be long subverted and seduced. [recall Lincoln's dictum: "you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time"]

Not only that, the Lords have over-played their hand.  They have gotten too obvious in their machinations - too bold in their exercise of power.  They let a fundamentalist religious group gain power in Washington, not recognizing that such excesses of zealotry would too soon begin to offend the basic goodness of Americans.  The Religious Right in American is really a small minority, who presently have too much sway.  Emboldened by their temporary powers, they have become intoxicated and incautious.  In the Terry Schiavo case, they embraced a view that showed the totalitarian side of their moral absolutism, while Bush II himself, in seeking to change Social Security, failed to recognize how loved and close to American hearts is this basic form of social care.

History shows us again and again how excess brings about its opposite.   George the III, an English King, did not appreciate what was being born across the seas from his throne.  And now, another George - Bush II - makes a similar error, and assumes his rise to power (not really based upon popularity, but rather upon the same kind of cheating that gave him a pass with regard to Vietnam) justifies any thought that runs through his head.

It would be nice if the Genius of History was kinder in its judgments and actions, but alas we humans seem too dense sometimes, and too often need a big knock upside the head before we pay attention.   What this means is that Americans are in for shock after shock until wake up we do, which we slowly are.   Then look out Lords of Finance - the dreaming sleeping giant has woken up, and turned its attention on you!

This then is the deeper American Mystery.  We are a Nation State in what some want to be the last era of Nation States.  We are a People made of Peoples, and we possess as a gift the newest and wisest form of government - a democratic constitutional Republic - itself something not fixed in form, and entirely changeable should we so humbly choose.  In the wise rendering of existence which the Genius of History weaves, Americans, as potential (we would have to take up our true global responsibilities) representatives of the needs of the whole World, have been placed in the way of the continued rule of the Lords of Finance.

Under the rule of the Lords of Finance, and by stealing the power of American military might, the World has been assaulted.  This same dynamic means that the American People, to the extent they throw off the rule of the Lords, will find their way to healing what has otherwise been ruined.  This is not to say we are the only such force in the World, far from it.  Yet, the truth is that no People occupies the position we do.  We have been used to cause much harm.  We have been seduced by too high a standard of living.  We have much to answer for, as regards our sleep.  But all that aside, no People in the World is more dangerous to the continued rule of the Lords of Finance.

How?

By the same methods, outlined at the end of Section Two: Part One: Rediscovering true Democratic and Republican Virtues: the redemption of the Two Party system by Citizen Governance:

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 too 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, it would not hurt a bit to take the conversation all the way into whether the current Constitution is any longer adequate and whether it ought to be rewritten from the ground up.  This is a profound social and political discussion, concerning which 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.

Section Two: Part Three: A Pragmatic Solution to the American Dilemma

Our Republic has been stolen from our People by the abuses of the political process by the Lords of Finance.  There are those who, with some justification, believe that campaign finance reform is the solution, but this solution assumes that the Legislative Branch of our Republic is healthy enough to make the needed changes.  I see no evidence for this assumption at all - it is far too romantic a view of what is possible [the 2006 by-election seems to be demonstrating that the People are finally giving up on Congress - on the legislative Branch - all kinds of people got thrown out].

The truth is that this is a matter that comes down to power, and so far the America People have been convinced that we do not have the power to effect the needed changes.  Yet, only We the People can change that attitude which assumes we are powerless in the face of the activities of the Lords of Finance.  If we do not adjust our attitude, we will never take those steps (and serious risks) that will return the People to their rightful position as the real source of the powers of government.

Right now it seems as if we are alone in this, but that also is not true.  All over the world ordinary people are rising up to challenge the rule of the elites of financial power.  Should the American People take up their true role in this war (and make no mistake, it is a war), then support from all over the world would come toward us.  Just as our Founders were not alone when the time came to separate from the overreaching of the aristocracies of English blood, so too would we not be alone if we take up the task of separating ourselves from the new aristocracies - the aristocracies of wealth.

But to do this we have to - we must - undertake the task of writing a new Constitution.  That is, if we want to engage in this war in the most peaceable fashion possible.  For a long time this war has been fought as a war of ideas, and that is the war we can and must win.

When the First American Constitution was written, it rooted itself in certain principles, which principles today are all the legal precedent we need to do the same act again - to write a Second American Constitution.

We are the source from which the power of any sitting government is derived.  This is first elaborated in the Declaration of Independence, wherein it is stated that the only just powers of a government come from the consent of the governed.  This Idea was later embodied in the First American Constitution, in between two secure bookends.  In the Preamble, it is stated that: We the People...do ordain and establish this Constitution.  Then in the last (the 10th) of the Bill of Rights (sometimes called the reserve clause) it is stated, more or less, that: rights and powers not expressly delegated to the Federal Government or the States are reserved to the People.

Nowhere in the First American Constitution does it speak of the creation of a whole new Constitution, but only of the amendment of the existing one.   This being the case, then clearly the power to completely replace the original with a Second American Constitution, is among those powers and rights which were not delegated and therefore are reserved to the People.

What this means is that we possess the power (which we must seize and exercise) to change all the rules that have been used and abused by the Lords of Finance.  We could, for example, change the underlying laws that have been abused to declare that corporations are persons.  We could, for example, insist that all legislation have only one purpose (no trick midnight amendments) and that the name of that legislation accurately reflect its purpose (no calling an act lessening the air quality standards, a clean air act, for example).  We could require that all government employees, especially all elected officials, can only have the same retirement and medical benefits as ordinary people have.  We could create a third legislative house, whose sole purpose was to undo legislation.  We could require that the public airways be devoted in prime time to keeping an eye on public officials.  We could, we could, and we could....

Is this a daunting task?  Yes it is.   We stand on almost the same ground as did those who wrote and signed the Declaration, and who ended that document with this pledge: And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Their lives were by this act made at risk.  Can we do anything less?

Our advantage is that we can see that in spite of all the seeming obstacles, they very nearly succeeded.  Now history comes around again, and says to us: Time to make the next step, having learned from the past, the errors made by those who went before.  Honor them in all things, especially by taking up their work and moving it forward - the work of once more seeking to answer the question: How does a free people govern themselves?

We don't have to succeed in this task - that is actually write a new constitution - immediately.  Such a task requires a great deal if it is to transfer itself from the realm of a few elite personalities (the Founders) to the thinking of a whole People.  All the same, in our starting on this Path, perhaps we ought to begin by declaring something quite akin to what was declared in 1776.

I have next below rewritten the Declaration of Independence, updating it for contemporary conditions and realities.   That rewrite, which is only meant as a suggestion of what might be said and done, the reader will find immediately below.  I have also, in Appendix E, put forward a version of the rewrite where you can see just what was changed (in bold) and what was left out (leaving the eliminated but original language in parenthesis and in italics).

It is also very helpful to read this offered first version of a new Declaration out loud.

_______________________________________________

The Second Declaration of Independence of the People of the United States of America

The unanimous New Declaration of the People of the United States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political and economic bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them (as various individuals understand Him out of their own freedom), a decent respect to the opinions of humanity requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to that separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creation with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness, and rights of privacy and information*. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among human beings, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shown, that human beings are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and theft of powers, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. -Such has been the patient sufferance of the American People; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present rule of financial elites is a history of repeated injuries and theft of powers, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these the People of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The Lords of Finance, through their corruption of the political and social processes of the Western Democracies, have imposed on the world, and on the American People, a system of banking and of monetary rules and policies entirely for their own benefit.  Any study of the true history of the creation of Central Banking proves this assertion.  Just consider that by this means of creating economic structures totally for their own benefit, the result is that 1% of the people in the world control 50% of its wealth.

They - the Lords of Finance - have, through their surrogates the Democrat and Republican Parties, impeded all efforts to reform our social and democratic processes (such as by our making serious and real changes to campaign financing), thus permitting neither reason or truth to rule our social democratic process, but rather only wealth and the raw power it is able to purchase.

They - the Lords of Finance - have first promoted a false Cold War, and now an equally false War on Terror, for the sole purpose of creating in America a permanent Military and Arms industrial base, intended not for the protection of the People of People's, but rather for the use by the Lords of Finance as a tool for their imperial (world) rule.

They - the Lords of Finance - have used the military might and covert might of American power to manipulate, ruin and destroy - where ever and when ever they felt necessary - systems of government throughout the world that did not bow to their will.

They - the Lords of Finance - have raped the world's environment, enslaved third world peoples economically, destroyed the world's agricultural riches by the introduction of dangerous chemicals and unproven new genetic forms into the eco-system of the whole world, all in the search for ever greater power and money.

This is not to say, that no benefit to humanity has arisen from some of these changes and developments, but rather that at every juncture where it was a choice between improving the lot of life of ordinary people or enriching themselves, the Lords of Finance choose that path most beneficial to themselves, well all the while, corrupting government processes everywhere possible in the vain pursuit of this immoral goal.

It becomes a question then of how do We the People, already in possession of one hard won Constitution, remove this insidious influence from our shared social and political existence, for one of the evil means by which the Lords of Finance rule is by remaining anonymous and invisible.

On this basis we reject as no longer workable this beloved and now flawed and corrupted original Constitution, declare it null and void, and assert our right to replace it with that which we believe more carefully addresses and protects us from the over-reaching of concentrated wealth.

We recognize that this task will have as its main difficulty the removing of the existing financial structures in which all the Peoples of the world have become ensnared.  The separation of the original 13 Colonies from the English aristocracy was far easier.  Here we need to rise above something far more entangled in every aspect of our daily lives.

In addition, we will have to confess our addiction to the comforts this concentration of wealth has made possible for a majority of the American People.  The truth is that we cannot move from our current conditions to those which are yet possible without owning our own responsibility and participation in the concentration of 80% of the world's wealth among only 20% of the world's people.

In this declaration then we have to assert two essential matters.

I.  The Lords of Finance need to be taken out of their anonymous and secret rule and made to face, as named individuals, the judgment of the world for their crimes against our rights as human beings, their crimes against our free choice of government and their crimes against the planet and the environment we all share.

II.  The People of America need to confess our own excesses and own up to our own responsibilities, and by this means replace the rule of elites and their surrogate political tools - the Democrat and Republican Parties, with Citizen Governance.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. These Merchant Princes, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyranny, are unfit to be the rulers of any free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our American political brethren. We have warned our elected officials from time to time of their attempts to serve themselves instead of the people by their legislative efforts to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over our civil liberties, at the same time they reward themselves with privileges and benefits (such as medical coverage) they deny to us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our suffering and dis-satisfactions. We have appealed to their native justice and nobleness of purpose, and we have entreated them by the ties of our shared humanity to disavow these theft of powers, such as their abuse of  constant re-districting as a means to keep themselves from being challenged for election, which has placed them outside our rule through the ballot. They have also become deaf to the voice of justice and of shared community, in that we ask for and need a protected ballot, safe from electronic theft with a paper trail so that all will know our real wishes. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces as essentially treasonous the behavior by which they preferred the wishes of the Lords of Finance over the real needs of the America People, and hold them, as we hold the rest of humanity, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the People of the united States of America, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the moral integrity of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these many States, solemnly publish and declare, That these the People of the United States of America are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent of the economic tyranny of the Lords of Finance and their surrogates, the Republican and Democrat Parties; that we are Absolved from all Allegiance to the economic rules created by the Lords of Finance and any allegiance to the present standing government of America, which has stolen excessive powers, failed in its sacred trust, and acted with conscious treason against the Republic, and that all political connection between us and the present sitting government of these many States, standing as it does solely for the benefit of the Lords of Finance, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent People, we have full Power to engage in civil disobedience, refuse to honor claims on our wealth by the many banks, ignore levies for armies, refuse to pay taxes, print our own money and any other acts of freedom necessary to resist the continued rule of the Lords of Finance, or the excessive and dishonorable abuses of power by the Republican and Democrat Parties, and to do all other Acts and Things which an Independent and free People  may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

_________________________________________

* With regard to rights of privacy and information, here is a proposed Bill of Information Rights, to be considered for inclusion in the Second American Constitution, should the American citizenry have the boldness and courage to take up such a task:

"It is the right of every citizen to sufficient information to be able to make informed decisions.

"It is the right of every citizen to a sphere of informational privacy, inviolate from the intrusions of the State or commercial and employment interests. This sphere is to be defined by the individual citizen themselves. Citizens who widely construct their private sphere of information rights must expect the normal consequences that flow from such an act (such as limitations on possible forms of employment).

"No government or private institution may withhold information needed by a free citizenry for the exercise of its duties. The Congress shall pass laws mandating appropriate and severe punishment for the violation of this right of information. Likewise, the Congress shall make laws mandating appropriate and severe punishment for violations of the right of privacy.

"When any citizen believes his or her information rights have been violated, the Courts must make inquiry, without cost to the citizen. In order to not overburden the Courts, the Office of Informational Ombudsman will be created by the Congress, which will mediate all preliminary inquires into requests, and violations, that arise from the exercise of these rights.

"Where a conflict arises between the right of privacy and the right to information, the Courts will seek the balancing principle in the Platonic ideal of the Good. For the purposes of this bill of information rights no non-living entity, such as a corporation, or other institution or organization, shall be deemed a person or a citizen."

Section Three: The Real Power of Citizenship both as an American, and as a Citizen of the World

Fundamentally, there is a war going on.  This is a war created and managed by the Lords of Finance, and being carried out against the majority of the world's Peoples.   Here is the picture we need to have...

The Aristocracy of Concentrated Wealth (the Lords of Finance), having become the hidden inheritors of the powers previously held by the Aristocracies of Blood, are engaged in feudal wars with each other.   These wars seem, in the present, to be like wars among Nation States, but in each case the Nation State is just a surrogate for the behind the scenes power of Financial Elites.

Even in the case of what is being erroneously called the Clash of Civilizations, the real battle is over power and wealth, with some power hungry arrogant rulers disguising themselves as religious leaders.   This is really a matter of human psychology, and the theistic element merely an excuse.  Human beings are drawn, out of their shadow side, toward power. Power is the ultimate drug.  The ego becomes thereby inflated - what sometimes is called megalomania - as a result of this addiction to power, eventually and irrationally believing itself to be a justified arbitrary power in the world.

Any religious leader, of whatever faith, who uses his (or her) assumed spiritual authority as a power in the realm of politics reveals his (or her) inflated sense of self and addiction to power.  Certainly, such individuals will abuse the doctrines of their religion to create after the fact justifications (reasoning to a foregone conclusion), but anyone conversant with the moral depth of the world's great religions knows that the core of these religions is service, love, generosity and similar qualities of being.  It is always a mal-interpretation of the teachings to assert they promote war, hate, terror - which leads us back again and again to understanding that the real root of the political behavior of far too many religious leaders is their personal and irrational addiction to power.

As a consequence the world is filled with far too many leaders of Nation States, whose hungers and appetites are frequently the real driving motive. Behind them, the banking and financial powers support, or not, such leaders with loans and other kinds of help as long as the political leader follows the lead of the Lords of Finance with regard to how economic rules are structured.

For example, the main offense of Saddam Hussein was not his abuse of his People, his flirting with weapons of mass destruction or even his control of vast amounts of oil production and reserves.  His principle error was to be seeking to take his economy, particularly his oil wealth, and disconnect it from the dollar and unite it with the Euro.  No other act was more threatening to the principle group of the Lords of Finance, the axis of English and American banking and corporate families.   A great portion of their wealth (and power) is tied to the dollar, and no act of Iraq's dictator was more dangerous to their continued dominance (within the feudal wars the Lords make among themselves, and for which ordinary people all suffer disastrous consequences - collateral damage as it were).

This is the same financial sin now being committed by Iran - a threat to take their oil resources away from any connection to the dollar and put it with the Euro.  This is why it was crucial to the Lords to dominate the American Presidency and by this means have access to American military might.  A Nation State which does not play the game, according to their rules, was to find itself at war.

All during the 20th Century the Lords of Finance have had unlimited access to political power to promote and develop their control and their status.  The very very rich have come to rule the world from behind the scenes.  In the Western Democracies this has been more directly accomplished by institutionalizing intermediate structures, which were then used to identify and develop political and intellectual talent, at the same time seducing them with access to power and wealth.  The main institutions in England and America were and are the Rhodes Scholarships (identifying American talent and taking it to England for its "economic" education), the Trilateral Commission (the main American think tank for the Lords of Finance) and the Council on Foreign Relations (the main English think tank for the Lords). [Of lesser import, but certainly not to be ignored is the Skull and Bones Society at Yale University, the annual meeting of financial elites at Davros, the meetings of the Bilderbergers, and the annual Bohemian Grove gatherings of political and economic elites in Northern California.  For more details, see appendix H: Counter-Moves.]

Any careful reading of the biographies, of literally hundreds of English and American leading politicians, and dominant government officials (Secretaries of State, Home Secretaries and so forth), will reveal their participation in one or more of these institutions, where they have been drawn into the inner circles of power and wealth [See in this regard, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins].  Generally they will never become billionaires, but certainly they will be millionaires and move easily in these spheres of privilege.  Imagine being a young Rhodes Scholar, for example, taken one afternoon to the huge estate of an English Lord, who has impeccable connections within world-wide banking and finance circles and told that you are to be part of those circles of elite power which will (and must) run the world, for the lower classes simply lack the intelligence and the practical financial savvy to be allowed, through democratic means, to make the required macro decisions by which international relations, trade and economic markets are made stable and healthy.

What a rush it must feel in the soul to be anointed as one of the lonely few, possibly destined for the top, where such responsibility will rest on your shoulders; yet to know that behind you will stand such a power as is having tea with you that day.  With a nod and a wink you are welcomed into a fraternity only a few know exists.  Your future is now assured.

As to those strange places in the world, where there exists the few who might resist the rule of the American and English establishment, well that is part of the game you are going to be able to play.  For example, consider the petty dictatorships, such as in South America or Africa.  For the taming of these there exists the CIA and its English cousin MI6 - who will do the wet and dirty work when needed, at those times when the pressure brought to bear by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on those nations banking systems, in order to force them to accept central banking, does not work.

And such as China and India, well they too will most often be led by individuals who also want wealth and power, and where wealth and power are desired, agreements can be made, for after all we are all reasonable men, are we not?

So the 20th Century progressed and the 21st begins.  The elites of finance and power play their feudal games, using their serfs and peasants to make the wealth and to fill the ranks of their armies, when and if necessary.  Meanwhile, if one has become a member of the privileged classes, then more and more there comes to be two worlds.

One world wills to be above, with private jets (or at worst first class flights) to safe and secure airports and hotels, with all the amenities (wine and companionship) any man or woman could desire.  Here will be the meetings in which the deals are made, by the underlings of the feudal lords, through which they divide and organize the world among themselves.  Meanwhile the Lords will rest content on their vast private estates, protected by private armies, eating the best foods, having the best health care and the most secure lives.

Oh, once and a while a terrorist (someone tired of being poor and ignored) will get through the defenses of a few of these elite classes, but in the main and as a group, the Lords of Finance and their families will survive and endlessly perpetuate themselves.  At least that is their dream, and the dream with which they seduce others.

And, in the other world - the world below the Lords of Finance and their servants - the middle class could well disappear.   A certain degree of anarchy and disease will be promoted, since the engine of the world only needs so many workers and soldiers as long as the Lords can remain somewhat civil with each other.  Electronic IDs will be the norm, even if one wants to work for a pittance, since any wage will then be a considered a privilege to have.   The rest, the undocumented and unnumbered, will exist solely on the refuse heaps of an economically feudal civilization, and, with luck, survive mainly by their own wits.

