The State of the Union is terrible.  We suffer from a number of serious maladies.   As a People we have not paid enough attention, and many of us are still very much asleep or living in illusions.  Our political leaders ill serve us, being addicted to power and privilege in far too many cases, such that they serve only corporate masters, and no longer the Republic.

    I think, in fact, if George Bush or Dick Chaney was asked to explain the ideas on which our form of government, our democratically elected Constitutional Republic was based, they couldn't do it.  And they'd not be the only ones - there are a lot of Senators and Congress-people who wouldn't do any better, just as their are few citizens, few corporate officers, and few members of the Media who anymore understand our form of government.

    But neither we nor the politicians are the worst actors.   Far worse yet are the Lords of Finance, the plutocracy of concentrated wealth which has for far too long had only its profits and powers in mind, and had no compunction in using this advantage to the destruction of the Republic and the undermining of our freedoms.  Like most Nations in dire straits, we have nearly succumbed to an enemy within, not to an enemy without.

    But worse than all these - worse than our own sleep, the arrogance of the politicians, and the callus indifference of the tyranny of concentrated wealth - is the so-called Free Press.  When the Bill of Rights was authored, a Free Press was among the highest rights they had in mind, when it was written that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.

    It was a free and raucous, even anarchistic press that was on their minds.  Why?  Because the Republic is an Idea, and as long as we have a vital and even obnoxious discussion of ideas, we will keep our freedoms, and our Constitutional Republic.  But that was not to be.

    The individuals who write the words in papers, and speak the words on TV, found themselves getting rich, and worse yet, in love with their own opinions.  Truth is word no longer in their dictionaries.  And, decade by decade in the Twentieth Century, the Press gave away its sense of the ideals of the Republic, in exchange for membership in elite classes, invitations to Davros, leaks from the White House, and what is worst - the seduction of celebrity. 

    As a consequence, we cannot find on the News any sense of the reality.  Lets just give one blatant example: In 1992 the neo-cons published a paper in which they asserted the need for American military bases in the middle-East, with Iraq as a prime target, and with empire building as their stated goal.  In the run up to the war, and since, this fact has been ignored, and what is worse, few Americans know that one of the main activities in Iraq has been the building of this permanent intended military presence, begin paid for by our taxes, and our children's lives.

    We have a government with an obvious secret agenda, and no word of this reaches our ears, something so at odds with all the lies that have been told, that the Press should speak and write of it every single day and night.

    How can we vote - how can we make the proper judgments that go with our responsibilities as citizens, when the truth is withheld?  And, that is just one example.

    We have a similar problem in Prescott.  A Mayor and City Council so unable to distinguish itself from the corporate interests and appreciate its duties to the public, that an egregious breach of trust occurred when the Granite Dells annexation agreement was signed.  A Press, so asleep at the switch that if it wasn't for a couple of accidental investigations of private citizens, we'd have no idea what was going on, what was planned and what of our taxes and water was given away to private developers.

    Now there are two choices we can take here with respect to our politicians.  It was, if knowledgeable, malfeasance of the worst kind; and if done in ignorance, then it was gross incompetence.  As to the offending corporations, they have not only harmed our government and our trust, but they have harmed their companions in the business world - the ones who are willing to play by the rules.  No longer can we trust developers not to take as much advantage of the taxpayer as possible.

    Now our shared public life, even local politics, is not unaffected by the wider issues.   Our local politics is like a local condition in much wider elementary weather and climate.  What goes on in Washington and Phoenix effects us here.  This is why I point it out, while at the same time trying to remind us that we still can do things locally of great value.

    However, there is an impediment to this - which is the divisions fostered on us by the last national election where wedge issues of little relevance to our real problems were used to divide us, one against the other - Republican against Democrat, Christian against progressive, supporters of business against workers.  The uses of the issues of abortion and gay rights, while deep social problems that need addressing, are not to be solved by law.  No law has ever made someone moral.  But the politicians gain advantage with these wedge issues, and by this sleezy approach to public life, bring ruin to the processes of rational discourse necessary for our Constitutional Republic to survive the assaults on its very foundations.

    We cannot expect the politician to give up his addiction to this shameful divisive rhetoric, until we ourselves set the right example.  We must overcome these divisions...

difference does not mean one is right and the other wrong...both are right...



Hi,

    My name is Joel Wendt, and I'm running for Mayor of Prescott.  As you can see we are a good-sized crowd today, and I have to think that it isn't because of my personality, since most of you don't know me or have never met me.  I think, instead, that what's brought you here is something that I wrote, something about the power of citizens in a political world that has gotten less and less sane over the years.

