Tuesday, October 4, 2011

MY FELLOW PATRIOTS AND COLOR GUARD

MY FELLOW PATRIOTS AND COLOR GUARD                                                                                                                                                                                    Please withhold judgment on this message until you have reached the end. There are elements of it with which you may disagree, elements that describe conditions which you have not encountered and had the opportunity to consider, and a near complete lack of knowing what concerns you as an individual. Consider this;   

   The American people are only now becoming somewhat aware of the burden you have taken upon yourselves to stand and resist the privileged few who have taken our democracy and economic system and twisted it to suit their purposes. You oppose a primal force-greed. You cannot win; you cannot establish any institutional change in our country that has meaningful power without engaging the hearts and minds- how is “hearts and minds” for an abused term? - Without a clear and resonant message to the American people that they can accept and act upon.

    We have created an opportunity with persistence and growing attendance that has captured some media fascination.  We need a message, one single message that will let every American describe you in a single sentence or phrase that encapsulates the essence of this effort.

  The rest of this message divides into two parts; A description of our country’s most pressing problems and the most powerful forces that caused them, and a description of a proposed remedy.

  I recall Jimmy Carters presidency and his speeches. He was shocked at the size of America’s federal debt, which was around 300 billion during his presidency.  He worried that the Soviet Union would pursue a gap in our missile defenses which he labeled a “window of opportunity”.  He sounded way too old and used up as he talked of an American “crisis of confidence”; He was exhausted. The responsibilities of the job had used him up.

  Then along came Ronald Reagan and his “Its morning in America” speeches and one of America’s most enduringly popular populists swept into power. The debt was no concern to him and he ballooned the Federal debt many times over to pump America’s economic engine with cash until it hummed. It was all deficit spending- like a family living well on credit cards. As the economy speeded up and labor became a more valuable commodity, wages began to creep up. He countered this by opening up America’s borders and importing cheap labor.  America’s middle class discovered our first jobless recovery and more of us began to slide toward poverty. As the years have passed this trend has accelerated. To ease this slide Americas political elite opened up our borders even more and allowed unrestricted Free Trade with nations whose labor costs were a fraction of our own. The cost of imported goods trumped the cost of goods produced in America as American investors took their tax breaks and invested them in foreign countries with abundant cheap labor.

   Blaming desperately poor immigrants for this is the equivalent of blaming the tool in the hand of an operator for the error. Our elected officials in Washington D.C. opened the borders. They knew full well that American workers would be displaced. Democrats sought poor voters. Republicans sought cheap labor for business.  Democrats. Republicans. Together they are the Republocrats.

   Ronald Reagan’s most enduring legacies live on with us today; Massive deficit spending and a war budget that exceeds that of all other nations combined.  Another legacy, mollifying the Democrats by increasing benefits to Americans that were economically overwhelmed by these twin hammer blows of imported cheap labor and cheap foreign goods, is also with us today.

  These two trends- both initiated and supported by our elected representatives in Washington, D.C.- have destroyed our manufacturing base. There is no such thing as a prosperous post- industrial America without deficit spending.  Free Trade advocates cry “Protectionist” whenever someone advocates creating and protecting American jobs. What these advocates don’t say is that if you are not creating and protecting jobs in America, you are creating and protecting jobs somewhere else.

  Both Canada and Germany have economies that are enduring this recession much better than ours. You, as an American, cannot go to either country and get a job without a specific invitation to come there. Your employer in that country must jump through many hoops to prove you have unique skills not available from citizens of those nations; they protect their own as a function of national policy.

  There it is; an all too brief and debatable encapsulation of the last thirty couple years. What do we do? How do we paint with an enduring broad brush that appeals to the American electorate and gives them an opportunity to not only be heard, but to seize some control over our country’s policy with an enduring institution? Do we put forward a candidate with a mandate? One man or woman to stand against a tide of institutional polling that neatly divides our people into a 50.1 % majority for one of the two parties that hold the American people hostage to the priorities of each party’s ideological base?

