June 4, 2007
by Stephen Neitzke
This is first of a two-part series: Executive Summary of Direct Democracy
We the people are the sovereign here. We need the seven extraordinary rights from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence (DOI) instituted in our Constituion. We need our national govt to include the eight direct democracy governance components that express the seven extraordinary rights and that are already in place in some of our states -- so that we can exercise our sovereignty when necessary. Without the DD governance components, we are powerless to stop even the smallest tyranny. The staccato of the deeply planned and sweeping tyrannies perpetrated by the three-branch Bush-Cheney Regime prove beyond doubt that the omission of direct democracy from the Constitution was a systemic problem from the beginning.
Our patriot founders fought the 1775-1783 Revolution for the extraordinary rights of Americans implied in the Declaration of Independence (DOI).
In our dual foundings -- the War for Independence and, four years later, the Constitution -- our true founding fathers are the ordinary-people patriot warriors who fought the War of Independence.
The majority of the authors of the Constitution, touted ever since in sophistry and propaganda as our glorious and hallowed "founding fathers", were the predator elitists who unconstitutionally rewrote our inviolable constitution, the Articles of Confederation. Their illegal ratification of the Constitution proved from the beginning and for all time that the American elites, unchecked by the people, would not govern in accord with a legitimate constitution.
The 1780s elites gave themselves, their class, and their class' progeny zero effective accountability, a vague constitution from which their elitist judges could arbitrarily find in favor of any elitist corruption, and an effective bar on any direct democracy that would limit elitist greed.
Checks and balances held by the people had always been a limiting factor on elitist greed and their wealth-driven corruptions of government. The American elites, as with the English elites who were their models, would not tolerate limits from those who were below their class.
The American elites of the 1770s and 1780s were true to their class, not to their nation. They lived the unexamined life of bigoted predators. They needed the rabble as an army, but not as political equals. It was good form to take care of the incompetent commoners -- a carry-over from the noblisse oblige of the bigoted English aristocracy -- but it was not good form to share power with them. The American elites clearly and greedily wanted as much social, economic, and political power as they could make off the backs of ordinary Americans.
The Federalist Papers are rife with sophistry, historical falsehoods, vacuous arguments, and Machiavellian deceits. (Machiavelli's book, The Prince, was published about 1532. Machiavelli's work in the murderous and psyhopathic arts of deceit was widely known among the American elites.)
The English elites had worked around and subtly violated traditional English rights since the Magna Carta. To the English and European aristocracy, the natural law of getting and holding wealth and power trumped all of the rabble's rights. The American elites held the same view.
The American elites saw historical realities only in the prism of cognative dissonance. Their belief system of superiority caused them to psychologically distort or reject any evidence that contradicted their superiority. The overarching natural law of wealth and power was simply a part of their belief system. It still is.
The historical failures of greed teach no lessons to the greedy.
The Constitution provided no sovereign citizen lawmaking -- as republics for all time inherited from the ancient Roman Republic. Never mind that the ancient Roman historian Polybius praised sovereign citizen lawmaking for its ability to produce balanced governance. Polybius was widely studied by American elites in the 1770s and 1780s, but rejected.
The American elites demanded that elected representatives of the people were the nation's sovereign. The Constitution provided no sovereign civil society to check and balance the constitutional encroachments of the rich. Never mind that Aristotle had spotted the need for balancing the rich's destructive encroachments in the 300s BCE. Aristotle's Politics was widely studied by American elites in the 1770s and 1780s, but rejected.
The more perfect the admixture of the political elements, the more lasting will be the constitution. Many even of those who desire to form aristocratical governments make a mistake, not only in giving too much power to the rich, but in attempting to overreach the people. There comes a time when out of a false good there arises a true evil, since the encroachments of the rich are more destructive to the constitution than those of the people.
Aristotle, The Politics, Book IV, translated by W.D. Ross, quoted in The Portable Greek Reader, ed., W.H. Auden, New York, The Viking Press, 1948, tenth printing, 1963.
The false good propounded by the authors of the Constitution was that the class-race elites were the only ones who could govern successfully. True evil springs from that 1780s false good in the elevation of GW Bush to presidential usurper on 20 January 2001. The beginnings of the felony conspiracy against the rights of all Americans to have a president elected in accord with the Constitution -- defined in and violating Title 18, US Code, Section 241 -- are in the unconstitutional SCOTUS decision in Bush v. Gore, 12 December 2000.
Felony forfeits all immunity -- judicial, executive, and legislative. The co-conspirators have no protection from 18 USC 241, except in the criminal collusions between federal executive agencies, the federal bench, and Congress. The felony conspiracy for presidential usurpation includes, at a minimum, the five SCOTUS judges who decided Bush v. Gore, former president Clinton, former vice president Gore, Clinton's DOJ hierarchy, Bush, Cheney, and Bush's DOJ hierarchy. They are all felons-in-waiting. Their only proper place is in federal prison, impeached and removed or not.
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A strong case can be made that this violation of 18 USC 241 is also an act of treason. The co-conspirators had all sworn to protect the Constitution and, with it, citizen rights. They knowingly violated their oaths of office and the citizen rights they were sworn to protect. In the 1860s, such behavior resulted in the seccessionist state legislators being convicted of treason.