Maybe...

This scenario, while quite visible in the current tendencies and trends, need not arise.  But for it not to arise, ordinary People have to discover their power, for in spite of the contrary views of the elite Lords of Finance, we do have our own power - a power equal to that of the Lords.

It is a moral power, and it is as free moral human beings (freely choosing our own intuitions as to what the good is in any instance), that we can learn how to restore balance to the world.  Balance and harmony are the crucial goals.  Although the Lords make war on the poor, it by no means is required of us that we make war on them.

Let me digress a moment, to share something I heard some months ago that is rooted in the spiritual wisdom of Africa, not well known at all in the West.  We, in the West, know a great deal about Christianity, perhaps some Buddhism, and if we have been paying attention even a little bit of the wisdom of Islam, but about the deeper African wisdoms, little is known outside of small circles.  Since I am not practiced in this wisdom, I can only share my incomplete understanding.

In a conflict, so it is taught, one Way to approach resolution is for one side to so understand the needs, hungers and desires of the other, such that they seek a Way to support those who make war on them.  Instead of standing in opposition, they seek a means to satisfy what is wished for by the other - to take on the burden of meeting these needs which have driven them to conflict. [If a man wants your shirt, give him your cloak also]

This is very profound if one thinks about it carefully, and may exactly be what is needed so that the coming years can be traversed with the moral impulses of many different kinds of people finding harmony and balance, in a situation where someone else makes war upon us.   The seeking after dominance, by an elite, over the great mass of others (who do not seek dominance), whether it be through financial, political or even religious powers, can be resisted in ways that do not have to end in bloodshed. [blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth]

At the very least, such must be tried, until no other choices remain.

Consider for a moment how one becomes a member of the Lords, or of their immediate circles of servants.  Mostly wealth is inherited, although occasionally it is won anew by such as those who have risen to the top of the revolution in electronics, for example.  But if we examine the biography of many of these elites of wealth (by whatever path it came to them) we find the riddle exposed by Christ when he said: "it is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven".

The central crisis of the world is moral in nature, and those with the least difficulty in ignoring conscience seem to more easily rise into and live with great wealth.   The moral problem is fairly simple.  When you have more than you need, how do you live with yourself, and keep to yourself this excess beyond real need.  In a world full of hunger and deprivation, certainly conscience will advise modesty and humility as regards living beyond ones real needs.  Yet, as we know, many cannot do this; and, this is a problem not only among the wealthy elites, but everywhere that human excess of appetite finds no restraint.

The elites could have run the world with greater wisdom.  There once was the ideal of noblesse oblige - the obligations of the nobles, such that those with power and wealth were paternal and caring towards those of lesser station.  But the current crop of Lords have lost this ability to know how to father and mother a world; and, in this failure to attend to their potential moral stewardship, they have fallen into a state that can only be called: moral childhood.

The Lords of Finance are moral children, and it is in Civil Society (see Appendix D) where those are found who are willing to shoulder the tasks of true stewardship of the world - to be the real sacrificing fathers and mothers of the future.  What then is their/our power?

Our true power lies in speech and in naming.   We tell the stories to the children of the meaning of the world.  We give the names of things, and so far in the last stages of life of Western Civilization, this power has fallen into disuse - in fact often usurped by the Lords and their various surrogates, who have woven over and around our civilization a set of lies about the nature of finance, and about the true nature of the human being.

Our one great weapon in this war is the truth, and it has been my privilege, in the company of many others, to begin to articulate that truth out of which we need to build the future.  Everywhere Civil Society (in whatever form of individual or community expression) speaks out, ideas are used and ideas have power.  Just consider the usage in this little booklet of such terms as: the Lords of Finance, the People of Peoples  and moral children.

Wherever we discover ourselves to have surrendered to illusion, we have the power to cut through it with the truth.  This truth, authored individually out of our own spiritual freedom - to think our own thoughts and make our own moral judgments - casts both fire and light on the present crisis of civilization.  The Lords have hidden in the dark of anonymity, and once we begin to shine the light on them, all their powers begin to weaken.

So we name them and we name their misdeeds and we name our real needs.  Thus begins the battle, a battle over the meaning of the world.

Once the light of truth burns more and more brightly, the Lords will be tempted to increase their restraint on speech and public gatherings.  Yet, our Founders, and the other creators of the Western Democracies, have left us a blessing.  They claimed and acted upon not only rights of speech and assembly, but also the right to author the fundamental laws.   The People remain the true source of governmental powers, and the threads of this power and authority we have to once again gather to ourselves.

This we do when we make our Declaration and then begin to gather in Renewal Groups and assert the Right of Citizen Governance to author a Second American Constitution.  We the People take up once more the fundamental discussion of the nature of government and the rights of a truly free people, now self-informed and self-educated by the lived-in results of the first iteration of that grand experiment that is the Republic.  Don't we call ourselves: wage slaves? And, isn't time for us to throw off our economic chains?

We have seen how wealth acquired unjustified power and corrupted our institutions, and now we can seek to remove from our lives this treason against the Republic, and against our sovereign individuality.   We have the power to speak and think and raise such a collective noise, from so many sources at once, that the Lords will have no choice but to rethink their posture.   Do they want to plunge civilization into internal wars which will tear down all that they have built, or will they confess and admit their errors of stewardship and recognize that liberty, equality and brotherhood will be asserted in the world, whether they oppose it or not?

For the truth is that as we seek to write a Second American Constitution, an act of power that will be a second shot heard 'round world, this will draw into question the value of private property itself.  It was by inserting the rights of private property into our original constitution, as equal to or higher than our individual rights as human beings, that then brought us to this place and time.  But now we awake and wonder: Do we want to go that far, and leave behind the childish notion of private property and substitute instead laws of stewardship, which recognize that all human beings are brothers and sisters, dependents upon our mutual stewardship of this home - this planet; and, that the claim of the rich to own it all through hidden rites of power and intimidation must now be put down and ended?

This is our dilemma, and this is also our power.  We take our moral authority in authoring truth and meaning, and by this means lead the world toward true sister and brotherhood (And crown thy Good (individual moral impulses) with Brotherhood (the recognition that the Earth must belong to all).

Yet, let us take the next moment to return to the wisdom out of heart of Africa, the wisdom that suggests that the best road to creatively resolve conflict is for one side to ask of the other: What do you need and how can we serve?

What would the Lords say in the face of such a question?

They might say a truth, which is that their judgment was correct that the common man was not qualified to organize that aspect of society which consists of finance and markets.  Civil Society is not really in a position of deciding this was a false judgment.  They also might say another truth, which is that history shows that political leaders, whether Kings or Presidents, often have an excess of egotism, that disables them from properly managing the same economic questions.

We could then reply, yes this is true, but how did you handle this riddle?  Did you approach it honestly and openly and with the interest of all in mind, or did you hide your manipulations and place your own privileges, wealth and power above the rest of us?

This they should confess as wrong.  They may not, of course, but at least we need to make the offer as we move in the direction of the Second American Constitution.  Truth to tell, we need expertise in banking and finance, just as we need expertise in medicine and science.  What we don't need is lies and we don't need to be treated as mere workers and consumers.  Such treatment is in vicious denial of what it means to be a sovereign human being and citizen of the Republic and of the World, where rights are to be equal for all.  The very very rich do not have the right to run our lives, ruin our world, deprive our children and save themselves at the expense of everyone else.

That much is clear, and as we require of them that they reveal themselves and come out of hiding into a public dialog with us, we have a right to expect truth and justice.  If they cannot meet us as human beings possessed of equal rights, then battle lines will surely be drawn and these harsh but true words may well be rendered into equally harsh but true deeds.

At the same time, we need to anticipate that in the beginning they will try to control with raw political power our efforts to rid the world of their tyranny.  They will bring back laws of sedition, and will arrest people for speaking out.  What then do we do when this battle escalates in such ways?

There is a new power in the world, or perhaps better stated: a renewed version of a very old power.  The now clearly useless and morally bankrupt paternalism of Western Civilization is on the wane, and arising to supplant it is a new maternalism - new powers of the Feminine Mysteries.  The moral power of women can be seen clearly at the heart of much of Civil Society.

So, let's imagine what happens when a few voices are stilled under sedition laws...

Imagine 100,000 grandmothers confronting the authorities with the same acts.  If you are going to arrest one of us, you must arrest all of us.  How long will the authorities be able to resist such power of moral shaming, as when young mothers with babies, and old women in wheel chairs, accompanied by all their male helpers and friends take to the streets and say, if you arrest one of us for such words, you must arrest all of us (as in the movie Sparticus, we all step forward and say: I am Sparticus).

This battle need never be fought with any other weapons than the willing sacrifice of one's own freedoms or life, and by the confrontation of the moral children of the world (the Lords of Finance), by their loving and understanding moral fathers and mothers (Civil Society).  Instead of hungering for one Gandhi, we all become Gandhi's.

Yes, such courage is hard to find in individuals, but it is not so hard when we act as a community.  Many hands make light work, and many hearts make the yoke of such love very easy to bear.

And so I ask, as did those who signed the original Declaration of Independence, that from this point forward we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

So be it.

Here is something in the same mood, written by J. Michael Straczynski, which I have adapted by changing some language.  [The original can be found in Appendix G]. To be read aloud

The Earth speaks in many languages, but only one voice.  The language is not English, or French, or Dinka, or Inuit or Mandarin.  It speaks in the language of hope.  It speaks in the language of trust.  It speaks in the language of strength and the language of compassion, which is the language of the heart, and the language of the soul.  But always it is the same voice.  It is the voice of our ancestors speaking through us, and the voice of our inheritors waiting to be born.   It is the small still voice that says: We are one, no matter the blood, no matter the skin, no matter the language, no matter the land.   We are one, no matter the pain, no matter the darkness, no matter the loss, no matter the fear.  We are one.  Here, gathered together in common cause we agree to recognize this singular truth and this singular rule: That we must be kind to one another.  Because each voice enriches us and ennobles us.  And each voice lost diminishes us. We are the voice of the Earth, the soul of Creation, the fire that will light the way to a better future.  We are one.

we dream America

we sing her shadow and her light

we dream America

and America dreams us

by Joel A. Wendt
social philosopher...and occasional fool

Appendix A:

Money and Debt

- the Company Store and the beginning of the 21st Century -

You are not going to like this one bit, but below, in as simple words as possible, I am going to try to explain my no doubt imperfect understanding of the reality of money in our time.

The short version goes like this...

The Central Banks - which are private institutions, not governmental institutions - get to print money and control interest rates.  These powers should belong to Nation States, but as Central Banking came to be the norm all over the world, the control of these two of the four main governmental powers (taxing, spending, printing money and rate of interest control) over an economy has been stolen (via political manipulation) from the Nation States and placed in the hands of private banking institutions.  In the United States this happened in the era in between 1910 and 1920, when the Federal Reserve Act was passed.

Other rules had to follow, but in the main this one was the principle tool by which the Lords of Finance began their liberation from the rule of Nation States.  This liberation is now nearly complete, with the final pieces being put in place using the power of government, via international trade agreements - treaties, to bind the Nation States to rules of trade consistent with Central Banking and primarily for the benefit of already existing concentrated wealth.

What do banks get to do, and what does a Central Bank get to do, that violates our rights, and our need to exist as autonomous and free human beings?

Banks take in deposits, in terms of savings and cash accounts, for which they charge us fees.  They get to play with our money (which we have earned and they have not) and make money for themselves.  They do return a small amount as interest, but in comparison with what they earn through fees and other financial transactions using our money, this interest is a trifle.

Not only that, but they loan us back our own money and charge us for the loan.  Now money does need to move around a bit, it is a kind of spiritual blood for an economy.  But a bank is not just a fee for services business, but is rather a kind of dam, behind which money piles up, because of the mass of depositors and other clients.  This piled up money is like the water behind a dam - it can be converted to additional wealth and power through the dynamics of finance.

Now there was a time when money had to stand for something else - usually precious metals, but that day is long past.  Now money is just air (or paper).  It has no intrinsic value (To follow this history, read the three volumes (6 novels) of Neal Stephenson, collectively called: The Baroque Cycle).

Central Banks are different from other banks, for they get to issue money.  In the United States, the Treasury does print the money, but the Central Bank gets to "distribute" it.  It appears to be the People's money, being supposedly issued by our government, but in point of fact it belongs to the Central Banks and is for them completely free.

[I have since become more aware of weaknesses in my understanding of this money-creation process.   But I cannot do justice to those details here.  The interested reader should Google Debt-Money for a history, and go to http://www.concordresolution.org/column.htm and read the remarkably clear and rich understanding of the real nature of money and debt, put forward by Richard Kotlarz - a New view on Money.  That said, the readers should realize that what is next below is a mixture of the true, and the partially true, due to my lack of the necessary sophistication at the time this was originally written.]

Whereas an ordinary bank has to receive deposits from the people who are forced to exchanged their labor for money, a Central Bank gets to make it's "deposits" up out of nothing.   This free money is then first distributed, in the United States for example, to the Seven regional Federal Reserve Banks which then "loan" it to more ordinary banks.  Sometimes during this process the amount of money in play increases, in that there are rules that let such "loans" be for more than the "value" of the "deposits".  I put all these words in quotation marks because they are a kind of lie - small lies among very big lies about how money really works.

There is in point of fact, in the language of economics (which is full of theories and points of view which often disagree), a kind of white wash of the bare facts.  Economic language is so lost in its scientific-like theories that it misses the point of the more simple facts.

Now in terms of geopolitics, the Nation States of Europe and of England and America, had achieved a kind of dominance as we entered the 20th Century, with the Nation States of Russian, India, Japan and China lagging a bit behind.  We can't leave out geopolitics, because it is in the political realm where the big lies are told about banking and finance in order for the rules, that principally benefit the Lords of Finance, to come into being.  That some of these Nations were encouraged to experiment with communism and some with socialism is another factor, but in the end it comes down to political power being used to engender Central Banking everywhere - that is: substantial power originally belonging to any Nation State's sovereign economic authority moved from that State and into the hands of private banking institutions.

As a consequence of the geopolitical struggles, wealth mostly concentrated during the first part of the 20th Century in England and America, and somewhat to a lesser degree in what are called the western democracies.   After World War II, other Nation States began to be players in this game.  This then came to bring it about that about 20% of the World's total population enjoyed about 80% of the wealth.

This can get to be a bit confusing, for those Nation States with wealth in the ground (oil, minerals, diamonds etc.) ought to have been more powerful, but the grip of the Lords of Finance on the economic rules of the game (so to speak) was such that those Peoples with wealth in the ground, couldn't get it out of the ground and into circulation without being compromised (corrupted).  So even though great portions of oil, for example, were in the middle East, the only way to market it was through the Seven Sisters (the big oil companies).  Eventually this lead to currencies themselves being treated as commodities (money as goods), and again the Lords of Finance, who created the rules of the markets in which money as goods was bought and sold, made out like bandits (literally).

What the Lords did next with this concentration of wealth is very interesting.

Credit Cards...

Fake money is created by the Central Banks, "multiplied" and then passed on to ordinary banks, where it then is loaned via credit cards to consumers.  Consumers (us) spend the money, while often leaving it to temporarily lay around in the ordinary banks where it makes them even more money, and in the process of accepting this credit, which is "sold" to us, we acquire debt.

To help this explosion of credit work to make even more money, all manner of regulations and statutes on interest rates (usury) were set aside in various places, so that recently in England a credit card was being offered to the poor with a 78% interest rate.  This makes legal for banks what otherwise is called the crime of loan sharking.

Our government does the same thing.  It borrows money to pay for its own excesses (just as we borrow to pay for our excesses).  And, since the way government works, the treasury debt is also our debt (for which payment we will later be taxed - each of us singly (including our children) now owes over $30,000.00 - that is every man, woman and child in America owes this portion of our so-called national debt).   So not only are we acquiring huge amounts of debt to pay for our own spending habits, but also for the spending habits of rich politicians, who use our tax money and national debt to get re-elected (pork barrel legislation, give aways to businesses etc.), and to share among corporations by such ruses as the Defense budget and rules and regulations governing Medicare spending and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

So we have personal credit cards and our government has a huge credit card (deficit spending covered by Treasury Bills), with the result that everywhere debt grows.  But where does the money come from that everyone is borrowing?  Its being printed by Central Banks and is not at all real!  This process is, of course, highly inflationary.   This huge inflationary tendency is why it is necessary for Central Banks to control interest rates at the same time they create fake wealth through printing money.   So the Fed (in the USA) is always tinkering with the interest rates, not so much because rising labor and raw materials costs cause inflation, but because constantly printing new money causes inflation.  The result is that the fake money in play is always increasing, and the Fed has to constantly trick the interest rates in order to keep the naturally occurring inflation in check.

[An acquaintance of mine describes it this way: there is in the whole world economy only about 1% real wealth (nature products transformed into things people need), with the other 99% being fake wealth (air money, stock certificates, derivatives, currency exchange values and other speculative financial market instruments).  None of these are tangible things people use, but since money itself is not real anymore, those at the top can pile up the most and use it to buy and sell countries and armies.  Another acquaintance told the following story after a meeting with someone high up in the Federal Reserve system: In the US, there might be as many as 40,000 folks running finance related companies (bank managers, stock brokers etc.), of which maybe at most 40 actually understand finance.  This same fellow from the Federal Reserve was also alleged to have said that how banks actually work could be explained on television in about 90 minutes, after which the people would go out and burn the banks to the ground.]

And where does the fake credit card provided money we spend go?  It goes to huge multinational businesses (arms merchants, chemical companies, energy companies, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, banks and so on), where it then concentrates in the hands of just a few - what the comedian George Carlin calls: the owners, and I have been calling the Lords of Finance.

In a sense, ordinary people living in the big lies of finance and money are just a tube through which fake money is passed as it circulates from its creation in Central Banks, to were it ends up in the hands of the Lords of Finance, from where it is next used to corrupt our politicians.  As it passes through the tube - that is us consumers and workers - it leaves behind debt.

Not too long ago, some people lived in areas where they worked for a company, lived in company housing, and bought everything they needed in terms of necessities from the company store.  They were the slaves, peasants and serfs, and the company owners (who owned the land, the housing and the goods on sale in the store - rent the movie Matewan for a dramatic depiction) were the aristocrats of wealth.  We now live in that same system which in the 20th Century has come exist on a scale that encompasses the whole earth (You think you own your home?  You're kidding yourself - the bank owns it, you just have the illusion - the financial lie - of ownership).

Think about it.  The scale of this store is so huge it is near invisible.  Just because General Motors and General Electric seem to be different companies, owned by different shareholders, doesn't mean that, as the money rises through the system to the places in which it concentrates far above what we visibly know, the hands that rule the system of banking don't well understand how their knowledge of the real way finance works gives them an advantage we can hardly imagine.   The super rich are not rich by accident.

The debt left behind, by the movement of air-money as credit, is then used as coercion in order to make us compliant socially.  The advertising business makes us want things (the carrot) and the debt we acquire to get these things drives us to keep working (the stick).  The companies we work for more and more abuse their workers (the labor movement failed completely in the 20th Century*), and as everyone who is paying any attention at all knows, our civil liberties, already under attack by our own government, stop at the door of the company for which we work.

[*WILL LESTER, ASSOCIATED PRESS - The number of wage and salary workers who were union members dropped to 12 percent of the work force last year, the lowest percentage since the government started tracking that number over two decades ago. The number of workers in a union was 20 percent in 1983, when Bureau of Labor Statistics first provided such comparable numbers, and that number has been declining steadily. More than a third of American workers, about 35 percent, were union members in the mid-1950s.]

