America's Huge Subversive Problem, We The People's Surefire Full Solution
 
Let's "provide for the common defence" of our Self-Governance, and Five Kinds of Public Good, all under assault by American wealth-and-power and their media machine

by Dan Ruuska     Version 4, revision 07.23.08

THE PROBLEM

America's self-governance: unfettered democratic processes, truly representative governance (our democracy) -- and the five kinds of public good listed in the first sentence of our Constitution since 1787: justice, domestic tranquility needed for cooperative unity, common defense, general welfare, liberty (the common-good bedrock of our "more perfect Union" and the American Dream, the very purpose of our democracy) -- are under stealthy mounting assault by a small number of Americans: consolidated wealth-and-power, the foe, protected and served by their media machine.

Consolidated wealth-and-power -- an ancient political disease -- off and on over the ages, and here and there around the world, has flared up out of dormancy and harmfully taken wealth and power from people. Today inside America that history is repeating itself, despite foresight and care by the Framers to assure it never would.

The present fusion of many separate powers -- wealth/corporate power, federal executive power, federal legislative power, federal judicial power, intelligence/military power, red/blue political-party power, and mass-media power (the wealth/corporate right, 0.2% of the public) with Christian-Right power (the religious right, 10% of the public) -- into the unbridled consolidated wealth-and-power now harming us began around 1980, two centuries after the Framers wired a multi-safeguard homeland/national security system into our Constitution and Bill of Rights to prevent such a foe from ever teaming up and flaring up inside America.

The foe's conquest of wealth and power hurts us dearly. They breached the homeland security and national security of our self-governance and five kinds of public good. And during their pursuit of more and more wealth-and-power happiness for themselves they take five kinds of well-being wealth including financial wealth and innocent lives -- and supreme self-governance power -- from We the People and our posterity. They do it to other nations, too, and the blowback including terrorism hurts America. Exactly what the Framers feared and tried to prevent.

Few are aware of this war on America -- by Americans -- that began a generation ago and escalates today. Because the foe disabled our vigilant free-speech/free-press warning system that was a vital part of our homeland/national defense and security of self-governance and the five kinds of public good, as they built up their advertising/PR/news/entertainment media machine that controls information and deceives and manipulates to help wealth-and-power morph our "government of, by, and for We the People" into a "government of, by, and for Wealth-and-Power" they label "democracy."

The foe has already made sure that good citizenship and active democracy -- reading and watching the news to stay informed, writing letters to the editor and blogging on the web, working on self-governance and common-good issues, whistleblowing in the public interest, engaging in principled dissent, advising our Senators and Congressperson, voicing concerns to the President, supporting a political party, voting in every election -- cannot possibly stop them.

(Worry not. Good citizenship and active democracy CAN become effective again. See THE SOLUTION below.)

By law: We the People have supreme power, are the government of America, are the state. We supply principled self-governance and bountiful public good to ourselves and our posterity. We vigilantly and vigorously assure integrity of the public trust (especially the true allegiance of our leaders and press) -- and we watch wealth-and-power like a hawk and always keep it on a short leash -- otherwise our self-governance and public good are at risk.

But few Americans understand or perform that Civics 101 anymore. So how did the foe disable our civic power and our civic responsibility so completely?

And how did they breach the homeland security and national security of our democratic processes, representative governance, justice, cooperative unity, common defense, general welfare, and liberty without detection?

During the past generation the foe gradually and stealthily altered our "real American democracy," a form of democracy that fosters and secures self-governance and public good, into "rigged market-based democracy," a form of democracy that 1] frees wealth-and-power to consolidate and grow in strength and take wealth and power from citizens and 2] blocks citizens from seeing and stopping that wrong and harm.

That media-aided subversion of our republic -- together with the foe's many others including their deep cleansing of core civic understanding from our public education and public mind, their cloaking/twisting of vital news and their hide-behind-good/shift-the-blame deceptions, and their several types of divide-and-conquer manipulation of the public -- softened up America to make it easy for them to heist our wealth and our power and trick us to help.

Some examples of that:

** The central section of our Declaration of Independence -- more than half of the document -- describes the consolidated-wealth-and-power assaults on self-governance and public good that triggered revolt and the birth of America. The foe and their media machine, in effect, cut the whole section from the original charter and from all copies ever made.

