Bottom-Up and Top-Down Republic

[1006 words]

It seems that many people have lost track of the Constitutional Republic in which both the govt and the civil society makes law. We need that Constitutional Republic desperately. It is the best protector of our rights, freedoms, and liberties. It is the best utilization of our human resources in problem solving from A to Z. And most importantly, it accommodates every human personality -- some very fascist -- without letting them harm the society at large. It has a niche for every ranting anybody.

We live in a nation dominated by predatory money-power, stemming from the obscenely wealthy class-race elite and corporate fascism that goes back to the late 1800s. Money-power has corrupted just about everything. It's dangerous to us all, it's stressful and depressing, and it's boring. We can do a lot better.

To regulate money-power, we need regulated top-down lawmaking as well as fully independent, sovereign, bottom-up lawmaking. For the sake of equality, rights, freedoms, liberties, sustainability, and the rule of law, lawmaking purely needs to be both top-down and bottom-up.

If we don't get that traditional form of republic -- a legacy from ancient Republican Rome -- we are going to lose everything, permanently. Predator elitism has been proving its insanity, robustly, for the past 2500 years. It destroys whole societies without a second thought. The Swiss are the only escapees. And the hatred of the Swiss by the predator elitists is boundless and universal.

Historically, the corruptions that allow predators to grab obscenely excessive wealth and power combine to fatally weaken any society.

No one elite is responsible. Collectively, the many elites do not intend that the society be fatally wounded. However, the predatory elites are psychopathic about grabbing excessive profits and power. They have no conscience for how their decisions harm others. They are arrogantly manipulative. And they mask themselves and their vicious behavior with lies and pretentions that make them appear normal and respectable. It is purely psychopathic dissembling.

When the corruptions eventually permeate the society from many different elites, fatal wounding happens.

When a tiny fraction of the society is very rich, and a majority of the society is very poor, the poor simply give up on the society and stop propping up the greedy rich.

When the catastrophe comes -- invasion, collapse from within, natural disaster, whatever -- the breakdown completes itself. The rich who are not killed outright by vengeful poor or angry competitors are on their own. This has not changed since corruption spearheaded the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire in the 400s CE. It is the simple, uncomplicated reason why enlightened elites in many nations have kept their society's middle class strong.

Obviously, America's post-FDR, post-WW2, homegrown fascist elites have lost track of their need for a strong middle class. Profits and power have become the whole game. Our post-Nixon corporate and political predators have been killing our middle class with no understanding that they are also killing themselves and their descendants.

Short-term bottom line rules. If you're not making more profit than this month a year ago, or last quarter, then you're failing. If you're not bagging more politicians and political favors in this election cycle than you did in the last, then you're failing. If you haven't set up the fifty frauds to grab more election districts in the next elections than you did the last, then you're failing.

The historical failures of money-power greed teach no lessons to the greedy.

As Switzerland has demonstrated, the best way to keep the middle class strong and the greed minimized is to institute sovereign, fully independent, citizen lawmaking. The elites have to give up access to excessive profits and power, but they get enough. Most importantly, they get a home-base society that -- with constructive help from the elites -- is predictably safe and strong over time and against all adversaries.

As Aristotle wrote in the 300s BCE --

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.

Pure representative government -- with its one-eyed, top-down-only problem-solving -- cannot produce a species-mature society, centered in equality, rights, cooperation, and sustainability. Too many doors to greed are forced open by class-driven and wealth-driven corruptions, allowing endless species-juvenile competitions among the elites for who gets to rob amd butcher civil society for profits and power.

Once opened, money-power's greed doors can only be effectively shut by sovereign civil society and its fully independent citizen lawmaking. Without fully independent citizen lawmaking, the sovereign people are helpless against money-power and its corruption of government.

Money-power, working through the three-branch Bush-Cheney fascist despotism, has drawn the circle that shuts us out -- with apologies to Edwin Markham. But they are not the sovereign here. They are only, temporarily, a corrupt set of money-power government owners who are controlling us unconstitutionally and illegally.

Outwitted Again

by Edwin Markham

& Stephen Neitzke

They drew a circle that shut us out --

Heretical, rebellious, a thing to flout.

But Sense and we had the wit to win.

We drew a circle that took them in.

Paraphrasing Edwin Markham's poem,

"Outwitted", in anticipation of the

constitutional renewal that will

make us a whole republic.

We the people are the sovereign here. We need to draw the circle that takes in money-power and all their fascist foot-soldiers, so that we can strip them of their excessive social, economic, and political power. So that we can make them or their children into productive citizens. So that we can replace them with non-predator elites who can help us maintain our rights and liberties against over-zealous groups of citizens, corporate predators, powerful, charismatic leaders in and out of government, and arrogant, bellicose foreign national governments.

The circle that will take them in is fully independent, sovereign citizen lawmaking.

The three-branch fascist despotism will not hand it to us on a silver platter. We the sovereign people will have to pulverize the wider elites community with something like the "Unity America" action plan. See the post, "Open Letter To Susan--Making Bush-Cheney Null & Void", 13 September 2006, on this blog.