Meanwhile, the true owners - the Lords of Finance - are free to corrupt our governments in order to make the rules of finance serve their own needs at our expense.

We are given a fake education that is more like training to be good consumers and workers, when instead of a real education which would enable us to unfold all our latent potential.  Instead of health care we get to take care of the financial health of insurance and pharmaceutical companies.  Instead of government protecting us, the Lords of Finance use government to be protected from us (can't sue businesses for their negligent failures, much less their intentional ones).  Instead of our receiving the news and information needed to help us be good citizens, we get infotainment and distraction - TV is a drug among a whole cornucopia of drugs (going shopping is another good one), which keep us subdued and asleep.   What's going to happen when we wake up?

Want to know just how good the Lords of Finance are at this stuff?   Want a smoking gun?  Here's an article about the recent drop in gas prices coming just before the 2006 American by-election:

"TREASURY SECRETARY'S FIRM MAY HAVE PLAYED MAJOR ROLE IN GAS PRICE DROP

"LE METROPOLE CAFÉ - In yesterday's WSJ in Section C there is a very, very interesting item in the article, Some Investors Lose Their Zest  For Commodities. The article notes that over that past few months, commodity funds have been liquidating commodity holdings. But here's the stunner: "Consider the Goldman Sachs commodity index, one of the most popular vehicles for betting on raw materials. In July, Goldman Sachs tweaked the index's content by cutting its exposure to gasoline. Investors tracking the index had to adjust their portfolios accordingly - which sent gasoline futures prices tumbling.

"Prior to Goldman's July GSCI revision, unleaded gas accounted for 8.45% of the GSCI. Now unleaded gas is only 2.30%. This means commodity funds had to sell 73% of its gasoline futures to conform to the reformulated GSCI. . .

"Here we have Goldman, qua keeper of the commodities index, manipulating markets simply by adjusting index components. It is noteworthy in several respects. First, we are used to the notion of them front running market sensitive information announced by third parties, but here a glorified hedge fund - albeit one dominating central banks and finance ministries worldwide - maintains market-moving indices itself. . . .  Second, it lends credence to the theory that the current well-publicized commodities decline is just a well-timed, well-orchestrated head fake to benefit the incumbents in the run up to the midterm elections - someone noted recently that Bush's ratings vary inversely with gas prices. . . www.lemetropolecafe.com "

Welcome to the Company Store and wage slavery, the true names for the modern economic life of the vast majority of the world's peoples.  Just keep in mind that the Lords of Finance (whether an old family banker or lawyer, or a oil rich prince) are feudal barons, fighting each other for power and wealth.  There is, as yet, no king able to rule them all. ("One ring to rule them all.  One ring to find them.  One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them." J.R.R. Tolkien)

Here's a crucial question for the reader: If the game is fixed, why do we any longer have to play by the rules?  Those who fix the game, aren't!

[All the same, banking does not have to be conducted without conscience.  For a look at a deeply spiritual and wise consideration of this possibility, see the Scottish visionary thinker, Barbara Gardiner's, Aesthetics of Economics, at: http://ipwebedev.com/hermit/bgae1.html, as well as her beautiful essay on Scottish politics: The Constitution Question: Conscience Politics, at:  http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/scotessay.html]

Appendix B:

Citizen Governance

- the future of the Republic form of government -

[The original version of this essay was on that part of the website "some thoughts on the nature of public life - and an offer of service", at: http://ipwebdev.com/campaign/cg1.html]

The United States of America is the first Nation where a certain fundamentally human impulse toward true freedom emerged more widely on the Stage of History.  Long in preparation, this impulse was/is connected to the gradual appreciation of the individual of his/her fundamental personal sovereignty - our individual free power of choice.  It is only out of the choices of the I am , or the spirit, of the individual human being, that governments obtain their just powers.  From the authoring of the U.S. Constitution forward, governments were to be seen as only having those powers granted to them by the community of sovereign individual human spirits, which constituted a particular Nation or People.

If we can appreciate how long it took for this principle to emerge onto the Stage of History, then it is possible to also appreciate how it is that this principle will require considerable time to grow into maturity.  The appearance of this principle, in this present restatement, is simply one among many other iterations of the reappearance of this impulse in modern times.   It is not new, nor is my articulation of it the only possible one.

The Declaration of Independence, states among its very first principles: " .., Governments are instituted among Men, deriving the just powers from the consent of the governed ,.. " and the U.S. Constitution begins: " We the People ... ".

The central act is the uniting of the individual sovereign power of free choice into a community, a Nation and a People, from which then the siting government receives its powers.

However, against this striving out of the hearts and minds of individual sovereign spirits was arrayed the vast weight of the Past.  Having its own momentum, the Past did not easily step aside for the birth of this just power with its fundamental right of Consent.  Men and women were too used to the old ways, where power lived in the aristocracies of blood and inheritance.  Thus, even though a fundamental shift had occurred at the level of our understanding, the outer forms of social relations were slow to evolve.  The aristocracies of blood became replaced with aristocracies of wealth.

Such is the condition of the world today.  Oligarchies of wealth constitute the most typical form of rule over various peoples all over the world.  It some cases it is fairly obvious, and in others, such as apparent democracies, the ruling elites have worked at keeping their activity hidden.

One of the most interesting aspects of this situation is that a core element of the reasoning of concentrated wealth, in support of its point of view, has considerable validity.  This is the view that the average citizen lacks the understanding and capacity to participate in macro decisions - the kind of decisions that determine the stability of markets, and the free flow of trade upon which the modern world has become dependent.  According to this reasoning, only the financially astute know what is needed to know in order to maintain an economic environment in which wealth can continue to be generated.  This apparent truth then justifies all manner of manipulations of the inner workings of various governments.

On the surface then, it appears that the world is locked into a what is essentially a class struggle, between the rich and the poor, over the determination of the social rules of modern and future societies.  In fact, is there any reason to expect the aristocracies of concentrated wealth to abandon their positions of power and privilege without a very great battle?

Here then is the moral riddle at the heart of the modern age.  If citizen governance is to emerge into the light of world affairs in a responsible manner, will it take a course that violently destroys the Past, or will it find some other path through this historical Rite of Passage that the Hopi Prophecies call: The Day of Purification.  And, in parallel, will the existing powers hold so strongly to their position and privilege such that all their considerable forces are spent trying to hold down the emergence of this sovereign individual-based community impulse.

If such a War ensues, then the Republic that the founders of the United States of America created will dissolve into chaos, to be replaced by either anarchy on the one hand, or some form of dictatorship (fascist or otherwise) on the other.

If we wish to avoid Battle, then the issues come down to this: By what means will we proceed ?

If the nature of our choices involves the assumption of a proper end goal - a certain right way the future needs to turn out - then we will automatically pursue a course of conflict, for the very fact of our individual sovereign natures assumes that we each will have a different end in mind.  On the other hand, if we choose to place the emphasis on how we go about stepping into the future, the basic form of the Republic that was bequeathed to us remains the most viable, healthy and just way .

To help understand this, we should notice that citizen governance is young.  It has so far rested mostly in an ideal form, as the main principle of the form of government of the United States.   Our present time offers us the opportunity to take this ideal further into reality - further into incarnation.

There are two Ways that I recommend.  Both are essential, and one can participate in either or both as one wishes.

One is for ordinary citizens to run for office.  Such activity was certainly in the minds of our founders, and it is much needed in the present, for the class of professional politicians has, in the main, lost its way.  Were I younger, I would choose this way myself.

The second means is the formation of conversation groups, or what I have elsewhere called: renewal groups (see Appendix C).  I have used the term renewal to emphasize the fact that this idea is not new, and was central from the very beginning of our Republic.  But it has fallen into a condition of sleep and disuse, so that if we are to return it to its pivotal place within our form of government, then we must - out of ourselves - call it forth in conversation with each other.

Conversation is the crucial aspect - the essence.  We have tended to think, having lost a true understanding of the nature of the Republic form of government, that the power of the people resided in the vote - that is that we were some form of democracy (which we are not).  More essential than the vote is our mutual spiritual work at expressing, out of our own insight, what we consider to be the nature of the good as that applies to the form and order of society.  It is our individual sovereign moral will, conveyed in the form of ideals from one to the other, that is the essential act of citizen governance.  Out of these heart-felt conversations then emerges that vision of the future toward which we then direct our elected representatives to strive to achieve.

Those, who also take the other path - that of seeking to represent us, very much need our guidance.  They work for us.   But the eternal truths to which we form allegiance, these are to be discovered in the renewal groups.  At present, the situation is almost the opposite.  The powers of concentrated wealth, and their political allies, work very hard at forming public opinion.  What we think is not so important as what we can be made to think.  Knowledge of true facts is routinely withheld.  What is provided is warped into that meaning most convenient to the speakers.  A representative form of government (our Republic) cannot thrive when all that the People are provided is a sea of lies and half-truths.

At the same time, this apparent abuse of power, by the wealthy elites and their servants, cannot (yet) imprison our hearts and minds.  Having free speech, and the gift of the word, we have the capacity to meet with each other and consider the fundamental and essential questions facing our society.  In this process of asking ourselves questions, and listening to each other offer responses, we begin that work - that means -  whose pathway offers us the most sane passage through the historic crises of the moment.

For the truth is this.   Our fundamental sovereignty as individuals is a reflection of our divine nature.   In this age of materialism, where we have unnaturally separated matter and spirit, we have also lost confidence in the moral.  Today people are content to limit their acts to what is legal, which my law professors described as the lower limit of the expectations that can be placed on human behavior.  To do only what is legal is to do the least socially acceptable act.

No society has life and vitality if its members not only expect of themselves the least, but even worse, intentionally pass downward through that boundary for reasons of personal greed (witness the massive failures now apparent in our business communities).   The renewal of the Republic can only come out of moral deeds, deeds of conscience - deeds first born in acts of individual conscience, which are then merged through conversation in to a community of ideals.

At the same time such deeds need to proceed in moderation.  Individuals, meeting in renewal groups and learning to express their hearts to each other in mutual tolerance, while considering the fundamental goals and purposes of human society, perform a sacred art.  This art of conversation then spreads from one to the other, eventually merging with other conversations  in a vast cooperative act of public ideal self-examination.  Where we have been asleep, now we are awake, and our considerations become the light by which our public servants can then do those appointed tasks that we so much need for them to do.

It will not be easy.  To rise from a public expectation of behavior directed toward the merely legal to an understanding of individual moral insight will be no simply matter.  This is hard work, for not only do we have a political Past, but we also have a religious Past, and a scientific Past.  The vast weight of these ideas can be a terrible prison for the future.  Yet, if we take the time to live with trust in each other's hearts, then the mutual work of the sacred art of conversation will lead us to just that community of ideals we need to light the way.

We need have no end in mind at all.  The means - the conversation arising out of our understanding of the principle of citizen governance - will ensure that we travel the roads of life in all the mutual faith and company that we need.

Appendix C:

The Nature of a Renewal Group

- some considerations concerning the future of the art of citizenship -

[The original version of this essay was part of the website "some thoughts on the nature of public life - and an offer of service", at http://ipwebdev.com/campaign/rngp.html]

In this paper I wanted to expressly address certain matters connected to the Idea of "renewal groups", as that is a potential aspect of the emerging citizen governance movement.

In another paper, Citizen Governance and the Future of the Republic (see Appendix B), the observation is made that if one wants to reform our political life, the gentlest and most sure means is through taking hold of the public conversation.  Up to our time, the content of this conversation has been dominated by elite groups through their control of media, and the superficial ways in which serious political questions  are routinely addressed in television commercials.   In effect, there is no real conversation during our electoral processes, but only a lot of money spent on trying to bend the voters emotions in particular directions.

For a Nation with a constitutional government that is based upon profound ideas, this fallen means, of addressing the serious issues of our time through sound bites, is basically irrational.  Outright lies, half truths, purposely confused media images, falsification of a candidates true feelings, and the obscuring of the real reasons various groups advocate their causes - all these are the norm.   This must be overcome, which is certainly the point of those who advocate for various campaign reforms.  My contribution is that we are not dependent upon Congress fixing these problems, but rather have in our own hands the means to bring about the necessary changes.

We do this by  changing the depth and nature of our political conversations among We the People.

No one can stop us from doing this.  Nor can anyone really stop the long term effect of such a permanent change at the fundamental levels of our democratic Republic.  An informed and enlightened electorate forces politicians to deal with matters in a whole new way.  What could be manipulated because it was hidden, is now brought by our conversations into the light, where it then becomes no longer subject to spin and half truths.  The Idea of what America is to be, and what is right for all within our civic life - this is to be determined in the conversations of the renewal groups, not in smoke-filled back rooms.

So what is a renewal group?

Really anywhere two or more citizens are gathered with the idea of seeking, through mutually open conversation, the root Ideas of what we are about - that is a renewal group.  This can be formal and regular, or informal and spontaneous.   The group doesn't even have to think of itself as a renewal group.

People riding in a car pool to work can have a renewal group.  Someone can invite neighbors over for discussion and have a renewal group.   People meeting for lunch can have a renewal group.  A church can have a renewal group.

The real question is what do we do that makes a gathering for political conversation not a renewal group, because this is really the norm today.  Most political conversation is not a renewal group.

Why is this?

It basically has to do first with the intention we as individuals bring to the process of conversation.  And secondly, with the effort we place at listening.  Then finally, to what extent we exclude certain views.

If our intention is only to give forth on our opinions (don't bother me with facts, my mind is already made up), then nothing can be renewed, because no view makes itself available to growth and change.   If we don't increase our listening skills, nothing can be renewed,  because true renewal also is a kind of "exchange", the same way that new life requires the co-mingling of genetic material, so new life in our political conversation requires the co-mingling of ideas.  And finally, by walling ourselves up into groups that judge each other as somehow less than we, because they don't hold to our views and opinions, we limit the potential for new thought, by how much of what is different that we then keep away.

Being a citizen is a responsibility, not just a right.  Just having an opinion is an exercise of that right, but to exercise the responsibility, we need to allow for our views to grow.

A good way to foster growth is to hear and genuinely consider other views, or to add to our factual understanding, or (and this is most important) to carefully think critically about all the ideas out there, not only the ideas of politicians and those with something to gain, but also our own.   In a sense, by critical thinking (not criticism, as in you think like a jerk - but by analyzing the factual basis and the logic) we make a kind of idea-compost, a place where a kind of fermenting process comes into being, which then leads naturally to new thinking.

This is what a renewal group does.  It brings new life to the Ideal of what the United States of America is as a Nation, and who we are as a People.   What could be more important as a future act of citizenship?

Appendix D:

Civil Society:

- its potential and its mystery -

[The original version of this essay was first published on my website Shapes in the Fire, at: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/civil.html.  The reader is cautioned that this essay is a bit complicated in that it brings together in one place a number of perhaps new and unusual concepts.]

While the social body itself is  life-filled in its nature (organic), it is moved, just as our human bodies are moved, by the higher (and lower) principles of soul and spirit active within it.    Thus, the emergence, out of the general conditions of modern civilization of Civil Society, is the result of moral/spiritual impulses arising in human hearts.

These have reached a critical mass, in part as a response to the excesses and extremes of our lower nature that have to date seemed to dominate the formation of the global economy.   Even so, there is much more here than meets the eye.

It might help our initial understanding to look at the social world without coloring it with our values - with our likes and dislikes.  We do have this habit of mind that evaluates people, events, history - everything we might call the social world, the world of human beings and their associations and activities.  Now even though we evaluate this shared social existence, we don't evaluate Nature in this way.  Nature we accept as a given, transformable yes, but not evil.  A great storm that floods and kills millions in Bangladesh is thought to be an act of chance (or god), and the poor who live on these flood plains often considered fools.

But a war we lay at the feet of human hearts.  Crime is the fault of criminals (or poverty if we are knee-jerk liberals).  Depending on our upbringing and many other factors, we all have our likes and dislikes, our loves and hates, and our assumptions about who is bad and who is good and who should be punished and who should be forgiven.

What is especially odd, if we bother to think about it, is that each individual has a different set of such values, and while we tend to join various communities with those who share ours, the fact is that many of the value systems consider the same social phenomena, but do not agree on their rightness or wrongness.  If we follow this out to its real logical conclusion, we will see that the social world, in itself, is not the values, but rather the values arise because of our individual relationship to the world.  Let's restate this, as it is central to the theme.

The social world, in itself, does not have the values by which we color it.   In fact, if we just think about how frequently others misjudge us, and how often we become aware of how others' interpretations of who we are is wrong, then we can see that this is true everywhere.  The valuations come from inside us, but are not implicitly on or in the object (person, community, race, religion) that is being judged.

Now if we remove these colors, these personal values, from how we see the world, how will it look?

Perhaps, if we can learn to do this with the right warmth of heart, we will see that the World is a great and wondrous Play, unfolding in Theme a grand Mystery.

This is not to belittle, by the way, our own vision of the Good, the truth we hold dear when we look at the world and find it wanting, or full, as the case may be.   It is possible, and this I say from experience, to hold both views without contradiction.  In the one view, the one free of our personal sympathies and antipathies, we see a thousand miracles pregnant with life and surging human passion.  This view of the social world shows something apparently unbound, seemingly unfinished, and largely unknown in its most intimate depths.  The other view, the one colored by our values, tells us more about ourselves than about the world.  Think about it, for here is one of the miracles.

Perhaps we pick up the newspaper.  We read of the acts of politicians, criminals, terrorists, businessmen, armed youth in our schools, an endless collection of matters sometimes too terrible to contemplate, served up to us by educated men and women in the name of our right to know all the gory details of the darkness in human souls.  Small wonder we are appalled, and spend our days in contemplation of how screwed up the world is and how, if just this or that was done in accord with our personal understanding, then the world would be better, be more light filled, and humane.

Or we go to work, and our bosses make unreasonable demands, while co-workers gossip, and our best friend sneaks out to have an affair with our spouse.   And then we get home, and the house needs cleaning but we are tired until mom calls and says she is coming over and out of guilt we rush about, meanwhile parking the children in front of the TV to watch a video with too much violence.

For truth to tell, we can turn our value seeing eye upon ourselves, and find that we too are wanting, weak, empty of high purpose, and not at all what we planned to be in our dreamy youth.

The Plains Indians of North America called this aspect of the world, the mirror.   The world, when we start to awake to its real nature serves to reflect back to us something of our own.  We value the world, we color it according to our likes and dislikes, our hopes and dreams, our vision of the Good.   That we do so is in no way a wrongness.

What a wonderful thing that we care, for in the heart is the seat of why we value.  We yearn for justice, for wrongs to be righted, for children to be perfect, for love for ourselves and all we know.   It is the heart which feels pain at failure, especially our own.   Sure we may feel guilt, but even more we feel loss, a small kind of death at the difference between what we really are and what we wish we could be.

Let us consider this some more, for it is central to approaching the Mystery of Civil Society.

One way we can see all this is to notice that the social world has an inside and an outside.  The inside seems intimate to us as individuals.  It is a psychological milieu, quite personal in its texture.  In fact so much so that we consider it the most private realm at all, one we have trouble even sharing with our closest friends and companions.

The outside would be the behaviors we observe in others.   Like the inside, this outside is incredibly rich and complex, although in thinking about the behaviors of others we often reduce our understanding of them to the most simple terms.  We see someone act in a way we do not like, and easily it comes to our mind an idea of their motives and reasons.  Yet, this is so odd, for at the same time we know in ourselves that our own behaviors are not at all based on simple motives and reasons.   In fact, we know that often we ourselves are unsure as to why we do what we do, even though we know more about our own inner realm than any other person possibly can.