** The opening sentence of the U.S. Constitution calls upon We the People to provide far more human-to-human goodness to ourselves and our posterity than the Ten Commandments do (it leaps out when you place the two codes side by side and actually read them). The foe and their media machine erased this truth and duty from America's patriotism.

** "[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion" became "supreme Law of the Land" in 1797. Two centuries later the foe and their media machine are busily removing "not in any sense" from that founding principle of our nation. (They're doing it to empower -- and reward -- the thirty-million-strong Christian-Right base they enlisted to help the half-million-strong wealth/corporate base gain more wealth and more power.)

** True "conservatives" and true "liberals" are rooted in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The "right wing" is rooted in -- and today is repeating the same two kinds of assaults by -- the unjust consolidated wealth-and-power that set off the American Revolution. The foe and their media machine blind us to it, disguise the right as "conservative" and the media as "liberal," and pit conservatives and liberals at each other, all to help the right weaken our "common defence" and achieve Divided We Fall to their assaults on our 1] self-governance and 2] public good.

** To eternally secure our self-governance and five kinds of public good from harm by domestic wealth-and-power, the Framers wired a homeland/national security system into our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The foe and their media machine cloaked the entire system from public view, removed it from public education, and quietly switched it off without America realizing its first line of defense went dead.

** Harm by foreign terrorists, we're told daily, is the most important threat to be fearful of and vigilant for and protected from today. But we're NOT told how "Homeland Security" EXCLUDES major elements of genuine homeland security: Yellow/Orange/Red Alerts for, and Rapid Homeland-Defense Response to, assaults on our democratic processes and representative governance and justice and cooperative unity and common defense and general welfare and liberty -- by American wealth-and-power and their media machine -- assaults that include steady collateral homeland death at the rate of many 9/11s a year which they carefully keep out of the news.

Unlike in 1776, today's foe is disguised as friend and is winning big with feeble resistance from the well-armed public they are busily taking wealth and power from.

THE SOLUTION

Deploy and wield a democracy weapon and tool for total homeland/national defense and security of America's self-governance and five kinds of public good: CivicPowerUSA.org.

The four-element big-picture surefire full solution to America's huge subversive problem comes from our primal urges for justice, ancient human wisdom, early American history, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights. That is, CivicPowerUSA.org comes from millions of people over the millennia, even from our DNA, not from this one concerned citizen.

A broad-based national civic-action congress of concerned citizens and groups created to unite and build and direct citizen forces to effectively fight the foe (like the Continental Congress did during the American Revolution) -- and the congress' likely spinoff: a new political party that could easily trounce the two major parties betraying America -- can forge and hone the weapon and tool into full strength and sharpness.

Some of the betrayals to stop and reverse? In the 1980s the foe, aided by reds and blues we elected and judges they installed, removed the FCC's Fairness Doctrine and many public-service requirements from broadcasting, and they loosened FCC restrictions on media consolidation, which 1] gave rise to hate radio and religious-right television and other foe-slanted mainstream media content especially our news, 2] led to the decline of public-interest broadcasting (broadcasting that serves the "national interest:" self-governance and our five kinds of public good), and 3] removed barriers to growth of the right's information monopoly and persuasion weapon, their print/radio/TV/film/web media machine. To help build that media machine, in the 1980s the foe influenced our universities to blend advertising and public relations and journalism into client-serving "communication." In 1987 the Republican Party and Democratic Party co-founded the Commission on Presidential Debates, a private corporation funded by wealth-and-power donors to both parties, which operates under the guise of being a taxpayer-funded federal commission, shields red/blue candidates from hard questioning by the public, shuts out candidates from other parties, all to cement red/blue monopoly grip on power. In return for wealth/corporate campaign cash (transmuted from bribe money into protected free speech by red/blue-installed judges) and Christian-Right-bloc votes (made effective by the right's suppression of voter turnouts), today's red/blue heart in Washington D.C. (537 elected representatives, 0.0002% of the public, a voter-removable linchpin holding all parts of the foe together) pumps wealth and power out of the public and into the consolidated-wealth-and-power few. So no matter who we vote for today, the foe wins and America loses more self-governance and public good -- more so when we elect reds, less so when we elect blues. The media machine, as part of their full service to the red/blue monopoly and rest of the foe, suppresses all news about these threats to the homeland/national security of our self-governance and public good, singles out and pillories citizens and groups who try to warn us about the right and their wrongs, and uses many other communication methods to weaken the ability and will of "We, the People" to "provide for the common defence."