    Less and less sane.  Exactly.  There is something rotten in Washington, and in Phoenix, and even in Prescott, and we all know it, but can't quite put our finger on it.  Its out of whack, out of tune, and it grates on our political nerves.

    Now just so it is clear, let me say this right in the beginning.  I'd like you to look around the room and at each other, and realize that we here are the government.  When all is said and done and the chickens come home to roost, they roost on our doorstep.  Whatever else can be said about the insanity in modern politics, we've been electing these people for a lot of years, and we need to own up to our responsibility.

    That said, let me sketch out this meeting for you once more, so it is as clear as possible.  I'm going to share with you my views, my citizen's State of the Union so to speak.  If you are going to bother to consider me for Mayor, you have a right to know what I think.  When I get done with that, you get to talk, but there will be some rules, and I'll get to those when the time comes.

    As to a citizen's State of the Union, lets get to it.

    There's some good news and some bad news.  I'm going to do the bad news first, and for many of you it will be far worse than you've thought possible.  You might even get angry at me, because you are going to want to be in denial, or think I'm nuts for saying the things I am going to say.  Maybe you will want to walk out.  Okay by me, but then you'll miss the good news, and the good news is very cool, very very cool.  It far out weighs the bad news, and its the kind of thing you don't hear about in the Media which not only doesn't give us the real bad news, it doesn't actually give us much of anything.  Kind of junk candy for the mind is what you get from Media, unless its Fox, in which case they're mostly just propaganda anyway.

    That said, lets start with some of the worst of it.  In my view of things, we don't have a legitimate government in Washington.  They stole the election in 2000, and they did it again in 2004.  They are not only thieves, they are incompetent as well.  They've destroyed the military, bankrupted the treasury, and told so many lies that everyone's head just spins trying to catch up to the last one, much less take in the newest one.

    The thing is they didn't do this in a vacuum.  The Republicans and the Democrats have created (and allowed) a political culture to arise in Washington that is addicted to money and lies, so much so that even the nice ones can hardly find a place to rise out of that amoral swampland.

    Now even if you only buy a tenth of what I am saying, those of you who want to think about this might wonder how the heck this came about.  This is important, because understanding how to fix it, requires we understand how it got wrong.  So we have to do some history, and because I am a bit of a philosopher by nature, the reason I am reading something I wrote, is to make sure I do this briefly instead of wandering off into details.  If I gave a spontaneous lecture we'd be here 'til Tuesday.

    Before the United States, most governments in Western Civilization were aristocracies of blood.  Kings and Queens and lines of descent, and power was vested in these families, and it was a power often without any restraint or limits.  Well, like anything of this nature, it got too in love with itself, and Kings and Queens got more and more arrogant, such that they squeezed too hard, and finally got the rebellion they deserved.

    Now the root of this rebellion was in something that lived in ordinary people for a long time - a sense of oppression and powerlessness.   At the time of the American Revolution, it was upper classes, large land owners etc. who were also feeling oppressed, and so this resistance to oppression found champions among the elites to go with the champions among the ordinary.  Together, they rebelled and gave birth to our democratically elected Constitutional Republic.

    When the Constitution was finished, someone like Franklin is supposed to have said, coming out of the Hall: "Well, you've got your Republic if you can keep it".

    Now what did he mean by that?

    Well, the fact was that the creation of the Constitution was a battleground  between those interested in the highest freedoms for all (except: women, slaves and Indians, but these were just details, right?), and those who had large property rights at stake, and did not want anything to interfere with their wealth, or the acquisition of more wealth.

    Now what happened, to make a really long story very short, was that the aristocracies of blood were not succeeded by a truly free people, but by an aristocracy of wealth.  The Republic did exist for a time, but by the Civil War it was in eclipse, and when Lincoln fought with the bankers over the financing of the War (they wanted 28% interest), Lincoln refused and created the first federal currency - Lincoln Greenbacks.  The Lords of Finance did not like this - for up to that time currency, then called species, was the province of banks not of governments.

    The Lords of Finance fought back, sometimes in your face, but also often under the table and out of sight.   They didn't want governments messing around with markets and other ways the rich made more money, so they invented Central Banking and got our (emphasis on our) Congress to create the Federal Reserve which gave to a private banking organization the monetary power that under the then understood rules of political economy, belonged to the government, which in the USA, means it was an aspect of the sovereignty of the People.

    That's right, the Federal Reserve is a theft of our national sovereignty, done right in front of us and for the sole benefit of the elites of concentrated wealth.  Central Banking was then exported all over the world, such that today the Lords of Finance hold powers which overshadow our freedoms to a great degree.  Basically we live in a tyranny of concentrated wealth on a scale it is hard to imagine.