Now it is not the purpose of this essay to investigate this most intimate matter of our inner lives in great detail.  Those aspects I have placed under the section Mysteries of the Mind (see: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/contents.html).  Rather what I want us to do here is sum up these facts, to make wholes out of them for the purpose of a better understanding of the social world.

To make this more concrete, let's consider some examples, both on a micro-level (intimate and personal) and a macro-level (large movements of communities of people).

We have a co-worker.  They are overweight.  We, on the other hand, eat right and work out.  We see this person everyday and there arises in us a reaction to this person, to their shape and form and to their habits of eating (we see them in the lunch room five days a week).  This reaction is not really thought out.  It is just there in our consciousness.   We have a value of a certain kind of health discipline, and someone not demonstrating that value is judged.  Not only that, but we might think to ourselves that this person has no will power, and that if they would just exercise their will, then they too could be healthy and fit.

The fact is, of course, that we walk through the social world constantly evaluating the behaviors of others of our acquaintance, and supposing we have insight into the whys and wherefores behind those behaviors.  It is also a fact that many of us, when we face this process of judging and evaluation directly (moving it from the semi-conscious realms into the conscious realms of our inwardness), exercise a deeper inner behavior.   We notice we have been judging and we alter that view and become more charitable.

On the macro-level, consider the Middle East, the nation of Israel and the Palestinians.  These are large congregations of individuals and we will often have discussions and thoughts where we conceptualize communities of individuals in generalizations.  We might think that Israelites do this and Palestinians do that.  Like the individuals of our acquaintance, we judge and evaluate - we "see" - the world of macro-social events in the light of our likes and dislikes.

Now everyone does this.  Everyone shines the light of their values, their likes and dislikes, upon the world.  Moreover, we tend to form associations in accord with finding others of similar points of view.  We might join a church, a political party, a protest movement - the list is endless of communities of common interest that arise because of shared values and world view.

I realize that this seems all to obvious, but it is in our clear thinking about the obvious that it is possible to find our way to the deepest social truths.  Let's step back a bit from these facts and try to have a more global view.

Imagine we are seeing the world from space.  We see before us a big physical place, upon which very large numbers of human beings live.  These individual human beings are also parts of various kinds of groups - some in accord with matters of language, culture, religion, race and shared values and interests.  Many individuals act toward each other with violence, as do many groups.  We could observe from space, over long periods of time, all sorts of behaviors and movements of associations and communities.  This is the outer social world, a world of moving and changing social forms.

Now imagine we can see into the inside of these human beings.  Here lies a whole other world - one of desires, and the most complex kinds of motives, thoughts and judgments.  No one would question that there is a relationship between these two worlds, the outer world of social form and the inner world of invisible psychological dynamics.

Among the elements of this invisible inner world are a wide variety of views as to what it all means.  We have religions and sciences, mysteries and theories.  Then, among all this vast collection of points of view, there might even be some elements of truth.  But the fact that there are all these points of view, which frequently do not agree with each other, this I want us to include in our global picture.  For consider, these views themselves have changed over time, and give no evidence of coming to final rest, in spite of what ultimate truth any current view might claim for itself.  These views of what it all means are just one more aspect of the inner invisible dynamics of the social world.

I urge the reader now to read my essay The Future (see: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/future.html), if that has not yet been read.  If it has been read, then it might be well to call to mind the pictures contained therein concerning the changes over time of the outer elements (social form) of the social world, and the corresponding inner elements (evolution of consciousness).   Basically as we go forward from this point I want us to remain simply within the most obvious social facts, as we have come to know them in their dynamic movement and complexity.

Clearly what we know of as "civilization" is undergoing dramatic changes in the present.  The social world, of outer form and behavior and inner dynamic psychology, is not static, but rather full of change.  Moreover, these changes give evidence of much order.  Chance hardly seems a word to describe what is actually observed.  But the ultimate conclusion to such a question I will leave with the reader, for there is no place here for a debate on causality.  The existence of order is obvious, its source a bit more mysterious.

Let us now turn to Civil Society, the true theme of this essay.

First, we need to accept that the existence of this social phenomena (civil society) is a matter of debate for many.  To some it does not exist, or if it does it really is only something already described in the social and political sciences.  The fact is this term is just a pair of words, whose meaning we are free to determine.  So for the purposes of this essay, I will use Civil Society to mean a very particular thing, which is only partially grasped by noticing certain outer social form manifestations (for example, the loose collective activity of many NGOs - non-governmental organizations).

As expressed in the essay The Future, our time is an age of individual moral choice.  It is as if a fundamental human power was coming awake, a power in times past more imposed by some authority upon individuals.   In ages past we had commandments, religious moral systems and teachings, everything but a recognition of the primacy of individual conscience.  But today this is not longer true.  Out of our own striving for self understanding and expression, there has emerged a demand for a free and individual rendering of what it means to do the Good.

Directed by our sense of what is wrong in the world, and in response to our personal values - our likes and dislikes, we form associations to accomplish the Good.  Whether it is a Greenpeace or Amnesty International or the Alliance for Democracy or church based social work in a third world country  - the names make little difference, in each case human beings join into communities to act upon the world out of impulses of the heart.   And, behind these impulses lives our individual moral authority.

Now this in itself would seem nothing new.  But in our time other events have occurred, which have made the context, in which this emerging moral freedom arose, have a special flavor.  One of these events is the globalization of the economy.  The second is the arrival of the Internet.  It is no accident that these elements have come to be at the same time in human history.

Globalization is a natural result of economic forces, which have to grow and combine until a certain limit is reached.  If we really understand "economia" [c.f. Barbara Gardiner's: Aesthetics of Economics and the Scottish Masonic Tradition (see: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/bgae1.  html)], we will realize that a true economy can only include the whole - the world.  Partial (national and regional) economies were only stages of growth, before the true natural scale was reached.  It would be more accurate to see what we have in the past seen as local or national economies to be local conditions in the Global Economy, much the same way we understand our local weather as aspects of the Nature of Climate of the whole world.

As many believe, the global economy is not dominated by moral ideals flowing from our individual sense of the Good.  Rather it is driven largely by fears, mostly fears of death.  Those individuals, who dominate the global economy through their connections to the tyranny of concentrated wealth (the successor to the older aristocracies), have other gods than the Good.  They serve themselves and as a consequence the values driving the global economy have brought it about that globalization has arrived with few truly human ideals at its center.

In earlier times, the suffering produced by the social domination of the selfish was only known locally.  But with the arrival of the Internet and modern media, our awareness of these tragic elements of human existence became more common.  The result of this non-accidental confluence of events (emerging moral individuality, economic globalization and wide spread information access) was the creation of a moral social organ within the world community - Civil Society.  This organ is young, and only somewhat self aware, but it is nevertheless a seed with remarkable potential.

But to really appreciate this we have to expand our understanding of the world social organism, so that we can see the real relationships between it and Civil Society.  To do this we have to become familiar with an Idea, in this case it is called: the threefold social organism (http://www.  threefolding.freeuk.com).  First introduced by the philosopher and seer Rudolf Steiner, this idea is essential to our understanding of modern social conditions.

In general on this website, I have been trying to point out that the social body of humanity has qualities of an organic nature.  These are not the only qualities, but this organic aspect cannot be denied, given that the social organism is made up entirely of living beings.   There is nothing theoretical or abstract about this situation.  It is a quite simple and observable fact.

This social organism can appear to our seeing-thinking if we take proper care to observe how organization appears in our social arrangements.  This organizational aspect can be seen in certain functional relationships, which are essentially polaric in nature.  This fact requires that we first understand the idea of polarity, which is something quite different from the idea of mere opposites.

In the pure mathematics of projective geometry (http://www.anth.org.uk/NCT/), the idea of polarity comes to full expression in the various relationships of point, line and plane.  In this sense, point and plane are the twin poles, while the line is the middle or mediating element.

In the human form, the head organization is one pole, while the limb organization is the other.  For those unfamiliar with this way of thinking, this will appear quite strange.  However, if you follow this out carefully enough, the true nature of what is being discussed can be apprehended.  The head is soft inwardly, while the bony part is on the outside.  The limbs, on the other hand (pole), have the bony parts on the inside, while the soft parts are on the surface.  It is this relationship between the two that unveils the polaric aspect.  In polaric systems, one pole is related to the other almost as if they were inside-out versions of each other.  In the human form, the middle (the trunk organization) is upwardly bony on the outside (rib cage and sternum), while as we descend in the form, the lower trunk is all soft, with the lowest parts of the spine being on the inside.  This polaric relationship of the human form is true in all details, and a deep and wonderful discussion of it can be found in the book Man and Mammals, by Wolfgang Schad.

Moreover, while the form is polaric, this is due to the non-physical inwardness also being polaric.  That is, the head carries out certain functions (form follows function) of a sensing and contemplative nature, for which it needs to be at rest, while the limbs propel us through space according to our spirit and soul's will and direction.  I have here, of necessity, only been able to hint at the details, the full expression of which would take us too far afield.

[In the following I am going to be referring to certain "ideals".  To understand the importance of this, there is a detailed consideration in the essay: Basic Conceptions: fundamentals of a new social view (see: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/basic.html) .]

What Rudolf Steiner pointed out, in his book Towards Social Renewal, is that human activities can basically all be described in such a way that it is clear that a certain kind of form or organization arises in the social order, from the inside out - form follows function.  For example, inwardly we have certain impulses of freedom, and these efforts to express this ideal appear most dominantly in what Steiner called the Cultural Sphere, in which he included science, art, religion and education.  Thus, in the main, the impulse to freedom is most realized in Cultural Life.

At the opposite pole, is the ideal of brotherhood.  Freedom is very much an individual expression - we do it out of ourselves.  But the ideal of brotherhood requires that we join together.  It is the Earth we share together, and thus, at the root of Economic Life is the ideal of brotherhood.   In the present, of course, we do much in our social life that deconstructs this naturally appearing order.  For example, many assert freedom in the realm of Economics, where they want wealth only for themselves or their associates.  Yet, there is only one Earth, and only so much wealth, and the ideal which seeks to emerge in Economic Life remains brotherhood - the sharing of what is available among all.

In between these two poles, the individual pole of the ideal of freedom and its polaric counterpart, the sharing pole of the ideal of brotherhood, lies a middle realm.  This is the Political-legal Sphere, or the Rights Life.  Its ideal is equity, or equality.  In law we balance the apparent competition between the impulses to freedom and the necessity of brotherhood.  Through political processes we determine what rules apply to all - or, how we are equal to each other and in what circumstances.

This then is how the threefold social organism tries to appear in human societies.  Profound Ideals seek to emerge, through human activity.  This functional process then forms our social order.  We should keep in mind, however, that this process of the forming of the threefold social organism is something that is occurring over vast periods of historical time.  It develops according to rules, and depends upon our slow maturation as human beings.  As we mature, more and more the social organism will acquire this form.
 Globalization and Civil Society are interim phenomena appearing in the history of the development of this threefold organism - natural stages in long term processes, whose eventual full realization will require our conscious participation.

Let me give a very brief sketch.  The older social structures, such as the ancient Egyptian, were theocratic in nature.  The kings were also priests.  Even in modern times, remnants of this way have continued, for example, up until the Chinese invaded Tibet it was a functioning theocracy.  In this sense, something out of Cultural existence dominated societies.  Yet, this form of social organization was incomplete.  It only really was valid for the particular stage of the evolution of consciousness applicable to that time.  Today, a theocracy is a dam to the real needs of any people (witness Islamic Fundamentalism).

The theocratic approach to social organization eventually gives way to some kind of idea of the political State.  With the early Greeks and Romans, we have the emergence of the first iteration of the Political-legal life in the formation of the State and the recognition of the Citizen.  So, now (or then actually) we have a Cultural Life and a Rights Life simultaneously.  The threefolding process is still immature, while yet being appropriate for humanity's inner condition.

Now we come to more modern times.  Human individuality is flowering.  The Economic Life has reached a kind of youthful climax with Globalization.  The Rights Life has matured, and in the latent ideal of citizen governance a seed planted at America's founding begins to grow into the light.  In the Cultural Life, human freedom in the realm of science, art, religion (as in choice thereof) and education (think about the real issues underlying current struggles) is exhibiting tremendous power.

More and more we are determined to think what we want to think (our society, family, education, religion, science be damned), especially about the moral, the nature of the good, and what is right to do in any circumstances of life.

If I may make a personal note, my life spans an interesting period of time, having begun in 1940. As a youth I was taught to do what was expected, something that was thrown over in a quite revolutionary way in the 1960's.  This insistence on freedom of moral choice has since matured (although between the generations there is a lot of misunderstanding).  Even so, out of this emerging moral freedom is forming a new social power in the form of Civil Society.    That which lives in the moral center of individuals is slowly finding various forms of community, and these communities themselves are gathering together in the secure knowledge of their common moral strength.   At the time of this writing (early March, 2003) this community opposes the efforts of the sitting government of the United States (the 2nd Bush Administration) to start a war against Iraq.  A new power awakes in the world, refusing any long to let elites of wealth or blood maintain their historical dominance and self serving rule.

If we step back a little from this situation, we can come to see the World itself threefolding, with a global economy on the one hand, an emerging cultural-spiritual force in the moral  power of Civil Society on the other, while in between, whether in the United Nations, or the International Court in the Hague, a mediating world life of Rights also surges forth from the inwardness of many human beings.

We need to look at this again.

Less than a hundred years ago, when the various European nations that brought us World War I were busy doing what nations do when they get ready to kill a lot of people, the ordinary people of the world basically had to stand by, passive guests to the machinations of powerful elites.  That is no longer the case.

Now the ordinary people of the world are beginning to know and experience their moral power as a group.  They no longer stand by passively, nor do they accept their own government's choices.  Everywhere, people resist the excesses of those obsessed with power, and it is now clear that sitting governments are near the end time of that mischief they can cause the ordinary and once powerless gentle folk to whom this planet really belongs.

Where once, ages ago, hierarchical castes ruled the ordinary human being, such as the Pharaohs of Egypt or the Caesars of Rome, this time has passed.  A new ordering principle awakes in the world, rising from inside the individual human being as a heart directed moral impulse, forming from there into communities of action, determined to impose its collective will on world social order.

This will can not be expected to achieve all that it might wish to overnight.  But no one - no one - should any longer fail to see the active presence of  the moral impulses underlying Civil Society in the unfolding of the future.

Appendix E:

The Declaration, as it was, with additions and changes noted in bold,

and what was removed (contained within parentheses and in italics).

The Declaration of Independence of the People of the United States of America (Thirteen Colonies) In cyberspace at the beginning of the Third Millennium (CONGRESS, July 4, 1776)

The unanimous Declaration of the People (thirteen) of the United States of America

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political and economic bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them (as various individuals understand Him out of their own freedom), a decent respect to the opinions of humanity (mankind) requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to that (e) separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings (men) are created equal, that they are endowed by the (ir) Creation (or) with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, (and) the pursuit of Happiness, and rights of privacy and information*. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among human beings (Men), deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shown (hath shewn), that human beings (mankind) are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. -Such has been the patient sufferance of the American People (these Colonies); and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present rule of financial elites (King of Great Britain [George III]) is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these the People of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

The Lords of Finance, through their corruption of the political and social processes of the Western Democracies, have imposed on the world, and on the American People, a system of banking and of monetary rules and policies entirely for their own benefit.  Any study of the true history of the creation of Central Banking proves this assertion. Just consider that by this means of creating economic structures totally for their own benefit, the result is that 1% of the people in the world control 50% of its wealth.

They - the Lords of Finance - have, through their surrogates the Democratic and Republican Parties, impeded all efforts to reform our social and  democratic processes, such as by our making serious and real changes to campaign financing, thus permitting neither reason or truth to rule our social and democratic process, but rather only wealth and the raw power it is able to purchase.

They - the Lords of Finance - have first promoted a false Cold War, and now an equally false War on Terror, for the sole purpose of creating in America a permanent Military and Arms industrial base, intended not for the protection of the People of People's, but rather for the use by the Lords of Finance as a tool for their imperial (world) rule.

They - the Lords of Finance - have used the military might and covert might of American power to manipulate, ruin and destroy - where ever and when ever they felt necessary - systems of government throughout the world that did not bow to their will.

They - the Lords of Finance - have raped the world's environment, enslaved third world peoples economically, destroyed the world's agricultural riches by the introduction of dangerous chemicals and unproven new genetic forms into the eco-system of the whole world, all in the search for ever greater power and money.

This is not to say, that no benefit to humanity has arisen from some of these changes and developments, but rather that at every juncture where it was a choice between improving the lot of life of ordinary people or enriching themselves, the Lords of Finance choose that path most beneficial to themselves, well all the while, corrupting government processes everywhere possible in the vain pursuit of this immoral.

It becomes a question then of how do We the People, already in possession of one hard won Constitution, remove this insidious influence from our shared social and political existence, for one of the evil means by which the Lords of Finance rule is by remaining anonymous and invisible.

On this basis we reject as no longer workable this beloved and now flawed and corrupted original Constitution, declare it null and void, and assert our right to replace it with that which we believe more carefully addresses and protects us from the over-reaching of concentrated wealth.

We recognize that this task will have as its main difficulty the removing of the existing financial structures in which all the Peoples of the world have become ensnared.  The separation of the original 13 Colonies from the English aristocracy was far easier.  Here we need to rise above something far more entangled in every aspect of our daily lives.

In addition, we will have to confess our addiction to the comforts this concentration of wealth has made possible for a majority of the American People.  The truth is that we cannot move from our current conditions to those which are yet possible without owning our own responsibility and participation in the concentration of 80% of the world's wealth among only 20% of the world's people.

In this declaration then we have to declare two important matters.

I.  The Lords of Finance need to be taken out of their anonymous and secret rule and made to face, as named individuals, the judgment of the world for their crimes against our rights as human beings, the crimes against our free choice of government and their crimes against the planet and the environment we all share.

II.  The People of America need to confess our own excesses and own up to our own responsibilities, and by this means replace the rule of elites and their surrogate political tools - the Democratic and Republican Parties, with Citizen Governance.

[skip to ___________________

(He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighboring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.)

