Executive Summary of Direct Democracy 4.0

We the people are the sovereign here. We need the seven extraordinary rights from the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence 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.

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THE SEVEN GOVERNANCE RIGHTS

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 -- first, the Revolution and War for Independence and, then, four years later, the Constitution -- our true founding fathers are the ordinary people of the Revolution and the War. They were revolutionaries in heart and mind before the fighting started, patriot warriors and their supporters during the fighting of the War. (This distinction between the American Revolution and the War is not new. John adams drew it at the time.)

The majority of the authors of the Constitution, touted ever since in sophistry and propaganda as our glorious and hallowed "founding fathers", were the Revolution-reversing 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, will 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 (a tradition of predator elitists since the vague Roman constitution, the Twelve Tables, about 351 BCE), 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.

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.

If we can manage a peaceful revolution against the Bush-Cheney evil, we still face ripping their anti-Constitutional laws out of our legal fabric. Nothing new under the sun. In the 60s BCE, after a bloody civil war, Pompey ripped the anti-republican constitution and laws of the usurper king/dictator Sulla out of Rome's legal fabric.

In our War for Independence, the American 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.

We can derive seven fundamental governance rights from the first part of the DOI's second paragraph. Those seven fundamental governance rights are --

1. Individual citizens have the fundamental right to be politically equal with all other citizens.
   
   
2. The sovereign people have the fundamental right to speak for themselves, in their voting majorities.
   
   
3. The sovereign people have the fundamental right to be their own sovereign masters, democratically and directly electing all of their public servant representatives.
   
   
4. The sovereign people have the fundamental right to remove any elected representative, for cause, without interference from government.
   
   
5. 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.
   
   
6. The sovereign people have the fundamental right to alter details of their governance, without interference from government.
   
   
7. 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.

The balance between sovereign civil society and rep govt in a DD/rep-govt mix is in rep govt's daily access to governing power and civil society's occasional application of ultimate power. The sovereign people do not have to make every decision.

Arguing against any of the people's fundamental governance rights is to argue that the American people are not sovereign. Such argument today is legally irresponsible. All power is held by the sovereign people and delegated with restrictions to the public servants, not the other way around.

There is nothing mysterious about rights, freedoms, and liberties. They are all made of the same stuff, the same powers. They are the freedom to be, the freedom to do, and the freedom from many human and political things involved with social, economic, and political fairness and equality. They are the discoveries and results of what it takes to defend those who are threatened or overwhelmed by aggressions against themselves and/or their society by powerful and unprincipled individuals and groups.

Once a fundamental human or political right is established, it lives forever. It might be suppressed by any government at any time. However, as long as it is recognized or rediscovered by any group of human individuals, it has its own life. Rights are humanly absolute, not politically relativistic.

From the rights established by 400 years in ancient Republican Rome, every civil society is the sovereign in its nation, whether the nation's laws recognize them as such or not. All political power flows from the people. The people are the nation.

Yes, we must live under our nation's laws. However, if and when we gain the opportunity to square those laws with the human and political rights that we know to be ours, the squaring is the right thing to do. Allowing predator elitists to deny us our rights, lawfully or unlawfully, so that they have increased opportunities to butcher us for profits and power, is clearly the wrong thing to do.

In the US, the people's sovereignty is not open to debate. There is no reason whatever that we the sovereign people must live with laws that suppress and violate our human and political rights. There is no reason whatever that we must allow predatory politicians to elevate themselves above our rule of law so that they can suppress and violate our rights for profits and power.

The public servants whom we elect and appoint to our governments are not the nation. They are not public masters. They are not the sovereign of the nation. They are public servants only. The only legal powers they have are the ones that we the sovereign people delegate to them.

Now, we are at a turning point. All three branches of our national government have used their powers to become a massively illegitimate tyranny. This is not politics as usual. This is an unique proto despotism, violating our Constitution and laws to an unimaginable, 1934-Nazi-Germany-like degree. Bush-Cheney is anti-Contitutional governance.

We the people are the sovereign here. We need the functional sovereignty, the raw power, of direct democracy governance components so that we can exercise our sovereignty when necessary. Without the DD governance components, we are powerless to stop even the smallest tyranny.

The shadowy, globalized fascist tyranny of the superrich world government has been enslaving our nation for nearly a hundred years. Those who control the international central banking cabal are the true masters of that shadowy world government -- and of our domestic and foreign policy. They're represented here in the treasonous Federal Reserve and its treasonous money-pump, the IRS personal income tax on work and wages. Their private, behind-the-scenes, shadow-government work is nearly done. We're far into police state realities and on the edge of the North American Union collapsing our sovereignty, rights, freedoms, and liberty. Grow up politically or politically perish in the world government of, by, and for the superrich. See Arron Russo's 2006 film, America: Freedom to Fascism, free-per-view online at Google Video.