Because new-nation Americans bought into the 1780s false good of being governed wholly by pure representative government, the sovereign people today have no national-level, direct democracy tools with which to end Bush's three-branch, anti-Constitutional despotism. We are powerless to end, or even to punish, any of the three-branch despotism's immense catalog of crimes against our Constitution, laws, and people.
Our rule of law has been drubbed and overthrown by criminal collusions between the three branches of government.
We have all the law we need to handle the despotism, but we have no justice. We have no direct, institutional power to cut through the criminal collusions among the co-conspirators themselves. The collusions bar us from justice.
"The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper."
--George W. Bush
From the false good, true evil.
In the War for Independence, the predator elites were willing to use the Declaration of Independence to bait the people into fighting for extraordinary American rights -- rights far beyond traditional English rights. Throughout the war, the DOI was continually posted and read wherever ordinary people would read or listen -- from military formations to church doors to taverns to public squares.
The predator elites, obviously, were not willing to deliver on the DOI's implied promises.
We can derive seven fundamental governance rights from the first part of the DOI's second paragraph. Those seven fundamental governance rights are --
- Individual citizens have the fundamental right to be politically equal with all other citizens.
- The sovereign people have the fundamental right to speak for themselves, in their voting majorities.
- The sovereign people have the fundamental right to be their own sovereign masters, democratically and directly electing all of their public servant representatives.
- The sovereign people have the fundamental right to remove any elected representative, for cause, without interference from government.
- The sovereign people have the fundamental right to control the output of legislation by formulating their own, by vetoing law made by government, and by affirming existing law in such a way that government is barred from amending it -- at every jurisdictional level, without interference from government.
- The sovereign people have the fundamental right to alter details of their governance, without interference from government.
- The sovereign people have the fundamental right to protect themselves from themselves by establishing the powers within government to administratively, legislatively, and judicially prevent zealous majorities, greedy corporations, the corrupting superrich, and government itself from violating individual and minority citizen rights, as given in the constitution and laws.
Although the implied promises of these fundamental rights are self-apparent in the DOI's second paragraph -- and although the elites knew that ordinary Americans had fought the War for those fundamental rights -- the authors of the Constitution rejected and omitted every one of them.
The seven fundamental governance rights do not square with the pure representative government of the Constitution.
- National, pure representative government does not grant political equality to all citizens. Instead, it absurdly makes the public servants functionally superior to sovereign civil society. Of course, the absurdity results from taking the sovereign people's point of view on governance, which is exactly what the politically sophisticated Urban Progressives of the Reform Era did. If you take the predator's point of view, or the servile's, then upside down is the natural order of things. (Stop being good Democratic and good Republican servile. Start being good Americans.)
- National, pure rep govt does not allow the sovereign people to speak for themselves in their voting majorities. Instead, rep govt's charlatans, demagogues, and psychopaths get to speak whatever lies please them, to and for sovereign civil society -- with zero effective accountability.
- National, pure rep govt does not allow sovereign civil society to directly elect all of its representatives. Instead, it maintains arbitrary corruption grounds called "the Electoral College" and "the independent judiciary" so that individuals in the highest reaches of power are appointed by the elites.
- National, pure rep govt does not allow the sovereign civil society to remove its employees for cause. Instead, a wholly arbitrary and pseudo-legal impeachment mechanism allows the pompous powerful within rep govt to save as many of its own from accountability as can be done without the public lynching the whole lying, greedy, useless pack of politician criminals. The predators have learned well that you don't need to fool all the people all the time. Fooling just some can keep you alive, in power, and obscenely wealthy.
- National, pure rep govt does not allow the sovereign civil society direct access to lawmaking. Instead, it makes whatever unenforceable, loop-holed, and/or illegal laws best suit its culture of lying and corruption machines (e.g., the anti-law regime tandem of (1) the unconstitutional and treasonous, privately-owned, usurious, currency counterfeiting, and currency inflation system of the Federal Reserve, and (2) the unconstitutional and treasonous, wealth-redistribution system of IRS personal income tax on wages and labor used to pay the usurious interest charges on the fiat, counterfeit, debt-based currency issued by the private owners of the Federal Reserve).
- National, pure rep govt does not allow sovereign civil society to freely alter details of their governance. Instead, it protects all of its elitist-favoring institutions and arbitrary lawmaking procedures to ensure the power of the greedy, psychopathic few over the sovereign, ordinary people.
- National, pure rep govt does not prevent violations of citizen rights by zealous minorities, greedy corporations, the corrupting superrich, or government itself. Instead, it is the facilitator for rights violations by all of those factions so that elitist profits and power are maximized, and so that ordinary people remain divided among themselves over as many dividing lines as possible. (Any substantial degree of citizen unity across the dividing lines would automatically mean unity against the politicians' culture of lying and corruption machines. Elitist profits and power would be automatically limited.)
Our DOI-based fundamental governance rights cannot be achieved in a pure representative government. They can only be achieved in a government that is a mix of fully independent, sovereign citizen lawmaking and representative government.
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Stephen Neitzke [send him email] is the founder of the Direct Democracy League. He is the author of "The State of the Republic, 1776-2004" as well as a number of other works, which can be found at www.ddleague-usa.net and on his blog at http://ddrevival.blogspot.com/
© 2007 Stephen Neitzke