_____here]

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. These Merchant Princes, (A Prince) whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyranny, are (is) unfit to be the rulers of any free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our American political (British) brethren. We have warned our elected officials (them) from time to time of their attempts to serve themselves instead of the people by their legislative (ture) efforts to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over our civil liberties, at the same time they reward themselves with privileges and benefits (such as medical coverage) they deny to us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our privations and dissatisfactions (emigration and settlement here). We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have entreated (conjured) them by the ties of our shared humanity (common kindred) to disavow these usurpations such as the abuse of constant re-districting as a means to keep themselves from being challenged for election, which has placed them outside our rule through the ballot. (, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.) They (too) have also become (been) deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity, in that we ask for and need a protected ballot, safe from electronic theft with a paper trail so that all will know our real wishes. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces as essentially treasonous the behavior by which they preferred the wishes of the Lords of Finance over the real needs of the America People (our Separation), and hold them, as we hold the rest of humanity (mankind), Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the People of the united States of America, via cyberspace communion (in General Congress, Assembled), appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these many States (Colonies), solemnly publish and declare, That these the People of the United States of America (Colonies) are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent of the economic tyranny of the Lords of Finance and their surrogates, the Republican and Democratic Parties (States); that we (they) are Absolved from all Allegiance to the economic rules created by the Lords of Finance and any allegiance to the present standing government of America, which has usurped excessive powers, failed in its sacred trust, and acted with conscious treason against the Republic (British Crown), and that all political connection between us (them) and the present sitting government of these many States, standing as it does solely for the benefit of the Lords of Finance (State of Great Britain), is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent People (States), we (they) have full Power to engage in civil disobedience, refuse to honor claims on our wealth by the many banks, ignore levies for armies, refuse to pay taxes, print our own money and any other acts of freedom necessary to resist the continued rule of the Lords of Finance, or the excessive and dishonorable abuses of power by the Republican and Democratic Parties (levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce), and to do all other Acts and Things which an Independent and free People (States) may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Appendix F:  Some material about the author, Joel A. Wendt

Most of this material is going to consist of URL addresses to my various websites and writings.  For the reader's general information, I am presently 66 (and retired on social security), the father of five (through two wives), and most of my adult life I was working poor.  I began life in better straits, gaining degrees in pre-seminary (a BA at the University of Denver) and law (a JD at the University of Montana), but during my about 14 years living in and around Berkeley California (1969-1983), I became an addict (mostly marijuana), and have been in recovery since September 1987 (a little over 18 years).  The years in this cosmopolitan community of Berkeley were not wasted, however, for there I received a rather remarkable introduction into both spiritual and political self-education.  Following this I mostly worked for restaurants, or in mental health, although the last three years of my work life (59-62) I worked in a light industrial factory.  If you explore the links below you will see that I have been thinking and writing for a long time, and there exists a great deal of work.

A list of all my writings can be found at: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/fullindex.html

My main website is called Shapes in the Fire and can be found at: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/

My last presidential offerings can be found at: http://ipwebdev.com/campaign/

Also there is Celebration and Theater: a people's art of statecraft, at: http://ipwebdev.com/celebration/

In addition, I have a blog: Hermit's Weblog: everything your mother never taught you about how the world really works, which I only use occasionally, and few have read: http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/blog/

Printed versions of my works are slowly becoming obtainable at Lulu (http://www.lulu.com/), an open source based free on-line publishing service, where one only pays for the cost of reproducing each individual book.

If someone wants to more deeply understand my relationship to America, they need to read the following four poems, quietly out loud: An American Quartet: (1) Some of Us Remember; (2) the Rape of the Republic; (3) America Sings; and, (4) a gift from another's eyes; beginning at http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/someremember.html

Appendix G: 

a wonderful contribution by the author of Babylon Five, J. Michael Straczynski.

These words were written for the character G'kar, a Narn, in this remarkable television series (the battle of good and evil, on the level of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, written for television, using the metaphors of science fiction).  The first three and 1/4 years of the five year story arc of this Great Tale involved the battle for good and evil, followed by that last 3/4s of season Four which were devoted to a civil war concerning the Earth, while season Five was devoted mostly to the civilization to which these wars gave birth, especially as regards a new minority - those with special spiritual (mental) talents (telepaths).  For those who know this series, it is remarkably prophetic, especially as regards its considerations of Earth politics.

Here is how it was written in the original in Episode 5.3: The Paragon of Animals

"The Universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice.  The language is not Narn, or human or Centari  or Gayam or Mimbari.  It speaks in the language of hope.  It speaks in the language of trust.  It speaks in the language of strength and the language of compassion, which is the language of the heart, and the language of the soul.  But always it is the same voice.  It is the voice of our ancestors speaking through us, and the voice of our inheritors waiting to be born.   It is the small still voice that says: We are one, no matter the blood, no matter the skin, no matter the world, no matter the star.   We are one, no matter the pain, no matter the darkness, no matter the loss, no matter the fear.  We are one.  Here, gathered together in common cause we agree to recognize this singular truth and this singular rule: That we must be kind to one another.  Because each voice enriches us and ennobles us.  And each voice lost diminishes us. We are the voice of the Universe, the soul of Creation, the fire that will light the way to a better future.  We are one."

**************
appendix H

COUNTER-MOVEs

... finding victory in the war the

rich are making upon the poor ...

by Joel A. Wendt

social philosopher and occasional fool

INTRODUCTION

This essay makes a very large assumption, which is a bit complicated, but which can be stated as follows ... (several paragraphs) ...

Much that happens in the world today is strongly influenced by certain groups of human beings who look upon the life conditions of most of the people in the world with a great deal of callous indifference, ... i.e. they could care less what happens to us (economic and social collateral damage) as they battle among themselves for dominance.  All the same, some, who don't think very clearly, might consider that what is to be said in the long essay that follows is the work of a conspiracy nut job.  The only problem with this point of view is that it is history itself that teaches of conspiracies, and someone who insists there are no such groups at work in the social-political world of humanity is living in a fantasy world.

Conspiracies have always existed where power was to be fought over and where great wealth could be obtained through temporary cooperation.   Most members of a conspiracy don't need to always have the shared ideology often thought, but in fact can share only the historical understanding that a momentary association of power and wealth hungry individuals and small groups can dominate for a time, those who do not consciously combine their forces.   Conspiracies of this kind only require similar goals, and a willingness to divide the spoils.  Japan, Germany and Italy cooperated to a degree during World War Two, not because of a shared political ideology, but simply because it was useful for their own goals.  Russia, under Stalin, wouldn't cooperate and became an enemy of the Axis powers for that reason.

On a smaller scale illegal and secret collusion were common during the time of the robber barons in America, on the bridge from the 19th to the 20th Century; and, recently such collusion appeared in the cooperation among five major investment banks, who worked together in an effort to dominate the still mostly unknown derivative markets, where they bought and sold  various speculative instruments in the top end of the ponzi scheme that the tame press keeps mislabeling the sub-prime loan crisis.  In all cases these activities were illegal (one of the reasons such conspiracies hide their activities - if it was legal they would do it right in front of everyone).  That they don't get prosecuted for such activities comes mostly from the corrupting effect and influence large wealth has on government.

The difficulty with what might be called most kinds of conspiracy theory is that those who try to prove such things exist, basically try to be too specific in the details, as if it was possible to penetrate to the inner workings of something that was set up in the first place to carefully hide itself.  We don't have to go into the specifics in order to perceive the conspiracy.   We only have to read the signs as it were, the tracks such activity leaves in various actions taken by individuals, governments and businesses.  It is the same as when we observe patterns in the weather - this enables us to anticipate a coming storm front.  In a like fashion then patterns in various social and political events reveals that hidden associations,  temporarily sharing common goals, are at work behind the scenes.

There is also a kind of thinking of which we are aware today, which can help us with this need we have to see behind the scenes and deeper into the minds of those who with such callous indifference can act so selfishly in the face of the suffering that is caused others.   A typical example of this callous indifference was the recent crisis in Myanmar, where the ruling military leaders (an obvious conspiracy of lawless individuals) cared only for their own interests and let hundreds of thousands of their people suffer and perish.  We live in a world where this is happening on a very large scale, with quite significant amounts of power and wealth at stake.   We need then to get inside the minds of such groups, and the science that has explored this on a very small scale is the kind of work that the behavioral science people in the FBI do - that which is engaged in by those we call today profilers.  This is dangerous work, by the way, for the soul that lets itself think like such inhuman willful lovers of evil, exposes itself to all kinds of problems.

Yet, it is essential that such a process be enacted, in spite of personal cost, for this is one of the keys to learning how to perceive the patterns.  If we think (momentarily and carefully) with the same callous indifference as those who would rule us from hidden places, we then develop a greater ability to discern among the many detailed phenomena of modern life, the trail left behind by those who would harm so many for such disgustingly selfish purposes.

In the long essay that follows I will tell the story of what can be perceived, that is I will profile the dominant conspiracy actors who are willing to sacrifice so many for so few.  I do this not to identify them as individuals, however.  I do this so that we can see the detailed nature of the war being waged upon ordinary people in the world today, and from this understanding of the nature of this war, how we then may make the Counter-Moves that limit the effects of those who would so easily harm so many.

Certainly in this effort I will not be perfect.  I don't even expect to get it all right.  I do, however, very much want to do something that most conspiracy theorists do not do, namely to offer solutions, not just a lot of negative hand wringing.  It isn't enough to perceive that lovers of evil seek to harm us, but we have to understand that we don't have to stand passively by, and can in fact engage in actions which limit and contain this harm. 

At the same time, we need to realize that we cannot do this with the idea in mind of achieving total victory of any kind.   A perfect world is not ours to obtain - that's a fantasy.   We can, however, ameliorate a great deal of what comes toward us, by all kinds of activities, many of which are already in place.  By this I mean to suggest that we already make all kinds of socially healthy instinctive choices, which protect us from this evil-loving callous indifference.   We are not to be overwhelmed, especially if we learn to perceive - to appreciate the profile - and form our own counter-associations, our own communities and groups from which we draw the necessary spiritual and psychological strength out of which our survival can be created (in spite of what the dominant holders of wealth and power seek to achieve).

Those familiar with my other writings will know that there are a number of different ways this can be approached, and here in this long essay I am just coming at the situation of modern existence from a particular point of view.  There are many other points of view from which our contemporary existence can be approached, and I hope as we progress into the next years, people will seek out the many other voices of wisdom that have much to offer to the shared trials of humanity.
 

In my books, the Way of the Fool and American Anthroposophy for example, I discuss how we deal with such problems as individuals and communities, from inside our own soul and spiritual  life.   In my book Uncommon Sense I discuss what can be done in a more macro-social sense following the legal potentials hidden and unrecognized in the U. S. Constitution (in which this essay will be included in the appendix).  I do the same in the book called: On the Nature of Public Life.  Below I am going at this situation from again another direction, through the process of elaborating in great detail the patterns in our shared social and political existence left by those who want to dominate, and what these patterns can tell us that might be useful in support of our need to respond.   The reader will get a clearer picture of what I mean here when we get into the actual details.

 

Joel A. Wendt, Summer 2008

ENTERING THE LOOKING GLASS

We need to begin with simple observations of various phenomena.  It is no use to immediately judge them or already assume such phenomena "prove" the existence of any government and business conspiracy.  Let us just begin to assemble various facts, and see if a pattern emerges all on its own.

For example, we could start anywhere, but I'd like to start with something that was a detail of the 9/11 catastrophe, and which precisely because it is still unresolved, could be very important to note.   This is the anthrax scare/panic that began, according to reports, a week after September 11, 2001, supposedly on September 18th.   This attack was directed right at Congress and was ongoing up to the time of the passage of the Patriot Act (passed and signed into law by October 26th, 2001).  Five people were killed, and as many as two dozen injured, all mostly postal workers or office workers.   So we have 9/11, then a week later the beginning of a bio-terrorism attack on Congress, during which the Patriot Act is offered and then enacted into law.

The Patriot Act, at over 300 pages, could not have been written following 9/11, but had to have substantial portions of it already on the shelf, as it were, well before 9/11.   Later, as the Country more and more woke up to the reality of the Patriot Act, legislators began to confess to never having read it.  All of this is carefully analyzed elsewhere on the Internet, but I do think it is an interesting kind of fingerprint as it were, of a certain kind of careful thinking, if we take the view that this whole scenario was engineered in advance.  Suppose you wanted to get certain laws enacted that you wanted in place later for larger purposes in the near future.  Can you think of a better method for achieving this?  The law is ready, the time is right [9/11], and the final pressure to be applied to Congress - a direct deadly attack - is commenced.

Eventually (seven years later), the main person of interest in the anthrax attack was exonerated in a civil judgment, which awarded him substantial funds (a payment for his willing collaboration in the attack and for being a suspect?).   Following this award, another supposed person of interest committed suicide, and then in the press was leaked all kinds of facts supposedly in support his guilt.  Now if I was the case manager of this problem for the extremely wealthy and power hungry, I would be glad to keep the public following one trail (certain to eventually dead end) of explanation for the anthrax attacks, but not so stupid as to think that would suffice.  I'd have a back up plan, and even better, a stooge.  Thus, when the first person of interest was finally exonerated, I'd be able to not only substitute a new one, but conveniently have him kill himself (right, if you believe in the tooth fairy).  At which point, the not very bright press and mainstream media, after an appropriate flood of news stories designed to convince the public, will consider the situation ended.

About those assumed convincing stories, let me just give one example.  Recently it was reported that the FBI has discovered the container in which traces of the exact matching anthrax spores could be found.  Here comes the kicker though, and the reader should keep in mind the subtle nuance of the FBI report.  The container was found to have been in the suicide's possession.  Note the word possession, and recognize that they do not say they found his fingerprints on the container - that is they have no evidence he actually handled this container (anyone could have planted it in his office or home or wherever).

Recently a new law was offered to Congress, and seems to be well on its way to being passed.   It advances an idea contained in the Patriot Act, which basically so loosely and carelessly defines domestic terrorism that what we have for years accepted as honorable civil disobedience would be now criminalized to a high degree, including giving the State extra power to investigate and prosecute outside previous rules limiting the power of the State under our Constitution.  (HR 1955 titled the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007).

Another recent news story explains that the FBI is to be given authority to open case files (and thus investigate with all their powers) any American citizen at all, whether there are any facts suggesting we should be suspicious.  No evidence at all.  Just a desire in an investigating arm of the Government to investigate someone.

In fact, if we look at the legislative history of the last 30 or 40 years, especially when Republicans controlled Congress and/or the White House, the State has more and more intruded into our lives.  This slow accretion, of the power of the State at the expense of the citizen, has been noted by many.   Some of the deeper thinkers on this problem have compared this situation to the story of the frog in the boiling water, who sitting in the very slowly rising temperature never jumped out of the pot.  We, to this thinking, are that frog, and the boiling water is the slow erosion of our civil rights.  When we do eventually realize what has been going on, it may well be to late.

Lets ask the question: Who, and for what reasons, might want to achieve such an end?  Who has something to gain if American civil liberties are slowly dissolved, and replaced with more and more central authority?  Who could do this regardless of which Party controlled the White House or Congress?   Why would they do this?

Lets take up another thread...

In recent years the problem called global warming has become a popular political issue.  Environmental degradation is nothing new, it was noticed many decades ago in Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, as well as other places.  Acid rain was another clue.   The original Clean Air and Clean Water acts were efforts to notice that the industrial revolution was out of control and was having all manner of side-effects that were dangerous to the future.  Is there anyone who also might have known about this, but for seemingly obscure reasons wanted to just let it continue (perhaps knew it couldn't be stopped), but saw some way to take advantage of this situation?

We are also today more and more waking up to the reality of banking and money, because of the ongoing economic crash.  The veil is being lifted, and many are starting to understand that the real nature of the economy is not what we are told.  More and more people are looking at the creation of the Federal Reserve.  Others are noticing the meetings in Davros Switzerland, where elites of all kinds gather.  Google Bilderberger for a big can of worms going on right in front of us.   People of power and wealth meet, and their collusion is becoming more and more obvious.

In my book, Uncommon Sense, I write of what I call The Lords of Finance, who are a loose association of the very very rich who sit at the top of the ponzi scheme that is modern debt-money banking (Google Money as Debt for details).  When you have a huge amount of wealth, you can hire the very best for-hire minds, which we know of today as think tanks, of which the  earliest versions (that still exist today) were called: the Trilateral Commission (Rockefeller banking money, mostly American in nature) and the Council on Foreign Relations (Cecil Rhodes wealth, and English banking money).  There is a lot of research available on the Internet on these institutions as well.

An image out of history is important here: bread and circuses.   The Roman Emperors, in the late (declining) stages of their empire, knew that to keep the masses more or less satisfied the Emperors had to provide minimal food, and significant distractions (bread and circuses).  We have that today in America.  Plenty of things, lots of food (denatured and unhealthy, but those in charge don't actually care), and multiple distractions (TV, movies, video games, shopping).  What they don't want is a culture, or a people, that is awake.

At the same time, many today are becoming aware that what we are told about how the economy works is more like the dogmas of a religion than the principles of a science.  For example, how money actually works has basically been completely hidden from the general public knowledge.  While we were told over and over again to have faith in free markets (the prime economic religious mantra), the rulers of the financial world knew that debt-money effectively enabled the bankers to become parasites on the workers in all those economies where central banks were the norm.   The truth was that almost all the money in circulation comes into existence as a debt on the spender.  It not only has no value, it really has a kind of negative value, because every time the financial elites took out their very large blood surplus for their own benefit, the debt on the rest of us increased.

Through complex misdirection, which had to be intentional (why our economics teachers and scientists didn't notice this is a quite remarkable unanswered question), it has never really been explained to people in the Western Democracies just how money works, what banks do, how they make money and dozens of other questions that would have caused ordinary people to demand extraordinary controls over the financial institutions on which we all depend.  On a colossal scale we've had the economic wool pulled over our eyes.

Now this was not always the case.  Our Founders and even Lincoln completely mistrusted the bankers (and the banks own higher ups in the food chain of concentrated wealth), and battle lines had been drawn as long ago as the very beginning of the Nation (see my Uncommon Sense for details).  Who would do this?  Why would they do this?   Some of these questions are also addressed there.

Let me summarize: One can have a fun ride getting at this information by reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle - 6 novels in three books for a total of 2700 pages, which is, among other marvelous things, an adventure saga covering the period in time in Europe from about 1670 to 1730, during which the basic directions of banking and finance were determined, as well as the basic directions of natural science..   During this period an understandable conflict arose between the aristocracies of blood (Kings and Queens etc.) and the emerging class of bankers and merchants.   Kings and Queens kept ruining bankers and economies by their undisciplined impulses to start wars, borrow money they could not repay, and live high on the hog (so to speak).  Great political and social power resided in hereditary blood.   It was the dominant way the world was run in the West.

The bankers didn't like watching their wealth disappear down the appetites of these elites of blood.  When human beings eventually began to throw over the elites of hereditary blood (the American and French Revolutions), the arrangements of political power became more fluid for a time, and thus it happened that as the U.S. Constitution was formed, the banking elites worked hard to maintain a place at the table of power.  Hamilton was one of their main representatives.

A second large battle between the impulses for a truly free government of the people, by the people and for the people, occurred during Lincoln's presidency.  The bankers were reluctant to loan money to the North for the Civil War (they want over 30% interest).   They had kept their ability under the Constitution to issue specie (bank notes), but Lincoln understood the danger to a point, and confounded them by issuing for the first time government money (Lincoln Greenbacks) to finance the War.

Even so, the battle had been lost all the way back during the time before even Stephenson's novel, when banks established the right (by practice, more than by law) to lend more money than they had on deposit.  Understanding this is why runs on banks occur even today.  We know their actual current cash on hand resources don't cover all their deposit obligations as these exist on paper.

With the Federal Reserve Act in the early part of the 20th Century, the banks finally won the main political battle, and private Central Banks now became not only responsible for the money supply and control of interest rates, but taxpayers had to pay all the costs of the newly printed money in circulation.  During this period was already put in place the fake religion-like ideas about money and banking, and this effort at illusion creation was intensified.   What would be kept secret in the cold hearts of bankers, could be managed in a democracy as long as people falsely believed they lived in a free society, and were taught to worship the dark gods of the imaginary free market and to accept the rights of wealth to take profit and property at the expense of persons.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, an elite now stood well poised to control major macro economic decisions world wide.  These powers most strongly arose in Western Civilization, which cultural influence was also the most adept at natural science.  Much of history in the last 120 years can be explained by a conscious decision among the super elites of wealth and power in the West to control the whole world economically (recall the Colonial and Trading Empires).  For example (a few among many possible examples), English wealth helped the Russian Revolution start, in part to give a second front in WWI, but for other reasons as well.  America, to continue the example, has sponsored a dictator in Iraq (and other dictators) for years.  Why?