The citizen lawmaking is sure to be set into place with a Constitutional amendment that provides for the "consent of the governed" that was promised to us in the Declarartion of Independence, and denied to us in the Constitution. It is sure to provide for ratification of future Constitutional amendments with binding referendums. Approval is sure to require "double majorities" -- a majority of all those voting plus a majority of states with approving majorities of those voting. (It's the legitimacy steamroller used by the Swiss for their national lawmaking. Many proposed amendments fail to gain one or the other of the two majorities required. But the amendments that do meet both tests have an overwhelming legitimacy.)

Following the passage of this crucial citizen lawmaking amendment, we can count on a large number of proposed amendments to follow. We have many interrelated and critical political problems that need real solutions.

In the first wave are bound to be amendments that repeal a number of the Bush-Cheney depotism's most troublesome laws. Among the first, repeal of HAVA and it's privatization of our electoral system into the hack-o-matic corruptions of Diebold is very likely. That amendment might go very far into branding Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia as outlaw corporations, taking all their assets and products, and barring them from commercial operations forever.

The need to rip Diebold out of our electoral system will likely be matched in amendments to nationalize the treasonous Federal Reserve and to heavily regulate all other private corporations.

Reform of the federal bench is another. Federal bench independence from the sovereign people has resulted in a long record of federal courts causing and backing predator corruptions and butcheries -- including the unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous elevation of the Bush Usurpation in December 2000. The likely shape of the judicial amendment will be the firing of all federal judges, in preparation for nonpartisan elections in each court's jurisdiction. Federal judges will also undoubtedly be subject to recall by the citizens of their court's jurisdiction.

Large majorities are humanly conservative -- unless there is urgent reform work to be done. Thirty-five years of corporate fascism's invasion into governmental matters have left us a raft of urgently needed reforms.

The national government will take on a very different look and feel under a combined system of direct democracy and representative government.

From the people's point of view, the elites will become help-mates when they are not corrupting government, and when government is not being corrupted for them. Representative government becomes a help-mate when its primary function is the protection of the people's rights, freedoms and liberties.

Representative government protecting the sovereign people's rights is one of the main reasons for representative government's existence. The fact that American representative government has a horrendous and despicable track record of not protecting the people's rights should not mislead us.

We can minimize corruption and the effects of greed and, at the same time, have a protective, top-down government. It could happen. We have the technology. The technology is sovereign, bottom-up, citizen lawmaking.

Fact is, fully independent citizen lawmaking mixed with representative government in Switzerland has a much better track record of protecting the people's rights than does American government. This is true for a number of reasons. Primarily, it is true because the dynamic majorities that develop for issue-driven citizen lawmaking allow and encourage majorities to sympathetically come to the aid of troubled minorities.

The rigid majorities of party-line voting in ideology-driven politics -- in the state legislatures and in Congress -- are far too manipulated to help any small number of voters or, gasp, non-voters. In American politics, non-voters are on their own. So an industry or two gouges them for everything they have and finally tortures them slowly to death. Eh -- so what? The weak do not deserve to survive -- it says so right here in the corporate fascism owners manual for government.

The protection of human and political rights for a financially poor, troubled minority of ordinary people is way outside the box of money-power's concerns.

Still, properly regulated and directed, a help-mate representative government can do what the people cannot. It can give our sovereign citizen lawmaking necessary and sufficient law enforcement. And it can protect our rights from money-power, as well as from zealous, bigoted majorities who think that the politics of their ideological "values" are more important than the protection of constitutional rights. Reality-check -- "family values" are less important than the protection of the rights of individual family members.

The majority of the people cannot protect their own rights, freedoms, and liberties. At least, not yet -- not in the midst of the greed and corruption that is the spinelessness of all major nations and of corporate fascism's globalism. There is no spinelessness, no cowardice, no dishonor greater than the butchery of powerless individuals. And we have a whole world full of spineless, murderous power structures.

The meek shall inherit the earth by taming the elites and their governments and enjoying each other's company.

Perhaps we will not need a tamed representative government somewhere off in the distant future. Perhaps after, say, a hundred years of most nations successfully practicing the governance of fully independent citizen lawmaking mixed with regulated representative government, perhaps then we will be able to step off into an enlightened and pure direct democracy. But not yet. Not yet.

For now, we need a properly regulated representative government to go along with the citizen lawmaking of our whole republic.

Only ordinary people who live inside the grinding, bottom-up problems have the integrity and wisdom to resolve those problems for the common good.

Only non-predator elites who live inside the grinding, top-down problems of money-power's corruptions have the insights needed to neutralize those corruptions before they cause damage and harm.

For those and many other reasons, we need both top-down and bottom-up lawmaking. Elites and ordinary people need each other more than they generally know.

A strong, species-mature society, centered in equality, rights, cooperation, and sustainability -- of, by, and for the sovereign people and their rule of law -- is, for now, in the political marriage of commoners and non-predator elites.

(Modified Wed 04 Oct 2006, at 7:55pm CDT.)

(© by Stephen Neitzke, 2006)