Stop with the do-nothing hand-wringing and clothes-clutching. Start with the citizen action groups (CAGs) and citizen action plans. Take responsibility for the political realities. Grow up or die ignorant.

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THE EIGHT DD GOVERNANCE COMPONENTS

Great strides were made during the Reform Era in the civil society's sovereignty. It was the greatest democracy movement in recorded history, with many tens of millions participating.

Reform Era citizens devised the greatest corruption-fighting package ever created, leaving that package in many state constitutions where corrupt politicians cannot meddle with it.

State government elites have made a mockery of the constitutional amendments establishing the mix of sovereign citizen lawmaking and rep govt. They've passed unconstitutional statutes to override the hard=won constitutional provisions -- giving themselves the power to delay, alter, and/or reject any citizen-proposed law (I&R petiton) that is offensive to money-power -- before the people have the opportunity to vote the issue. The parallel would be executive agencies and/or judges barring a Senate committee from sending a bill for a floor vote. (See the essay, "2nd Look--State Govt Against Citizen-Proposed Law", on my weblog, DD Revival.)

Despite the 100 years of illegal abuses, the Reform Era's corruption-fighting package is still there, messed-over but not broken, safely stored in the state constitutions of the 23 active I&R states. It needs only a statute-law cleanup and some clearly written constitutional amendments. The cleanup requires only the organization of nonpartisan citizen action groups. We have plenty of individual talent to craft the needed laws and amendments.

The cleanup will result in fully independent, sovereign citizen lawmaking. It will give we the sovereign people the power to end the elites' state-level, first line of defense against national-level corruption, as well as to minimize their national-level power-profit greed.

The Reform Era legacy can be viewed as an affirmation of eight direct democracy governance components that have correlated components in ancient Greece and Rome. The modern, Reform Era versions are the functional expressions of the DOI's seven fundamental governance rights. They sort themselves into three categories --

Administrative functions:


(1) The people's direct election of representatives, suppossedly done in open, fair, and peer-reviewed referendums called 'elections'. Most Americans have been so dumbed-down into political ignorance that they do not recognize 'elections' as simple direct democracy referendums in which all the jurisdiction's eligible voters gather without officers to vote candidates up or down. Elections are done in all states, but only for state-level officials and members of the national Congress. President, Vice President, and federal bench judges -- the top-most powerfui of our political heap -- are selected, not elected, by the class-race elite, to whom they will be forever accountable. We need to eliminate selection by the elites and directly elect all of our representatives.

(2) The people's recall of the election of a public official who has violated the public trust or simply offended too many citizens is removal of the people's political employee for cause. It is done by petition process in 18 states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin). NOTE -- this is simply a modern and more civilized version of the ancient Greco-Roman citizens' vote to exile the offending person, barring his return, usually on pain of death.

Legislative functions
(Note that all of the legislative functions
are heavily and unconstitutionally interferred
with by state govts in all 23 active I&R states):

(3) The people's constitutional amendment initiative (CAI) is the proposal process for constitutional amendments, intended to function without government interference. It is the most powerful of the DD components. Where the CAI exists in the state constitution, it automatically establishes the people as the sovereign, because they can write fundamental law directly into the state's constitution, while the public servants cannot. The CAI is so powerful that it can do the work of all the other DD components. We need the CAI, fully independent from govt interference, in every jurisdiction -- local, state, and national -- with new online citizen institutions at the state and national levels to protect it. It is currently done by petition process in 18 states (Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois -- where it is very restricted, but still powerful -- Massachusetts -- where its constitutional provisions are unconstitutional relative to earlier, more universal constitutional provisions, so that the governing elites can arbitrarily stop any proposed citizen law that is offensive to money-power; big mess -- Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, and South Dakota). NOTE -- In all of those states, the people are constitutionally the state and have constitutional political equality, regardless of how ignorant they are of, or how little they use, those powers.

(4) The people's statute law initiative is the proposal process for statute law, intended to occur without government interference. It is done by petition process in 21 states (Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming).

(5) The people's statute law referendum is the proposal process for the veto of legislature-made law. The name should be changed from referendum to remand to minimize confusion with referendum-the-vote. It is done by petition process in 24 states (Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kentucky -- where it is so restricted that it has no practical application -- Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming).

(6) The people's statute law affirmation ("referendum on existing state law") is the proposal process to bar government from amending a law that the people do not want changed. It is done by petition process only in Nevada. It was used in 1990 to stop the legislature from overturning Roe v. Wade's personal privacy rights for Nevada women. Its successful 1990 use, carrying its "see us first" provision in the constitution, forever barred the Nevada legislature from amending or repealing the state's abortion laws. The legislature can recommend and refer amendments or repeal to the people, but only the people's direct-vote referendum can approve the legislature's recommendations. In 1990, it quieted what promised to be an explosive situation if the legislature had its anti-Constitutional way.