Consider for a moment the conscienceless soul of a serial killer - what is usually the subject of profiling.  Imagine that same conscienceless impulse coming awake in the blood lines of bankers.  Over time, this conscienceless impulse (moving in secret) rises to the top of the successor aristocracy.    An aristocracy of wealth then covertly replaces the aristocracies of blood at the table of real financial power, while the illusion of control among the people of the Western Democracies becomes the main teaching element in civics and other cultural influences that are subject to manipulation and which create our world views.  

If you look into the broad creation of public schools, during those 120 or more years, you will discover that a prime goal was to control urban youth, who otherwise (having little to do) tended to lawlessness.  Rural youth were excluded from the laws requiring school attendance when needed on the farms, but in the cities the truant officer was meant to be an agent of great social control.  Public schools were not really intended to educate (the elites had their own private academies, many of which still exist all over New England), but to give workers basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic.

We are fed a dream about how our social life is ruled (we're a democracy we are told, after all we vote), and half asleep we become the serfs and peasants of an aristocracy of wealth able to purchase all the clever minds it needs in order to rule from secret.

Is there more?

- its for the greater good -

Where did this gentleman get these ideas: "its for the greater good" (whatever that means), and that he was "doing God's work"?

Any evil seeks a self justification.   The pedophile believes he loves the child he rapes and abuses.  Of his own satisfaction he makes a kind of personal religion.  This isn't because of a need to salve conscience, but rather because each individual world view has to have some degree of internal consistency.  Too large a paradox in the fundamentals of our personal world view, and an uncontrolled insanity can be the result. 

The callous indifference of the elites and super elites of wealth needs a similar justification.  We get glimpses of this justification process when we recognize that there is some purpose to such social forms as the Skull and Bones Society (Yale's elite fraternity), or to the annual gatherings at the Bohemian Grove in California (a gathering of already co-opted politicians, business leaders and others).  What we find out about these events is that frequently there is a religious or rite-like ceremony as part of them.   Is there some psychological principle being applied here?

Most of us are familiar today with cults, and how a cult works at brainwashing someone.  Suppose that very very very smart people were to do something similar, but far more sophisticated.  Not so much mind control, but nevertheless something that lets them entice others with inducements that bring a needed degree of submission to the will of those at the top, yet doesn't disturb to openly (many so seduced like to be half asleep as well) the sense of rightness of those who consent and agree.

Imagine, for example, potential future American business and political leaders being awarded Rhodes Scholarships, and then going to England, to Oxford, for advanced education.  These individuals are themselves then profiled, and their weaknesses and strengths cataloged.  Those with the right psychological disposition are then drawn further into the inner circles of extreme wealth and power.   Tempted with various kinds of addictions, some sexual, they are shown that they can be princes of the world of the elites, and satisfy any indulgence at will.   Should they fall, or otherwise act in such a way that they are noticed by the press, the elites then show the ease with which they can kill any story, or otherwise make their proteges immune from consequences.

Lets pause and consider the idea of addiction for a moment.  The greatest addiction is power.  The addictions of the senses - of the mind and of the feelings (heroin dreams, nicotine, sex etc.) are small compared to addictions of the will - of unlimited power to do whatever you want.  A secondary aspect is, oddly, a kind of love.  Our culture of celebrity celebrates special people.  They too get what they want.  Think now of Dick Chaney.  Enormous secret power.  Can help his friends in the circles of wealth do almost anything they want in government.  He's not alone of course, but lets just focus our profiling imagination of one person.

When he goes to the private homes of the elites, in perhaps Virginia or at Aspen in Colorado, what is his experience when he walks into a room.  The most powerfully and secretive man on the planet is adored by his surroundings as if he was a god and a great hero.

To return to the process by which one joins this worshiped and powerful elite...

At some point a special few are even made aware of the slight of hand involved in the making of a fake economic religion, with enough truth in it to explain much, but with the real effects and benefits for the super elites still carefully hidden until the neophyte inductee has so committed themselves that it would be suicidal to leave the group.  As many of these individuals will have intact consciences (which like all of us, we can be induced to ignore it), something has to be given to them that lets them believe in the Way of Wealth and Power.

We don't have to know exactly what was given.  The details are not important.  I'll sketch some possibilities, but at the same time will focus on religion-like social processes, because as we all know, Western Civilization is strongly influenced by Christianity, and so most people raised from their youth in Western Culture will have certain values.  They must be given a justification for accepting their roles as princes who lie, without too far disturbing their early church experiences and ideals.  While the super elites of the aristocracies of wealth will produce their share of conscienceless individuals, most members of these groups will need to become true believers in a religion-like world view that seems itself to be superior, just as their life is to be superior as a member of these high elites.  This is the secret written in the phenomena of the Skull and Bones rituals and the annual rituals enacted at Bohemian Grove in California.

Extreme wealth is able to purchase anything that is for sale, whether the price is wealth, or power or something perhaps even more addictive - a kind of religious enlightenment or initiation ecstasy which brings either true or illusory direct spiritual experience.   I want to emphasize that it is not significant (from one point of view) to decide whether or not what is offered to the princes of elite power and wealth is a true or false spiritual achievement.  We just have to appreciate how, for some, such enticements will be quite powerful.

Here I want to take a small side trip, to make an as if argument.  Lets assume (for the moment) that the spiritual is real, and that spiritual initiation is real.  Lets also assume that such spiritual Ways have both a left hand path and a right hand path.  In spiritual literature this is already well known, so I am not so much speculating, as borrowing what already is discussed among those who consider the spiritual real.

For example, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) taught what he called Spiritual Science, and among his teachings one can find material about what he called Occult Brotherhoods.  He taught that behind much that arose in England and American that led to WWI, and also was certain to influence our time, there existed, from behind the scenes, systems of spiritual enlightenment or initiation that already had long traditions in the West.  To make things simple (a bit dangerous, but not too much so), I'll make some distinctions.  There appear to be many Occult Lodges of perhaps centuries hidden existence, and rumors have been everywhere for years (the Illuminati, for example).

There are (to my mind) three main Ways: the Blacks, the Whites and the Grays.  The Blacks serve the Dark and get involved in black magic and powers, and also get lost thereby in a kind of spiritual cul de sac.   The Whites serve the Good, and believe personal individual free choice of all human beings is the highest value, which is why (for example) Steiner gave 6000 lectures in which he revealed all the secrets which had been kept for years by the Grays, who coveted worldly power, and used their secret spiritual knowledge to win a kind of dominance even more secret and powerful than that of the super elites of wealth.

The view of the Gray Occult Lodges is that the world order is fundamentally spiritual, and includes the belief that those, who understand the spiritual rules behind existence, have an advantage, and a responsibility.  Basically the Grays succumb to a characteristic of Lucifer's Rebellion, and believe that ordinary human beings can't be trusted to manage macro-human affairs.   Only a privileged elite can do so, and by this message, and a demonstration of unusual psychic powers (clairvoyance of various kinds) the Lodges of Grays seduce certain of the potential princes of England and America (as well as some Europeans) into their spiritual ideology, which works from one basic idea.

Someone, with the appropriate skills, must lead.   They are told: You have been selected to be part of this unique community of world leaders, and you are engaged in a battle with the East, which would bury the Christian West under its false views and inhuman values.   As a consequence, to participate in the establishment of elaborate lies is necessary in order to make the world safe for true Christian initiation and enlightenment, thus some special few must make hard choices for the greater good.

Ordinary people can't be trusted, which is why we (the Grays and the super elites) let them have their vain dreams and dogmatic Christian religions.  We, the spiritual elite, who serve the Light Bringer (Lucifer, who in their spiritual ideology is painted differently from typical Christian theology), know better.  We will take care of those who are less competent, and for the sacrifices this requires of us, we need to live the good life, for we have to have the same financial standing and power as the rulers of the decadent Middle-East and Far East.  With such great responsibility over the true destiny of humanity, one has to have access to great financial and political power, and there must also be equally great rewards.

Getting a sense of the necessary ideology?  It doesn't have to be exactly like this in its details.  I am only sketching (profiling) a general picture.

Excuse me for a moment while I retire from writing and let my mind work free from its necessary swim in this degenerate anti-Christian and immoral insanity.

just how far are they willing to go

Some of the ideas that can be part of this religious-like (but fundamentally irreligious) ideology concern the problems of death and suffering.  Among the kinds of knowledge, the Grays believe they have access to, are ideas of reincarnation and the immortality of the spirit.  Other ideas include detailed matters concerning the afterlife - that is what happens in between death and a new birth.  These views were seen historically as heretical (to institutional Christian churches), and this justified as well the secrecy involved.   The Occult Lodges are old.

Since the human spirit is, from this point of view, immortal, then death is seen (for this ideology) as simply a transition to another state of existence for a time (until the next incarnation).  In addition, a version of the processes in the afterlife are also taught in some of these circles, so that a bastardized view of divine justice is presented.  I suspect that what is taught suggests that those who take this on the responsibility will receive their rewards in heaven (as well as on earth) for such sacrifice (just like the Islamist idea of virgins in heaven for suicide bombers, only far more sophisticated).  

Suffering and death are taught then to be a part of existence as ordained by the Gods, and the ruler-ship on the Earth of the Grays (the Occult Brotherhoods or Lodges - keep in mind this is still mostly male and patriarchal) is also part of the Divine Plan.  Its a tough job, but someone has to do it.  For pointing out the holes in such views, Steiner was eventually poisoned, after his main Temple to the Truth (the original Goetheanum in Switzerland) was burned to the ground.

 

In any event, many of these super elites belong to various cults espousing allegedly superior religious views that paint them as the morally just holders of worldly power.  They have little need to worry about the death and suffering of the masses, for the immortal spirit will have a just afterlife and then be returned to another earthly life. What matters is that the West dominate the East, otherwise the true values of this superior and occult based Christendom, will be lost.  The world is the scene of a great battle between the truly Godly and the Godless heathens.

In this battle any lie, and almost any act, is justifiable, because it is clearly needed to win (for the greater good).   The world must be Christianized, but not in the outer religious sense so many fundamentalists and Zionists and Islamists believe, but from a secret brotherhood that has come into incarnation just to deal with these battles.

Two such battles occurred in the first half of the 20th Century: World War One and World War Two.   A very significant theater of these battles in the earthly realm was Central Europe, especially Germany.   Like the United States is being painted today (by these same powers) as the author of horrible deeds in the world, so Central European culture, with its remarkable spiritual potentials (it gave us after all, in the 19th Century, the complete basis for modern natural science), had to carry its own Cross - to become viewed, not as a source of truth and initiation in the mysteries, but as decadent and uncaring, as well as capable of any unspeakable crime (the holocaust).   For similar reasons it was important to these powers that America openly take up torture (and other grossly immoral acts), for there is coming a third great war, again to be fought mostly in the Center, between East and West.  America too is to now carry a Cross.

The world is a giant game of Risk (a military board game), and if you are a Nixon or a Kissinger or a Clinton or a Rockefeller or a - pick any family name from the elites, you must use the productive might of America to make a powerful war machine, provide fodder for armies from the poor, and rule (for a time) from the Executive Branch, as the world goes through a well understood and predictable (by all those well-paid and seduced fine minds) transition in the West from Nation States to feudal-like independent Corporate Trade Empires.

The world will go through a time of great chaos, flirt with a new ice age (global warming is just a prelude), and many will die (be recycled through reincarnation), while the Corporation as an Entity (read the first six novels of William Gibson, who gave us the term cyberspace) free of human control (but needing to be well taken care of by human servant management) becomes the dominate social form all over the world (the free and wanton capitalism of the West is to consume the East, both from the outside and the inside - China and India, for example, in their headlong rush into free market capitalism don't really yet recognize their peril).  A hierarchical social form (all structure and no heart) is to be set free, and there combined with the numeric powers of more and more advanced computers.

The fear of the Grays has some reality behind it.  For if the East were to triumph, the Christianized West would likewise be consumed (a process already begun due to the many in America who have taken undisciplined* ideas of Buddhism into their naturally Christianized souls (see my book: the Natural Christian).  An imagination of this possibility (control of the world by decadent culture from the East) is contained in the eight remarkable novels of the Chung Kuo Series, written by David Wingrove.

*[Just being spiritual may satisfy a curious soul, but we also have to be awake to the long term cultural implications of differences between Occidental and Oriental philosophies.  There are profound reasons why there is a cultural East and West.]

As these developments unfold, however, many in the West will wake up (also predictable), so it was necessary to bring into play a complete degeneration of civil rights, particularly in America, in order to control and imprison any and all dissent against the terrible social processes that must be allowed to freely occur (in the world view of the Grays).  Long in planning, certain final callous and indifferent moves were made during the Bush II administration, with Karl Rove as the master overseer (the one with the most callous mind of all - a genius unique in world history, known to be coming into incarnation by the Brotherhoods, and thus helped at every turn to eventually sit inside the web of political power in the United States).  Now he has moved into the Media, where with the help of Rupert Murdoch he works both for Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, enabling him to provide for the laity of the elites of wealth all the self-centered moral justification needed during this transition through social chaos to the new world order of free Corporate Entities and number driven computer social controls (just think today about all the software that exists allowing management to intrude right into the work stations of the modern office worker).

Of course, the scientific materialism of the West, helps foster great disbelief in such an understanding.  What better way to keep secret a ruler-ship of the world, than mask it with a world view (scientific materialism) that casts doubt on all possible religious understanding.  The work of the Lodges has been well thought out over centuries of time.  Keep in mind, however, that they are not unopposed (e.g. Rudolf Steiner - and of course many others, including this author).

As just pointed out, there is another difficulty in this.   Some in the East are not asleep either.   There are those in the  East who seek the same victory, but they lag behind the stream of events, and also are always catching up to technological advances.  Their advantage is untapped natural resources, a willingness to pollute to the max, and huge expendable populations (both India and China, as well as Russia to a certain extent).  They are also more obviously callous in opposing dissent.

From this picture it can seem as if those of us below the elites in the social commons are to be toast (everyone is aware that in the present the middle class in America is disappearing).  Well there would be little point to this essay if this was truly the case, so now let us move from these too too dark thoughts and find some light and warmth.

One more point, however.  In reading the above we can't just skip over the process by which the spiritual gifts of Central Europe were intentionally scourged and had set upon its genius a crown of thorns.  Now this genius (a part of the natural genius of the whole world - see Teilhard de-Cardin's idea of the noosphere) must be resurrected.   While a similar scourging and crowning with thorns is being applied today with regard to the genius of the American Spirit, that genius would do well to recognize that in going through its own cross bearing, crucifixion, death and resurrection, that it will serve the Good in the best way, by helping restore the cultural health of the Center and the East as well.  The world is a whole, and we serve ourselves best, when we serve the whole (wash the feet).

Civil Society, the Wise-Earth, Blessed Unrest* and the Mystery of America

*special thanks to Paul Hawken for this insight

Probably the primary thing to first realize is that those who build a wall to keep others out, also build a prison for themselves.   The Berlin Wall kept communists in as much as it kept the West out.   The Wall in Israel dividing Israelis from Palestinians does the same.  It appears in place as an effort to contain and control something, and at the same time is a trap for those who impose it. The elites of wealth (and their priests in the Occult Lodges) suffer the same error of focus.  The more they try to control and dominate the more they are trapped in the narrowness of vision of that methodology.  Each seeming effort at controlling by the application of top down hierarchical social power ties the manager to more and more limited opportunities and consequences.  The box they seek to use to contain us, just as much contains them, albeit in a different way.

Our main strategy is then to think outside the box.  I know, it is an awful pun in a way, but a truth as well.

There is another strategy that helps.  The martial art known as Aikido: "the way of unifying (with) life energy" or "the way of harmonious spirit" gives a hint.  When an aggressor comes toward you, you move in such a way that the energy of the aggressor moves through and around you as if you weren't there.

To give another really strange hint here - consider the possibility of not moving toward dissent at all.  A system expecting rebellion in masses of dissatisfied people through protest, doesn't know what to do if you do something else, something entirely off the wall so to speak.  Suppose all that was needed was to elaborate the truth of the subterfuge placed in the world by the super elites and their priests (expose it) and then declare victory.

Another off the wall strange idea: the movie War Games (if you don't know it, rent it).  A computer hacker discovers a war games computer run by the military is about to launch a nuclear war.   He makes the computer play tic tac toe over and over again, so as to learn this lesson: the only way to win is not to play the game at all.

By creating a game (gaming the world) the super elites are bound up in that game (the box that confines them).  By understanding their defect (their lame thinking), we don't play that game, but create another.  Instead of either/or, we do what happens in a both/and solution - something not on the table yet, emerges.  They make war on us, we make peace on them.

This won't be easy.  Consider the impulse to activism so common today, such as Green politics, environmental protest, PETA, move-on.org and so forth.   In a lot of this activity life energy is spent trying to fix the system - trying to induce changes in a macro social structure which isn't actually capable of change.  It is too old and too rigid, and as we expend our life energy trying to change it, we avoid doing as much as possible to change ourselves.  By the way, don't think they don't promote this.  Remember all those smart minds they can buy?   You can bet they have people (who don't even know the elites support them) just to lead this activist dissent activity, which misdirects us from what we can actually do (keeps us busy in the game, when not being in the game at all is what we need to do instead).

Blessed Unrest (see Paul Hawken's book of the same name) is a first stage of perception by the ordinary people of the world, living in the social below - the social commons - of their shared trials.  We are waking up to each other, as much as we are waking up to the gamesmanship of the super elites of wealth, and their priests in the Occult Brotherhoods.

Think of the school yard.  One pushes the other, the other pushes back.  Each push energizes the other, until war breaks out.   All the time we spend trying to force the high elites (and their political surrogates) to change, only has the effect of giving them strength to resist.   The '60's and '70's in America actually invigorated and entrenched conservative thinking as a push back in reaction to the push from the left.  Today, they once more are expecting our resistance.   If we don't resist (if we aren't there in a kind of way) they will overbalance and fall.  They shove, we move gracefully aside, keeping our center through our Wise Earth communities, and then overbalanced by their aggression, they fall.

It will be hard to understand, but there is a wise governance to the world that is itself superior to anything the super elites and their priests can imagine.  Some of them know they are living in this wise world, but still want earthly power and perhaps even believe they can game the perceivable and true spiritual order of human existence.  Their problem is that this wisdom is a distributed system (check this out with regard to computers if you want to understand it in a coarse way).  The way the wise guidance of the world works, as a distributed system, is that the main factors in its unfolding are ordinary human beings.

While the Grays worship Lucifer, the Light Bringer, the White Brotherhoods trust individual human freedom and marvel at what ordinary human beings do and accomplish, because in them lives the Christ Impulse (like the Buddha Nature described in the cultural East, there is a Christ Impulse - a non-institutional spiritual instinct for moral self sacrifice and wisdom in most all human beings) (again see my book: the Natural Christian*).  Don't we hear many people say today: I'm not religious, but I am spiritual.  The ego or I of ordinary human beings is collectively (in communities) a kind of genius far superior to whatever the elites seek and produce, because the real authority in the world is moral.  The meek shall inherit the Earth.

*[See also Ben-Aharon's America's Global Responsibility: individuation, initiation and threefolding.   As well as Steiner's: The Threefold Social Organism.]

This is what lives, and has so far manifested, in Civil Society etc.  Moral human action.  In the wise guidance of humanity and the world, the elites actually suffer the consequences of their personal out of balance appetites for power and wealth, only to end up by this activity serving the distributed moral intelligence of the world (the noosphere) by creating just enough chaos to goad it into waking action.  We can legitimately declare victory because in waking up to the truth of our situation we have already won (the creators of the movie The Dark Knight instinctively understood this).  Yes, there are agents of chaos, but the effect of that is to prompt into action something wonderful (yet dreaming) in the soul and spirit of individuals.