*** Do it to neutralize the foe: the "right wing" (10% of the public) -- consolidated American wealth-and-power protected and served by their media machine -- who 1] breached the homeland/national security of America's self-governance and full range of public good beginning around 1980 including by disabling the homeland/national security system the Framers wired into our Constitution and Bill of Rights to prevent such an enemy from ever forming, 2] takes five kinds of well-being wealth, and supreme self-governance power, from conservatives and liberals (90% of the public) today, and 3] thereby proves itself to be a treasonous homeland version of the consolidated-wealth-and-power enemy waging war on self-governance and public good that's described at length in the central section of the document of dissent we celebrate every Fourth of July.

*** Do it to achieve "real change:" restore and grow and secure America's democratic processes, representative governance, justice, cooperative unity, common defense, general welfare, and liberty.

Taxpayers would save the amount now being taken from them by the foe, an average of $15,000 per taxpayer a year (a total of $2 trillion annually). Collateral damage from the foe's unbridled taking of wealth and power, homeland death at the rate of many 9/11s a year (more than 50,000 deaths annually), would cease. These and the many other benefits -- when employed as hot selling points by the national civic-action congress and new political party -- would ignite the public to yank out the foe's linchpin and replace the corrupt heart in Washington D.C. with a principled one: 537 honest representatives devoted to achieving the "real change" above.

How well-armed are we, with supreme law and supreme power and other potent strengths, to carry out this long-overdue major maintenance and tune-up of our republic? Study CivicPowerUSA.org.

Yes we can change our "theocratic plutocratic kakistocracy taking wealth and power from the public" that began to flare up around 1980, back into the "secular self-governance fostering bountiful public good" founded in 1787.

We can even remove the foe's judges from the Supreme Court. Our Constitution instructs how because the Framers foresaw the possible need.

The national civic-action congress would begin like in 1776. Organize the foe's injustices into three categories: 1] how they harm our self-governance (democratic processes, representative governance); 2] how they harm our five kinds of public good (equal justice for all, domestic tranquility needed for national unity and cooperation, common defense of self-governance and the whole public good, general welfare of several kinds, liberty and its privacies and freedoms); 3] how they betray us (how they switched allegiance from the America in our Three Charters of Freedom to a homeland version of the enemy that triggered the American Revolution, how they breached the Framers' homeland/national security system that protected America from harm by American wealth-and-power, how they deceive and manipulate to weaken America's strength to "provide for the common defence" of self-governance and public good). State precisely how the foe violates our Constitution's Preamble, Articles, and Amendments in technicality and spirit (why not start with the examples in CivicPowerUSA.org, including how their long-premeditated war on Iraq violates Article 6). List those injustices, and violations of law, in a declaration to defend America against the foe and reverse the harm they inflicted.

That's part of Element 1 of the four-element plan outlined in CivicPowerUSA.org.

Through the public-serving new political party we elect into power during Element 4, we enact and enforce reforms. Corporate reforms -- especially to eliminate "corporate personhood" (which never had a valid legal basis anyway), reinstate early-American "corporate publichood" (corporations exist to serve the public and are forbidden to hurt the public), and regulate corporations so they serve and never hurt self-governance and public good. Judicial reforms -- to build a public-serving Judiciary to complement the public-serving Presidency and Congress we elect, which would include removing right-wing judges from the Supreme Court. Tax, subsidy, fiscal, and regulatory reforms -- to halt the $2-trillion-a-year stealthy transfer of wealth from the poor and middle-class, from our public assets, and from our posterity to corporations and the well-off through their comprehensive system of: regressive total taxation to escape paying their past fair share; giveaways to the wealth/corporate/religious right and cuts of funding for the public; federal deficit spending to fund and hide that theft and to make future generations pay for it; corporate privatization of public services (now they're eyeing public education) and free-market corporate gouging of the public (think Enron, health care, prescription medications, consumer credit, home mortgages). Political-influence reforms -- especially media, lobbying, and campaign-finance reforms to accomplish these items of "real change:" the media would no longer help the foe plan/prepare/initiate/conduct heists of public wealth and power, or serve as lookout and get-away car, or pillory citizens who object; members of the public trust would be banned from becoming lobbyists, or other forms of hired gun, for their former constituencies (such as for the pharmaceutical industry now profiting from Medicare reform); a $50-per-taxpayer annual IRS tax to lavishly fund all national elections would on the average save every taxpayer $15,000 a year by eliminating campaign contributions and the unjust taking of wealth and power they buy. All these reforms -- and others including political-advertising and vote-counting reforms -- are needed for America to again have principled self-governance AND the bountiful common good that principled self-governance delivers.