  When a family fails to pay its bills for decades, they are economically failing. America is simply and only a vast collection of families living on a land built by generations of families. Our democracy is not, has not, and seemingly cannot pay its bills. Democracy in America is economically failing due to the priorities of our two ruling parties’ Sisyphean struggle for control. We, the people, are the grist that they grind as our politicians seek out prolonged, successful careers. Personal greed and self-promotion rule; To the best talking heads go the spoils. The term “Big political contribution” merits a one word definition; Bribe.

   And we can stop it all, in the most populous elective branch of our Federal government, the House of Representatives, by utilizing the Constitution of the United States of America.  What an impossibly strange idea.

  There are a total of 546 people who exercise near complete control of the governing of the people of the United States. They are the president and his vice, nine supreme court justices, 100 senators and 435 congresspersons. They are all elected officials. They are all in office because they are favorites of the base of one of two parties; Democrats and Republicans. The far left and the far right are well represented. The middle, that vast group of people who form the working backbone of this nation, is not represented anywhere; We are the grist that they grind.

  Over 80% of them are very wealthy aging white men with great hair. They are not in any way an accurate demographic picture of the American people.  If we could replace 435 of them- the members of the House - with a true demographic picture of voting age Americans that vote, what would we have? A branch of our government in which half the members are women, one in ten is black, one in nine Hispanic; People of all ages whose only requirement for service is that they vote and be a citizen. We would have health care workers, mechanics, teachers, the recently unemployed, a few alcoholics, the occasional drug addict, carpenters, brick masons, backhoe operators, a few people now serving in the armed forces, and people from many other walks of life. Maybe even a professional clown.

  This demographic , with women and minorities disincluded  in the white male dominated society of the time, was our framers intent for the House.  Our Constitution was built as an amendable document designed to change with changing times to reflect the realities of an unknowable future; A living and breathing document that has been modified to put an end to injustice many times.  So it goes with the right to own a gun, the free assembly which you are now practicing, the right to vote for women, and many other national concerns. Our constitution has not been able to breathe for a very long time now. We live in a time in which our people are struggling mightily beneath the yoke of greed, manipulation, and indifferent power over all wielded by a select few. If we give that document one single breath of fresh air it will rise up and smash our oppressors into the oblivion they deserve.

   Whoops. Sorry. Got a little emotional there. Any statistician can tell you with confidence that by the time you randomly pull one voter from every congressional district in the country, the chance that you will get a group of people that resembles what we now have are about the same as the chance that President Obama is an alien from Mars. We will hit the mean, the median, and the average; We will be looking at ourselves.    

  So there it is, an amendment to our constitution that picks by lottery one voter from every congressional district for a term of limited duration, with all lottery winners-if you would call them that-serving for, say, a total of five years, with the first year served as an intern of sorts under the current representative to learn, and four years of voting up or down on legislation. We could stagger the intervals of service by having 50% of them replaced every two years, thus avoiding rampant inexperience. And bringing in new blood.

   No forced conscription; Only voters who tear a stub from their ballot and drop it into a bin will be considered for service.  How many Americans would consider supporting such an initiative? How many Americans would be willing to leave their present job for one with the pay and benefits a congressperson receives? Would such an assembly lower the minimum age of service in the House so that all voting age Americans would be eligible to serve? Would they ban all contributions to members of that body? Their families?  Would the priorities of the far right and the far left dominate such an assembly? How would such a House affect the Senate? The Court? The Presidency?

  Powerful political forces – Republocrats- would find common ground to oppose such a measure.  They will shoot the messengers, and so take down the message. They will do anything and everything to stay in power, but you already know that. Fear tactics. Dividing the opposition. Co-opting their message until the storm abates. Their resources are vast and their manipulative skills the best in the land. We cannot prevail. We must.