The rest is details, and as these are important, I will next begin relating those thoughts which I can offer as my contribution to our shared distributed wisdom - Blessed Unrest and the Wise-Earth.

counter-moves - some examples

Great wisdom is obvious in: think globally, act locally.  Because the real wisdom, that is superior to the lost-in-illusion super elites, is a distributed system based upon individual moral action, the work is always where we are.  Right in front of us in our biographies.   This is one of the reasons we can let go a lot of vain activity which seeks to coerce a system that if left to its own inner nature will collapse in on itself. 

A characteristic of this old system is that it is hierarchical (top down) and mostly male dominated (patriarchal).  The emerging new system is circle like (based on sharing) and returns once more the previously set aside matriarchal understandings (think the social ways of the Iroquois Federation).  An old social order is dying, whose inner dynamic is based on dominion over, to be replaced by a new social order whose inner dynamic is communion with.*

*[See my book: the Way of the Fool. for more details]

Of course, not everyone is going to understand the psychological Aikido of not playing the game by declaring victory.  Once the mob had been romanticized in the Godfather movies and the Sopranos, and corrupt cops in The Shield, no one should be surprised that Sons of Anarchy will soon romanticize biker gangs.  The world takes all kinds, and we each have choices that will lead to consequences.

For those willing to take on the tasks required, to be a wise earth spirit, unresisting (in only certain ways) in relationship to the overreaching of super elite aggression, there are certain basic tools, all of which are related to compassion (our individual Buddha Nature) and love (our individual Christ Impulse).   For the simple reason that I like the "l" sound at the beginning of the word love, I'll label these three tools: language; law, and liquidity.

Of these, the most powerful is language, so lets begin there:

the coming transformation to a new oral culture,

through the reinvigorating of our appreciation of

the hidden possibilities in Language and conversation

This next process I seek to illuminate has already began, and while often thought of as a flaw by many elites of culture, the move away from the cannons of Western literature, in the West (and perhaps elsewhere) is a hint of things to come.   As one of the places language is artistically displayed in is song, lets observe a cultural process that took place since the middle of the 20th Century, so as to see what this process can teach us of the coming future.  This is just one example of many that could be put forward.

In 1955 or thereabouts, Elvis, the King of Rock and Roll comes along.  He's not the cause of, or even really the leader of, but sometimes cultural changes have a fore-runner, someone who stands out as the wave of social change begins its more visible movements.  Anyway, Negro (today we say Black, but then we used other terms) blues music (which has a distinctly sexual aspect) gets united with Anglo (white) culture's pop love songs, and Rock and Roll charges into the world.  Being as English and American culture are deeply related, it isn't too long before the Beatles and others join in, and something comes out into the whole world that was never there before.

The world responds, in a lot of different ways.  Reggae music (Bob Marley etc.) sings back, and something that the awake DJ's start to call World Beat comes back toward America (Paul Simon catches some of it in his intriguingly named Graceland album).  Rock and Roll and World Beat have a kind of cultural intercourse, as the wise hearts of musicians and songwriters all over the world get involved in talking to each other through song and music (a lot of this never appears on commercial radio and TV in America, but it nevertheless took place).  Not to soon thereafter, out of the depths of certain northern city black ghettos, and in part in response to World Beat, Hip Hop is born (some of this later morphs into Rap).  Now Hip Hop is three things.  First it pares down the musical element to almost just rhythm - just the beat.  It also is poetry, but poetry as a story.  Oral stories you can dance to.  Basic.  Fundamental.  It is also, in its pure form, out of the social commons (a kind of instinctive communion with) and when it remains there it is free of the corruption of commercial interests.

Everyone now should be able to look at world-wide cultural developments among ordinary people and see there the wise earth transformations.

Schools have failed to keep up with the changes in the lives and nature of the human beings attending them.   The education system, having run out of ideas (old dying culture), can't really speak anymore to the real life in the big cities (much less elsewhere, for example, the story telling in Country Music speaks volumes about the ordinary life of a lot of people).   Time (in the sense of change) is speeding up and the history of popular culture from the '50's on tells this story in a big way (except in commercial radio - fake imitative culture, which driven by the profit motive and greed, doesn't get the true spirit of these changes at all).  But true new culture, such as Hip Hop, even thought it fits within what those who can't get over worshiping the past decry as the loss of interest in the written word - Hip Hop is genuinely new.

Just to give an example that this change is a bit noticed, a poet laureate of England, when asked in an interview whether there were any voices out that that he thought special, said that people should pay careful attention to Eminem (Marshall Mathers), who he considered to be the new Bob Dylan (the poet-seer deeply in touch with his time).  There is no Eminem  (a shooting star whose time quickly passed) without the Eight Mile section of Detroit and Hip Hop.  That white culture still borrows from Black culture could be seen as a problem (and is by some), but is better appreciated for the fact that it represents a profound spiritual-cultural intercourse that is world-wide in scope.

The thing is that oral culture is more alive.  The word dies when it is rendered into print on a page.  It needs the reader to resurrect it.   But oral culture, in a social situation, jumps from one to the other, like a kind of electric arc.  It enlivens.  If we were to wander the hidden cultural byways of the world (and in America) we'd see that down in the social below, the social commons, story tellers are becoming important again.

In the colleges and the universities - the ivory tower - there is too much intellect and not enough heart (the organization is dominion over).  Especially when times get tough as they are doing now in a big way.  Now I am not saying no more written literature at all.   Just that like anything there is excess, and one of the nice things that happened to the world (as on odd kind of after effect) was when China began their take over of Tibet in 1949 and began shoving all those Lamas (teachers of deep Buddhist ways) out into the world.  Tibet, as a cultural source, had been a kind of slowly cooking wisdom soup pot, and now the genius of history kicked that pot over and sent its nourishment rushing all over the world.

In a similar kind of way, by wrecking (for a time through WWII) the cultural life of the Center (Central Europe), this forced certain cultural forces (including communities of spiritual beings for those willing to look at it that way) toward the East and the West, looking for incarnated individuals receptive to their wisdom.  This in a way has brought about the beginning of the fulfillment of an ancient American Indian Prophecy (the Hopi Prophecy).   This too will take an oral form, just as the Buddhist wisdom cooked slowly in Tibet is best rendered orally.

In Europe, the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner mostly rested in lectures and in books, imitating the European ideal of the university (their center, in Switzerland in the Goetheanum, has something that is called: the School of Spiritual Science).   This modern Christian-like wisdom (heretical to the max when compared to the fake Christianity of most organized Christian religions) is itself waking up to its conversational or oral capacities in a new way.

I mention all this, the Hip Hop street poetry, the Buddhist soup pot from Tibet and the heretical Christian wisdom of Anthroposophy, to show that this change to oral culture is everywhere.   It takes a lot of different forms - just think about a Twelve Step meeting.  It consists, when best, of the oral representation of personal stories and mutual confession.   These are deeply powerful forces for change.  Books will still be important, but what is said from one person to another person will again outweigh all that.  In fact, the core of this little book is a story.  The profile is a story.  No one is required to believe it, nor will they be tested on this material like in a school, nor will they be part of a community that will shun them if they don't mouth the right dogmas.

Language* then is born, in its most vital way, in conversation and in story telling.  In ages long ago, in a galaxy far far away, ancient story tellers were everywhere (that's what George Lucas is, a story teller using the medium of modern film - also M. Night Shyamalan - remember modern  wisdom is distributed).  The Gospels were stories.  The fables of the Greeks were stories.   Buddhism was originally oral.  However, and this is a very important however, the inspiring genius behind these stories, which at one time tended to concentrate into a few (Virgil, Homer, etc.), is now diffuse and distributed.

*[See the poem The Gift of the Word in the appendix.]

Steiner, for example, in creating the Anthroposophical Society, created what he called Branches and Groups, and even pointed out that in the future this is where the real work was to be done.  The social commons, while collectively owned (as it were), is really just who is there at any given moment sharing in the conversation.   The wisdom source lives in us all now, in our individual thinking.  The Wise Earth - Civil Society - filled with Blessed Unrest.

While we have it (it can fail or become taken over) the Internet gives us wide ranging abilities to tell our stories.   Millions of blogs.   FaceBook pages.   Everyone has something to say.  The coming resurrection of new oral culture will be entirely unlike what oral culture was in the ancient world.

Here we will be challenged to craft, with each other, what the world means.  Will we tell a story of bad people in corporate office buildings who all must die and be blown up in order to save the rest, or will we tell the story of all the places in the world, whether they are a skyscraper in New York City, or a brothel in Thailand, such that we learn to see that all are temples to that which in that place is worshiped by those who are confused and lost and don't yet recognize their brothers and sisters?

Will we speak of the confusion between the impulse toward dominion over, and the impulse for communion with, or will we teach the children that those who are other, must be hated?  Will we be top down and hierarchical, or circle-like and sharing?

Will we spread harmful gossip, or will we illuminate each other with grace?   This is the fundamental question of the application of language - of the gift of the word - as a vehicle for new oral culture.

redesigning the organizational structure of societies

through our understanding of the real living nature of the Law

The law, that most of us know today (at least in America), has its roots in the time of the Roman Empire.  Many of its ideas are still couched in Latin (for example, res ipsa loquitur: the thing speaks for itself; or habeas corpus: show or bring the body).  Like anything else, a legal system can grow old, and as I have suggested elsewhere in my writings - that we live in a time of the End of Western Civilization, then no one should doubt for a moment that the law (as conceived centuries ago) has become socially exhausted and spent.

It is unwieldy and excessively detailed.   Its last towering ideal impulse was during the time of the Warren Court, when so many of our civil rights, originally recognized by the Constitution, became truly universal (it only took almost two hundred years?!?).  The coming descent into social chaos may produce pockets (some quite large) of anarchy.  We need only look to Africa and parts of Asia to see how large such pockets of anarchy can be.  Petty dictators seize governments and old tribal allegiances are borrowed by thugs as justification for murder and theft.  In America, we have a quite odd, yet remarkable tradition, the gun rule of the old West.  Cowboy justice, sometimes good, and often just another kind of mob rule, is likely to return - its true mission unfinished.

The Corporations have no real interest in justice, for they want to be a law unto themselves.  At the same time, they don't have an interest in controlling everything either.  William Gibson, in his future oriented novel Virtual Light, had this to say through his characters:

"You know," Sammy Sal said, pausing before a first shallow sip, " you shouldn't have this kind of a problem.   You don't need to.  There's only but two kinds of people.  People who can afford hotels like that, they're one kind.  We're the other.  Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between.  But not anymore.  How you and I relate to those other people, we proj their messages on.  We get paid for it.  We try not to drip rain on the carpet.  And we get by, okay?   But what happens on the interface?  What happens when we touch?"

Chevette burned her mouth on espresso.

"Crime," Sammy Sal said, "sex. Maybe drugs.  He put his cup down on the wagon's plywood counter. "About covers it."

Where Corporate control wants it, there will be one kind of law.  Theirs.   Where they have no interest, in the communities that are truly separate, there will be another kind of law.  Ours.   In the middle, in the vague in between where the two kinds of order touch - something neither.  By theirs, by the way, I don't mean other people, but what is required by a social form that has freed itself from human control.  Lets look a little more closely at this.

Many readers will know that the lawnow (in its decadence) considers corporations to be persons.   There is a rather insane history in this, but the practice is too embedded in legal culture now.  Legal rules also require of management that they serve the stockholders over almost every other value (workers needs, environmental needs etc.).  The doctrine in its widest form is called due diligence.   So, the Corporation is a person, and its managers must serve, with due diligence, the interests of the owners (the stock holders) over every other value.   Many corporations own their own stock.   Can you see where this is going?  The legal structure of a Corporation is emancipating itself from human control.  Its technical ownership is diffuse.  Neither stock holders or the managementreally run the Corporation anymore, which has a great momentum as a social form.  A kind of idea incarnates in the Corporation, which as we know is kind of callous and indifferent to most others affected by that social form (uses the workers, lies to the consumers of its products, corrupts political processes, grossly enriches management and a few stock holders, etc.).  As Western Civilization dies, a decadent social form will live on for a time, a kind of ghost of some of the worst moral impulses of that Civilization.  The individuals living out these selfish and callously indifferent impulses will die, but the Social/Legal Creature created by this activity will continue.

Keep in mind that corporations have a culture - a Way.  Some are overt, some more secret.  These views in the future will become more and more religious-like (even cultish).  Human energy will design them.  The textural structure of the rule of the Occult Lodges will seek to seep into these cultures.

The separation between this creature of corporate control and communities of free individuals doesn't have to be physical, either.  Its not a question of place, but who you are with and what are the circumstances.  Nor will all corporate control, or all free communities, have the same laws and social rules.   A Corporate Entity that wants a longer future will take better care of its human servants.  A free community that wants a longer future will take greater care in creating its serving and hopefully living laws.

In a certain sense, the realm of law, or of expressed (perhaps written, perhaps oral) social order, is a middle realm between language and culture, and economics and money (liquidity).  It partakes of both (see Steiner's ideas on the Threefold Social Order here).   Laws after all are formed of words and ideas, while money and liquidity concerns things (objects), and the relationships of people to such objects.  In an economy, objects, even money, must be in movement (liquidity).  In a culture, ideas must be free and living (again in movement).  They can't come to rest in fixed words (dogmas).  In the middle realm, there needs to be that which is moving, that still somehow has the character of an object.

This is what a law is, in a living way, freed of the old barnacles of dead Roman thought.  In the arguments of the Supreme Court we hear echos of these conceptions of the law in the ideas of living meaning, versus original meaning.  Some want to fix the meaning in the 200 plus years old thought of the Founders (as can best be understood), while others want to free the meaning of laws to adapt to the reality of the human present.  This is why my book Uncommon Sense suggests we write a new Declaration of Independence and a new Constitution.  If we don't modernize the law during the death of Western Civilization (the transition from Nation States to feudal-like Corporate Entities, swimming in a vast disorganized sea of free functioning anarchies), the law will continue to crack and fracture until it falls down around our heads.

If, in fact, we want to participate in the process by which the Corporate Entity arises to a kind of independence (and it must for a time so arise - it can be a necessary and stabilizing historical force after a period of chaos), we have to participate in the law creation process as it is.  It is really very useless to protest that laws favor the rich, or stand with signs outside places where the elites and super elites gather.  Instead, those who would influence politics have to run for office, and get their hands dirty in all that troublesome mess, from local politics on up.   Can't be an idealist there.  Have to compromise.   Oh, a protester can be an idealist, but not someone in real politics.

At the same time, we can do politics better than those who do it now do it. Again - distributed wisdom.  Think globally, act locally.  As long as people have avoided the legislative halls, whether they are just a school board, or a city council or a state assembly, much less the Senate or the Congress, this has left the field of battle, over the meaning and processes of social order, abandoned to the super elites, or the smaller and sometimes more insideous religious fundamentalists, and they haven't been asleep at all.  There is sweat capital that is the equal of money capital.  Human energy.  Life energy.  Political Aikido as dance.  This kind of local polticial activity needs to be the locus of bottom up political capital.  Not the political capital of the elites, or the surrogates the political parties, but the common sense participation out of the social commons - the circle-like communion with.

If we really use the Wise Earth distributed wisdom born in Blessed Unrest politically, we can do a lot.   After all, politics is about story telling.  Sure it has a lot of lies, but there are lots of ways to tell a true story.   If Hip Hop and Country Music married each other, for example, in the production of political songs for individual candidates, distributed door to door by activists (bored with protesting), who know what might happen?  A protest sign is one thing, street entertainment another.  One is negative and against, the other is creative and for.

Think Jon Stewart.  It is possible to do parody that doesn't demean, but merely punctures what is over-inflated.  Variations are endless, and the amount of distributed creativity out there is already enormous.  Sweat political capital can equal money political capital in the present and coming political battles. People just have to get off their couches and from in front of their TVs, stop shopping and go participate.

The best way to learn about the law is to try to make new ones.  My Uncommon Sense has a lot of ideas along this line.   As the degree of social chaos increases (its actual depths can't be predicted, just its general shape), where anarchy is local (government ineffective), then so must law creation become local.  Think Katrina and the Super Dome - only lasting for months, perhaps years, instead of days and weeks.  In such circumstances we can't stand around waiting for help from a government that has proved itself actually incapable.   We have to organize our selves.  We have to work with each other instead of waiting for the big father in Washington to do the right thing.   Native Americans can well tell the story of that illusory promise.

Sharing the Earth: things, money, Liquidity and work.

There is a lot of good work out there already on the nature of debt-money.  We all need to understand it.  Just don't get one-sided.   Remember the wisdom is distributed, so use a lot of different resources.   Steiner wrote a book: World Economy.   There is the Small is Beautiful Schumacher Society.  There's the book Muddling Toward Frugality, by Warren Johnson.  People are creating community farms.   Co-ops are in a lot of places.   Credit Unions are better than banks.  There's the alternate currency movement.  Local barter centers in church parking lots.

The best debt-money material is by Richard Kotlarz, whose columns on A New View of Money can be found on the Internet here: http://www.concordresolution.org/column.htm  Nobody has the handle on it he has.  A couple of points that he makes are worth mentioning right here.

If we understood how money actually operates (in its true, but hidden, sense), we would know that our idea that we put money in the bank when we deposit our paycheck and then take some out when we write a check to pay a bill - that idea is an illusion.  What actually happens is that when we write the check (and also with a lot of other banking-related transactions) the money doesn't come into existence until that moment in time.  The check allows the bank to create the money and charge the macro economic structure interest (thus, debt money).  The way this system works is that the amount of debt constantly increases, because it is never fully retired due to the interest payment hidden in the the bowels of the money transaction process.  We've reached a point today where the weight of this debt money interest is so huge, the world economy is falling apart.  The sub-prime mortgage crisis was just one of many places in the world economy where it began to fracture due to this mamouth excess of unpaid interest-debt.

The way out is for governments (and that is ultimately us) to issue the money, not the backs.  Read Richard for the details.  Knowledge of this is crucial to navigating the future.  Government issued money carries no debt and the consequences for our economic life are considerable.

In the War the rich are making upon the poor there are two kinds of approaches we can make from the social commons in terms of dealing with the problem of liquidity of money and other objects that we need.  Some are strategic and some are tactical.  Moving away from bank issued money to government issued money (remember we are the government) is a fundamental strategic approach.  It is large scale.  Other kinds of activities that need to accompany the coming changes are tactical - that is local, something like an IED (those roadside bombs in Iraq).  But these are social weapons, not physical weapons.

For example, the super elites think on the macro scale.   They are tied to old ideas of hierarchical organization and top down management styles.   Remember they took over from the aristocracies of blood, and just made themselves secret Kings and Queens.  But as our distributed wisdom tells us: all politics is local.   Try as the elites might (even with computers) there's a limit to the detail they'll be able to micro-manage.

Their influence dissipates - it spreads out and becomes less concentrated (and thus less effective  as it moves away from its top of the pyramid.  The computer gives it a tool to try to micro-manage, but all computers can be hacked.   The hacking intelligence of humanity is also distributed.  What happens to the software inside a corporation that tries to micro-manage all its office workers if a hacker gets in there, but not in a big obvious way?  Instead, a wise way.  Back doors, little code tricks like in computer games that let the office worker trick the system from his end.  Hide the code tricks in mnemonic stories, just as certain secrets were once embedded in nursery rhymes.