The Framers understood and feared humankind's ancient political disease -- wealth-and-power consolidates, inflicts harm on the public, which forces the public to revolt and restore fairness -- and took measures to prevent the wealth-and-power disease from ever awakening and arising inside America. They created multiple supreme-law defenses against the disease, a kernel homeland/national security system to eternally ward off and suppress the disease: Democratic processes and representative governance to keep the disease in check and safely dormant. "[I]nsure domestic Tranquility" to maintain an undivided, undivisive We the People able and willing to unite and cooperate to fight the disease. "[P]rovide for the common defence" against the disease. "[N]o religious Test[s]" to prevent religion in public servants and in other members of the public trust from feeding the disease. Trial by jury as a direct citizen check against unjust arrest/prosecution, unjust courts, and unjust laws spawned by the disease (juries have supreme power and supreme responsibility to nullify bad laws -- laws NOT "made in Pursuance [of]" our Constitution -- such as laws that favor wealth-and-power and hurt self-governance and public good). Separation of powers, and separation of church and state, to prevent separate components of wealth-and-power from consolidating and growing into the disease. Freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, to sound alarms about outbreaks of the disease and to rally citizens to fight the disease. Surely our experts in Constitutional law can cite other founding inoculations against the wealth-and-power disease. The Framers wired all these safeguards into our 1787 Constitution and 1791 Bill of Rights. Beginning around 1980, the right wing and their media machine powered down the entire security system. We can switch it back on.

Use the religion of the Framers, traditional Christianity, for the purpose of homeland/national defense and security of our self-governance and public good. The Christian Right -- whose nihilistic/aggressive/inhumane unChristlike brand of Christianity emerged a century after 1776 and thus was not the religion of America's founders; who in the 1980s were enlisted and empowered by the wealth/corporate right to help them take wealth and power here and abroad; who assault separation of church and state and our self-governance and our five classes of common good as they push for their religious goals of divine rule and speedy arrival of "end times" (which they have faith will end America and We the People and our posterity); who claim to be patriotic and moral and to have God's blessing all to cover up their immense wrongs; who are thus deeply unChristian and dangerously unAmerican -- can be overpowered by conservative and liberal mainstream Christians who outnumber them by six to one. After 200 million traditional-Christian voters flood to the polls to help America elect a principled heart into Washington D.C. and neutralize the power of the 0.5-million-strong wealth/corporate right, the power of the 30-million-strong religious right dies also.

Use the Second Amendment, too, for its intended purpose of homeland/national defense and security of the self-governance and five kinds of public good ordained in our Constitution. "[B]eing necessary to the security of a free State," today's Minutemen who "keep and bear Arms" would aim and fire their millions of symbolic flintlocks at the domestic foe.

And ask our troops and veterans to fully fulfill their solemn oath to "defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

The secret of success is to spot and surmount the foe's divide-and-conquer manipulations: 1] They orchestrate us to focus on and chase single-issue bits and pieces of their wrongdoing in order to prevent us from seeing and solving the whole problem as successfully as America's founders did. 2] They fragment the general public, and the public interest, into myriad self-interests and then foment those divisions to compete and clash; they insure domestic discord (the opposite of "insure domestic Tranquility") to block citizen cooperation, to prevent a united state of America, to assure Divided We Fall. They apply those two basic divide-and-conquer tricks so very effectively that even those who dedicatedly fight the right actually aid the right to divide and conquer. In short, they fracture the combined civic power of We the People into tiny, competitive, divisive, impotent fragments of power so that each and every individual or group effort toward "real change" can be singled out and easily brushed off or crushed by the well-organized full might of the small right wing and their media machine. So. Let's tap into our wellspring of civic power to build cooperative United We Stand against that treason.

Alert and rally America to mobilize and carry out this resolute homeland/national defense -- of our self-governance and five kinds of public good -- BEFORE the right wing and their media machine totally cripple and sap the ability and will of We the People to stop them.