    Most of what we are taught about economics is a lie, for example.  To avoid some details, let me just tell you a little story.  Some friends and I had a small study group on economics in New England in the '90s, and a gentleman who worked for the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston came to speak to our group and said two very disturbing things.  First, he said that there were about 40,000 CEO's of financial institutions in this country, and perhaps 40 of them understood the real rules of money and finance.  Second, he said that the real rules could be explained on TV in about an hour and a half, and if that was done, by morning all the banks would have been burned to the ground.

    The money the Fed prints is fake - it has no real value anymore.   Its main use in the last couple of decades has been to create endless consumer credit for the purpose of tying us down with enormous debt.  American's have been seduced with a high standard of living, easy money, and to go with that corruption, fake news so that we don't really understand our impact on the world or how the world feels about us.

    Now if you think I am talking conspiracies here, you are right.  But believe me when I say that history is just a story of one conspiracy after another, with a lot of amoral people taking as much advantage as they could in terms of acquiring wealth and power.  Lies are so ordinary now in the mouths of politicians, that they even believe them themselves.  They call lies spin today, which is a lie about lies of all things.

    Anyway, money rules, and money corrupts and Washington is corrupted to the core, so that it becomes easy to steal elections and lie to the people all in the normal course of business.  If there is a basic rule it is this: never believe what a politician or a rich man says.  Notice only what they do, what are their deeds, and on that basis make your judgments.

    So what's wrong with the world.  Well, it comes down to this: The seeking after power and wealth is a very short term competition, such that no one really thinks very carefully about tomorrow, except to lay the ground work for more power and wealth.  The result is that everything is falling apart, because no true impulse to stewardship was exercised.  The people in power cared more about their power than the consequences, and so like the parasites that they are, they have eaten the life blood out of the body politic and now we find ourselves amidst decay and rot and the stink is getting so strong it is starting to make us wake up.

    All that said, which is very little, it is but a part of a much larger whole.  I could easily speak of the deeds of the Lords of Finance over the last 200 years, in ways that would cause the hair on the back of your necks to rise.  Some of you, who might have been reading The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, are getting from this book more of the truth about how these folks rule the world, and with what outrageously selfishness and callousness.  The fact is that I've hardly touched the surface of the reality of the tyranny of concentrated wealth.

    For a long time now, they have had too much control over our government, and abused that power to make all the basic economic rules to their sole advantage, making quite real what we have for generations now called: wage slavery.

    By the way, this condition is natural.  It is how history goes.  Wealth and privilege seek power to continue their domination, which is why Franklin said: "if you can keep it."

    So, lets get the good news.

    When the Founders got done with the Constitution they had achieved something remarkable, which the Lords of Finance would like us not to notice.  The Founders had not only made real the ideal that the only just powers of government come from the consent of the governed, they had, in writing the Constitution, created legal precedent.  They said "We the People do ordain and establish", and they said "that powers not expressly delegated are reserved to the people".  The Arizona State constitution has the same basic idea, and even the Charter of the City of Prescott flows from the same principle.  The fundamental rule is that any power a government can exercise comes from us, and it is a temporary grant which we can withdraw at any time we choose.  We are the ultimate power, not politicians or the Lords of Finance.

    Think about it.  I mean seriously think about it.  Say to yourself, I am the power.  We are the power.  Make it your mantra when you watch the news and read of some more political stupidity or thievery.

    See the thing is that the same arrogance that led the aristocracies of blood to produce rebellion, has led to excesses by the aristocracies of wealth, that also are producing rebellion.  Like that office worker in Tiananmen Square in China, who stood in front of that tank, and let us remember, stopped it, because the driver was also a man of conscience - we have enormous power if we just take hold of it and use it.

    Now locally we do it with the Reasonable Growth Initiative.  We can also do it by replacing as many members of the old political guard as possible.  Those folks are too stuck in dead thinking, and the old-boy networks of favors.  They think we can keep doing the same thing over and over again, even if it isn't working, which is Einstein's definition of insanity.

    But what's the main thing here?  The main thing is that citizens have to become active.  As long as we are passive, we get what such passivity deserves - that is ending up food for the economic vampires - the callus monsters who think they know best, when what they mean by best is what makes them wealthy.

    It might seem that this is a horrible mess, but I think not, so let me tell you how it works and that what we do to fix it is basically a very small thing.  We don't have to lift the whole mess and heal it tomorrow, we just take a part, and do it right, and because we are many, the lifting of the whole is much easier than we might think.