We don't confront these corporate wrongs directly.  We out think them.

For sure, one possibility (and a hard one at that) is that a lot of what ecology minded folks want may just come about through broad social collapse.  In worse case world-wide environmental chaos scenario, the industrial world dies.  In that case there isn't enough social order at the top to keep the big hierarchically managed systems running.   No electricity, no running water.  No trucks running all over America moving food.   No big farms to make all that overabundance of nutritionless food.  Lots of isolation and lots of anarchy.

What we need is skills.   As such a collapse looms (to whatever degree it actually manifests - think the precautionary principle), we need the distributed wisdom to appreciate the need to preserve knowledge and pass on skills.  Here's one idea.  Its strategic in conception and creation, but tactical in local application.

Think open source.  Open source computer people created on-line free software (such as Linux) that was better than what was being created by the corporations.   Windows sucks - its too open to being hacked.  Linux isn't, but is only slowly making its way in the world, replacing an operating system that is crap.  You know why Windows sucks?   Because they never delete any of the old code.  Its this huge fat pile of mostly old code that only works because processing speeds have increased enough to run through all the old code on the way to finding the new stuff (unless it balks somewhere in all that junk computer software dna, in which case you get the famous Blue Screen of Death - a Windows crash).

Open Source communities need to create a Library for the Future.  If the collapse gets too out of control (something the super elites are willing to risk, because with all their power and private armies they will survive), the knowledge generated by Western Civilization could be lost (along with all the other cultural treasures of East, Center and West).

If you are in an isolated community, experiencing a long period of anarchy, do you know how to recognize and treat dysentery, cholera etc.?  Can you, if you have a water source, build a water wheel?  If you have piles of old electronics, can you recycle them into something you need and can use?  Do you know how to make insulin from sheep?  What about sewing up a bad wound?

If you check out survivalist websites on the Internet, there is a lot of information.   There could be a lot more.   A DVD of the right storage capacity can store something like 20,000 books.  The Media Lab at MIT has created a tough cheap laptop that runs on a crank (you just turn the crank and make the electricity).  Such a laptop and such a DVD (with some appropriate yet unwritten search software) takes the knowledge and skills our society has concentrated in single individuals, and passes it on to the whole.   Distribute several million of these worldwide, in all kinds of languages (remember the Internet is this huge huge structure for sharing information, and if it gets its collective mind around a task, tens of thousands of people will do the grunt work for free).

One of the things you'll get is a variety of DVDs.  Or, a website (or a hundred websites) where you can create the DVD you want, selecting what knowledge you want, for your personally designed Library.  You don't have to use the crank laptop, but can keep the one you have, if you just find on the Internet where to get what you need from Radio Shack and the like, to turn your bicycle into a machine that will generate the right tickle of electricity when you pedal it.

Once, in America, there was the Whole Earth Catalog.  Guess what the Internet is?  It just needs some folks to fill in the gaps in the organizing of information, and showing how to distribute it to the local places that need it.  Think globally, act locally.

The same whole earth distributed wisdom resource can design new products for those people who want to plan ahead.  Could an alternate barter currency system come awake on the Internet?  In a functioning anarchy, what is the "government" the issues the currency?

Keep in mind that the super elites are no doubt planning to either crash the system (the Internet) or over control it, if it starts getting too rambunctious.  There will be a window of opportunity and then it will close.   At the same time, if a lot of people are acting, then a process we can call synergy happens.  We don't have to ourselves over-organize the same way an old tired hierarchical social form does.

The social commons we all share, with its distributed wisdom systems, will naturally form synergistic structures.   These will arise, and then pass away.   People will form associations that live for a time, and then dissolve.   Remember, the nature of the Sharing of the Earth can be captured in the idea of liquidity.  Life Energy in movement.  Money, ideas, goods, services, whatever.  We just be careful not to let it come to fixed conditions of rest.  The old pyramidal social form (dominion over) the Corporations seek to preserve won't continue very long, for it contains a constant urge to become more and more rigid, which eventually must lead to its death.

The circle form of new communities (communion with) is fluid enough to adapt, either within the Corporate structure, or outside it.  The Wise Earth is alive, and life (as was said in the movie Jurassic Park by the Jeff Goldblum character) will find a way.

One of Rudolf Steiner's ideas about money (in World Economy) is that it comes into being in relationship to the original transaction (such as selling produce), and then exists for a time, and then dies.  Money is like the spiritual blood stream of the economy, and just like the blood its substance lives for time and then dies to be replaced by new substance.  

Another of his ideas is that labor should not be treated as a commodity, nor should land.  Under a real appreciation of the nature of economic processes, to treat either as a commodity causes all kind of indirect social ruin.   For example, capital dies when it becomes invested in land.  In that place it can't continue to circulate.  Land is a kind of choke-point.   We saw this in the recent housing bubble collapse.  All kinds of value got locked in land, and the whole system kind of choked on it.

People's work (their labor) can't be a commodity either.  Labor is best viewed as a gift from one to another.  We don't work for ourselves, we work for each other.  The social organism under the ideas of Threefolding is meant to be seen as living (liquidity).  Think of what we call the division of labor.   In more ancient times if you had land, you could (in some circumstances) wrest your living from it.   Normally you didn't do this alone, but together with others.  Paying for labor is not universal, in a cultural sense.  Native Americans, true Cajuns etc., had a strong ethos of sharing.  Buying and selling labor is a by-product of economic confusion, rooted in a tradition of slavery, serfdom and peasantry.  Don't we call ourselves: wage slaves?

Recall our idea of distributed wisdom.  It is the nature of the division of labor that it is distributed as well.  You fix a car.  The dentist fixes your teeth.  Your neighbor fixes your dentist's toilet.  We are interdependent.  We already work for each other all the time, we just don't notice it.  If you treat the single parts of that process (the labor) as a thing, as a commodity that can be bought and sold, we mistake what needs to be honored essentially as a spiritual gift from one human being to another (our labor) the same way we treat a shirt. 

If you are getting the idea that this is all a bit strange and complicated, good.  Remember, we've been living in a fake religion of economic ideas, all designed to benefit one class - the class of aristocrats of wealth that succeeded the class of blood aristocrats before them.

Another of Steiner's unique ideas is that capital (which can function in a true economy) would be managed from what he called the cultural sphere (that area above were we talked about language).  People not necessarily involved directly in banks and financial institutions would evaluate the proposals of entrepreneurs seeking capital.  Their question would be how would the product serve the whole, not which small group is going to make the most profit making something people don't really need, by abusing workers and ruining the environment.

I can't here teach you everything about the Threefold Social Organism, or Richard Kotlarz's New View of Money, but with the ideas of language (cultural activity) and law (political-legal activity) and liquidity (economic activity) you've began to become acquainted with something much wiser than the fake religion of free markets and unrestrained capitalism.

*     *     *

Lets return now to the beginning, in a way, to recall and complete the spiral movement of thought unveiled in this essay ...

We started with a quest.  How do we understand the world we live in?  What are the real dynamic forces working in human social life?   So much seems insane and crazy - is it possible it is not just accidental, but something various people do on purpose?

I proposed thinking about social and political life in the same way a profiler does.  Look at it from the same point of view of the people who don't care.  What might be that point of view?  How might they think?  Does history and our common knowledge of events and political realities justify our having truthful knowledge that such point of view exists?

For some readers, what was then discovered may have seemed to have gotten pretty out there.  Talk about a conspiracy theory!  All the same, we didn't stop there.   We looked at our own situation, at the reality of ordinary people in the social below - the social commons.  Are we helpless victims, or something else?

I believe I showed how this was not the case - we were not victims and not helpless.   We were in fact a step or two away from appreciating our real powers, powers (sweat capital or equity) equal to that of the super elites.  We gain much just by actually knowing how the world works.  They seek to game us, we see this and don't play at all.   We do our own thing.  We form communities within the social commons, using our incredible counter-force in the synergy of our own distributed wisdom.  We think globally (understand how the world actually works) and act locally.  We take our Blessed Unrest (our waking up to social reality) and use the already developing Civil Society and Wise Earth culture to be smarter and wiser than the elites who seek to rule.

We confound their seeking power and wealth (dominion over), with our ability to work with each other (communion with).   They fight and compete, we cooperate.  They tie themselves to social structures that can't do anything but get more and more rigid and then die.   We create living social forms, full of life and love.   We make peace and love, not war.  The meek will inherit the earth.*

Wake up.  Declare victory, and go find some local politics to get involved in.  Participate!  Trust the distributed wisdom and the principle of synergy. Think globally, act locally.  And, have fun doing it.  Dance, sing, and create art.  Work and play together. 

finis

*[Of course, this essay doesn't answer a lot of questions.  If you want a more general examination of some of the spiritual secrets of the world, read my the Way of the Fool, and New Wine.  For more on politics, read Uncommon Sense as well as On the Nature of Public Life.]

appendix I

Jim Garrison's summation to the jury in

the Clay Shaw trial of the JFK assassination.

May it please the court. Gentlemen of the jury. I know you're very tired. You've been very patient. This final day has been a long one, so I'll speak only a few minutes. In his argument, Mr. Dymond posed one final issue which raises the question of what we do when the need for justice is confronted by power. So, let me talk to you about the question of whether or not there was government fraud in this case--a question Mr. Dymond seems to want us to answer. A government is a great deal like a human being. It's not necessarily all good, and it's not necessarily all bad. We live in a good country. I love it and you do too. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we have a government which is not perfect.

There have been indications since November the 22nd of 1963--and that was not the last indication--that there is excessive power in some parts of our government. It is plain that the people have not received all of the truth about some of the things which have happened, about some of the assassinations which have occurred--and more particularly about the assassination of John Kennedy.

Going back to when we were children, I think most of us--probably all of us here in the courtroom--once thought that justice came into being of its own accord, that virtue was its own reward, that good would triumph over evil--in short, that justice occurred automatically. Later, when we found that this wasn't quite so, most of us still felt hopefully that at least justice occurred frequently of its own accord.

Today, I think that almost all of us would have to agree that there is really no machinery--not on this Earth at least--which causes justice to occur automatically. Men have to make it occur. Individual human beings have to make it occur. Otherwise, it doesn't come into existence. This is not always easy. As a matter of fact, it's always hard, because justice presents a threat to power. In order to make justice come into being, you often have to fight power.

Mr. Dymond raised the question: Why don't we say it's all a fraud and charge the government with fraud, if this is the case? Let me be explicit, then, and make myself very clear on this point.

The government's handling of the investigation of John Kennedy's murder was a fraud. It was the greatest fraud in the history of our country. It probably was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated in the history of humankind. That doesn't mean that we have to accept the continued existence of the kind of government which allows this to happen. We can do something about it. We're forced either to leave this country or to accept the authoritarianism that has developed--the authoritarianism which tells us that in the year 2029 we can see the evidence about what happened to John Kennedy.

Government does not consist only of secret police and domestic espionage operations and generals and admirals--government consists of people. It also consists of juries. And cases of murder--whether of the poorest individual or the most distinguished citizen in the land--should be looked at openly in a court of law, where juries can pass on them and not be hidden, not be buried like the body of the victim beneath concrete for countless years.

You men in these recent weeks have heard witnesses that no one else in the world has heard. You've seen the Zapruder film. You've seen what happened to your President. I suggest to you that you know right now that, in that area at least, a fraud has been perpetrated.

That does not mean that our government is entirely bad; and I want to emphasize that. It does mean, however, that in recent years, through the development of excessive power because of the Cold War, forces have developed in our government over which there is no control and these forces have an authoritarian approach to justice--meaning, they will let you know what justice is.

Well, my reply to them is that we already know what justice is. It is the decision of the people passing on the evidence. It is the jury system. In this issue which is posed by the government's conduct in concealing the evidence in this case--in the issue of humanity as opposed to power--I have chosen humanity, and I will do it again without any hesitation. I hope every one of you will do the same. I do this because I love my country and because I want to communicate to the government that we will not accept unexplained assassinations with the casual information that if we live seventy-five years longer, we might be given more evidence.

In this particular case, massive power was brought to bear to prevent justice from ever coming into this courtroom. The power to make authoritive pronouncements, the power to manipulate the news media by the release of false information, the power to interfere with an honest inquiry and the power to provide an endless variety of experts to testify in behalf of power, repeatedly was demonstrated in this case.

The American people have yet to see the Zapruder film. Why? The American people have yet to see and hear from the real witnesses to the assassination. Why? Because, today in America too much emphasis is given to secrecy, with regard to the assassination of our President, and not enough emphasis is given to the question of justice and to the question of humanity.

These dignified deceptions will not suffice. We have had enough of power without truth. We don't have to accept power without truth or else leave the country. I don't accept either of these two alternatives. I don't intend to leave the country and I don't intend to accept power without truth.

I intend to fight for the truth. I suggest that not only is this not un-American, but it is the most American thing we can do--because if the truth does not endure, then our country will not endure.

In our country the worst of all crimes occurs when the government murders truth. If it can murder truth, it can murder freedom. If it can murder freedom, it can murder your own sons--if they should dare to fight for freedom-- and then it can announce that they were killed in an industrial accident, or shot by the "enemy" or God knows what.

In this case, finally, it has been possible to bring the truth about the assassination into a court of law--not before a commission composed of important and powerful and politically astute men, but before a jury of citizens.

Now, I suggest to you that yours is a hard duty, because in a sense what you're passing on is equivalent to a murder case. The difficult thing about passing on a murder case is that the victim is out of your sight and buried a long distance away, and all you can see is the defendant. It's very difficult to identify with someone you can't see, and sometimes it's hard not to identify to some extent with the defendant and his problems.

In that regard, every prosecutor who is at all humane is conscious of feeling sorry for the defendant in every case he prosecutes. But he is not free to forget the victim who lies buried out of sight. I suggest to you that, if you do your duty, you also are not free to forget the victim who is buried out of sight.

You know, Tennyson once said that, "authority forgets a dying king." This was never more true than in the murder of John Kennedy. The strange and deceptive conduct of the government after his murder began while his body was warm, and has continued for five years. You have seen in this courtroom indications of the interest of part of the government power structure in keeping the truth down, in keeping the grave closed.

We presented a number of eyewitnesses as well as an expert witness as well as the Zapruder film, to show that the fatal wound of the President came from the front. A plane landed from Washington and out stepped Dr. Finck for the defense, to counter the clear and apparent evidence of a shot from the front. I don't have to go into Dr. Finck's testimony in detail for you to show that it simply did not correspond with the facts. He admitted that he did not complete the autopsy because a general told him not to complete the autopsy.

In this conflict between power and justice--to put it that way--just where do you think Dr. Finck stands? A general, who was not a pathologist, told him not to complete the autopsy, so he didn't complete it. This is not the way I want my country to be. When our President is killed he deserves the kind of autopsy that the ordinary citizen gets every day in the State of Louisiana. And the people deserve the facts about it. We can't have government power suddenly interjecting itself and preventing the truth form coming to the people.

Yet in this case, before the sun rose the next morning, power had moved into the situation and the truth was being concealed. And now, five years later in this courtroom the power of the government in concealing the truth is continuing in the same way.

We presented eyewitnesses who told you of the shots coming from the grassy knoll. A plane landed from Washington, and out came ballistics expert Frazier for the defense. Mr. Frazier's explanation of the sound of the shots coming from the front, which was heard by eyewitness after eyewitness, was that Lee Oswald created a sonic boom in his firing. Not only did Oswald break all of the world's records for marksmanship, but he broke the sound barrier as well.

I suggest to you, that if any of you have shot on a firing range--and most of you probably have in the service--you were shooting rifles in which the bullet traveled faster than the speed of sound. I ask you to recall if you ever heard a sonic boom. If you remember when you were on the firing line, and they would say, "Ready on the left; ready on the right; ready on the firing line; commence firing," you heard the shots coming from the firing line--to the left of you and to the right of you. If you had heard, as a result of Frazier's fictional sonic boom, firing coming at you from the pits, you would have had a reaction which you would still remember.

Mr. Frazier's sonic boom simply doesn't exist. It's part of the fraud-- a part of the continuing government fraud.

The best way to make this country the kind of country it's supposed to be is to communicate to the government that no matter how powerful it may be, we do not accept these frauds. We do not accept these false announcements. We do not accept the concealment of evidence with regard to the murder of President Kennedy. Who is the most believable: a Richard Randolph Carr, seated here in a wheelchair and telling you what he saw and what he heard and how he was told to shut his mouth--or Mr. Frazier with his sonic booms? Do we really have to reject Mr. Newman and Mrs. Newman and Mr. Carr and Roger Craig and the testimony of all those honest witnesses--reject all this and accept the fraudulent Warren Commission, or else leave the country?

I suggest to you that there are other alternatives. One of them has been put in practice in the last month in the State of Louisiana--and that is to bring out the truth in a proceeding where attorneys can cross-examine, where the defendant can be confronted by testimony against him, where the rules of evidence are applied and where a jury of citizens can pass on it--and where there is no government secrecy. Above all, where you do not have evidence concealed for seventy-five years in the name of "national security."

All we have in this case are the facts--facts which show that the defendant participated in the conspiracy to kill the President and that the President was subsequently killed in an ambush.

The reply of the defense has been the same as the early reply of the government in the Warren Commission. It has been authority, authority, authority. The President's seal outside of each volume of the Warren Commission Report--made necessary because there is nothing inside these volumes, only men of high position and prestige sitting on a Board, and announcing the results to you, but not telling you what the evidence is, because the evidence has to be hidden for seventy-five years.

You heard in this courtroom in recent weeks, eyewitness after eyewitness after eyewitness and, above all, you saw one eyewitness which was indifferent to power--the Zapruder film. The lens of the camera is totally indifferent to power and it tells what happened as it saw it happen--and that is one of the reasons 200 million Americans have not seen the Zapruder film. They should have seen it many times. They should know exactly what happened. They all should know what you know now. Why hasn't all of this come into being if there hasn't been government fraud? Of course there has been fraud by the government.

But I'm telling you now that I think we can do something about it. I think that there are still enough Americans left in this country to make it continue to be America. I think that we can still fight authoritarianism--the government's insistence on secrecy, government force used in counterattacks against an honest inquiry--and when we do that, we're not being un-American, we're being American. It isn't easy. You're sticking your neck out in a rather permanent way, but it has to be done because truth does not come into being automatically. Individual men, like the members of my staff here, have to work and fight to make it happen--and individual men like you have to make justice come into being because otherwise is doesn't happen.

What I'm trying to tell you is that there are forces in America today, unfortunately, which are not in favor of the truth coming out about John Kennedy's assassination. As long as our government continues to be like this, as long as such forces can get away with such actions, then this is no longer the country in which we were born.

The murder of John Kennedy was probably the most terrible moment in the history of our country. Yet, circumstances have placed you in the position where not only have you seen the hidden evidence but you are actually going to have the opportunity to bring justice into the picture for the first time.

Now, you are here sitting in judgment on Clay Shaw. Yet you, as men, represent more than jurors in an ordinary case because of the victim in this case. You represent, in a sense, the hope of humanity against government power. You represent humanity, which yet may triumph over excessive government power-- if you will cause it to be so, in the course of doing your duty in this case.

I suggest that you ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.

What can you do for your country? You can cause justice to happen for the first time in this matter. You can help make our country better by showing that this is still a government of the people. And if you do that, as long as you live, nothing will ever be more important.

from: http://www.prouty.org/closing.html

See also (if you dare) Oliver Stone's version of these events in the movie JFK, where the actor Kevin Costner gives a much expanded version of this summation.