    The Lords of Finance, and their political lackeys, get away with what they do because of the lies.  Its like in the Wizard of Oz - we need to see the fake wizard behind the screen and then he looses his powers.

    So the politician lies, and the Lords of Finance lie, and the media, which belong to the Lords of Finance repeats the lies over and over again as if they were the truth.  It isn't, by the way, that the truth is not out there, we just have to work for it - we have to separate the wheat from the chaff and actually want the truth.  A lot of us like to live in our opinions, which are not the truth, and a lot of us like to believe our favorite politicians, which is understandable, but it is a trust badly placed.  The truth takes some work to get at, and if we aren't willing to do that work then we will not only get what we deserve, we'll bequeath that mess to our children.

    For example, we believe incorrectly, that our main role in our democratic Constitutional Republic is to vote.  This is not so, and was not how the Founders saw it either.  We are to participate, as much as possible, in the conversation that precedes the vote.  It is that public dialog which is the essential thing, with the vote being the last emphatic act.  But as things are done now, with the money given by the Lords of Finance to both political parties, the public dialog is warped into a great sea of confusion, mis-information, and untruth.  Complex matters are oversimplified.  Matters of character mis-represented and hidden.  Issues not germaine to our actual social reality are emphasized, while the core problems ignored.  Hate is encouraged, and our people divided.  The loudest and the noisiest are given voice, while the sanest and deepest go unheard.

    Our work is to take back the conversation and return it to sane and rational discourse.  We do that locally at first, and in this we can be assured that we here in Prescott are not acting alone.  Elsewhere many others are waking up and realizing that more of the same old politics will destroy us.  There are issues about which we just need real information, such as the Granite Dells development deal, and there are issues which are philosophical, such as the conflict between private property rights and basic human needs.

    To work on these we need to talk to each other, and to talk to each other we need lines of communication - that is our own means or media systems, which can't be controlled by the Lords of Finance.  So that's what is going to happen here, next.  We (mostly you) are going to talk to each other, and then if you notice around the edges of the room, will be sign up sheets and materials designed to help us make more viable the lines of communication, so that our conversation with each other continues after this meeting and becomes the power by which we slowly and surely take hold of and define the public discourse on terms other than the Lords of Finance and their politician servants want.

    So what's at issue here?  Something normal in a way - those with money use it to gain political power, and in the process corrupt our political processes - that is tempt our elected officials into abusing our trust.  This is true on the large stage of world and national history, and it is true locally as well.  If we don't want this to continue, what can we do about it?

    It is a question of power, and we have to seize it.  It doesn't come by itself.  So now you have the question.  What are you going to do?  As a public servant all I can do is point the way and suggest: maybe you want to go this way.  After that, if you don't go, if you instead go home and back to sleep in front of the TV, then we all we suffer.  But you know what?  I don't think that is going to happen, because every time the American  People had to stand up and be counted, they not only did that, they did it with such vitality and power that we astounded the whole world.  So what is it going to be?

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    While you are thinking on that, here is the rules for the conversation.  You'll see that we are now setting some empty chairs in the center of our horseshoe like circle.  Those who want to speak, should come and sit in one of these chairs.  If there needs to be a line lets form it over there.  When you are in the inner circle, I am going to hand to one of you what is called the talking stick.  This is a Native American idea for helping conversation.  The one who holds the talking stick, gets to speak, the rest listen.  When done, the stick is passed  to the next person, and also when done, you should also leave the inner circle, and the next person in line can have your seat.  In this way, as the talking stick moves around the inner circle, those finished speaking will leave and those waiting will sit.

    I am going to encourage you not to make long speeches.  The best would be to say all or part of your name, and something on the order of Wendt is nuts or not, and then how you feel, what most concerns you and what you want.  Keep it simple and from the heart and that way most of those here will get a chance to speak.  Remember this is just the beginning of something which I hope will grow and become much more as we practice our conversations and build our interconnections.

    If you need to leave early, please quietly go by the tables and sign up where you want, and take whatever papers you need.  We'll see that everyone on a list gets a copy of the list and help getting connected.  In this way we begin the work, and what is to happen later will come to you according to how you signed up (or not).

    We are obligated to give up this room at Noon, and I'll give a ten minutes notice.   As to asking me questions, lets leave that separate from this part where you speak to each other - that is when you speak don't ask me questions, but keep in mind I'll be outside after Noon and can be yelled at then.  Also the sign up lists create future meeting possibilities for those who want them.  Thank you for coming and now lets hear from this person to begin.