Consultative functions:

(7) The legislature's statute law referral to the people's referendum, done in 23 states, and

(8) the legislature's constitutional amendment referral to the people's referendum, done in 49 states (excepting only Delaware).

Our Urban Progressives of the Reform Era -- circa 1898 to 1918 -- crashed into the systemic problems and corruptions of pure representative government. Unlike today's hand-wringing, do-nothing, so-called progressives, who sit on their hands and wait for the inside-the-corruption-box, inside-the-culture-of-lying, Democratic Party to save us all, the Urban Progressives worked outside the box of the failed status quo. Their remedies and solutions centered on giving the people the power to check and balance the corruption- and collusion-prone branches of government. They acted by constitutionally increasing direct democracy, so that they could gain the representative government promised in the Constitution. All they wanted was the melding of direct democracy to representative government, so that they could have a proper representative government, with corruption minimized.

In the past nine decades, predator elites in the state govts have done whatever unconstitutionalities were needed to wreck and defame all citizen lawmaking and the recall, with special emphasis on wrecking the constitutional amendment initiative. With the state govt unconstitutonalities eliminated, direct democracy components will have a very improved look and feel.

The eight DD governance components, if installed at the national level, are all the power needed by the sovereign people to limit wealth- and class-driven corruptions, to re-define the over-vague Constitution, and to hold accountable the corrupt and criminal representatives and judges. We have a 3-branch fascist despotism to end, a national economy to save with sustainability, a fascist corporatism "North American Union" to wreck, and the Yellowstone supereruption to prepare for -- a disaster that could happen from tomorrow to many years from now, and that will kill tens of millions of Americans within a few weeks if we are no more prepared for it than we are now.

In the frame of complex systems theory, the Reform Era was a microshift that partially succeeded. Our Reform Era citizens succeeded in advancing us toward the objectives of political equality and independence from tyrannical elites. However, they failed to effectively alter elitist corruptions and control.

We the sovereign people are no closer to independence from tyrannical elitist control now than we were at Caesar's death and the fall of the Roman Republic. As with the ancient Romans, we've lost our Constitution to money-power tyrants.

However, the early 20th Century Reform Era carried us one giant legal step toward the objectives. If we will take the time to organize and learn the lessons of the Reform Era's failures, we can make the next microshift fully successful. For the lessons to learn, see "DD Reading List", on the DDL site.

Modified Wed 12 Jun 2007, at 5:15am CDT.

© 2007 by Stephen Neitzke

Article 5 Constitutional Convention

Straight talk about a deep trap.

Predator elitists, in all their sundry, anti-Constitutional stripes, are decades ahead of democracy advocates in both organization and in any topic that concerns the defense and advancement of corruption. In any remedy or solution to the corruption machines, we must be careful to see our strategy and tactics from the predator elitists' point of view, as well as from our own.

Some democracy advocates are showing considerable activity recently, advocating a 2nd NCC (national constitutional convention). We need to warn them off the effort. Hamilton and his 1787 Federalist predators saw us coming.

Article 5, as it came into the Constitution, was a sop to Randolph, Mason, and Gerry -- great democrats of the 1st NCC. In the convention's final days, they were refusing to sign the Constitution because the majority of delegates would not allow the document to be debated by state legislatures and the people and then sent into a second convention to be amended as needed.

Article 5 was one of several sophistic tricks attempted by the majority of delegates to persuade the three democrats to sign on. The predators knew that ratification of their corruption-maximizing Constitution was not a sure thing. They had exceeded their instructions to merely correct errors in the "inviolable" USA constitution, the Articles of Confederation. Their exaggerated criticisms of the Articles had been transparently false for many years. They'd watched as several elected delegates refused to even show up, because of convictions that Hamilton and his predators did not represent the nation. They'd watched as several more delegates bolted from the convention as soon as intentions to scrap the Articles were clear. The bad press had been steadily increasing. The Federalist predators had cobbled together an unconstitutional ratification procedure -- a straightforward violation of the Articles -- that depended on their getting strong support from the wider elite community. And here, three pillars of that wider elite community -- men who had worked tirelessly throughout the convention -- were saying "NO".

On 17 September, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington became two of the sophists who tried mightily to swing the three democrats back into the elitists' camp. Taken against the severe, systemic problems of the Constitution -- problems that handed us the criminal Bush-Cheney Usurpation and left us powerless to end its catalog of felonies and treasons -- the Franklin and Washington speeches that day are two of the best displays of how the 1780s American elites lived the unexamined life of bigoted elitism.

Washington especially, with his remark that the "... smallness of the proportion of Representatives had been considered by many members of the Convention an insufficient security for the rights & interests of the people", strikes a level of insincerity and hypocrisy that is intolerable. Not only does he mock the very reasonable Randolph-Mason-Gerry proposal, but he mocks the patriots who fought the War for the extraordinary rights promised in the Declaration of Independence, as well as the nation's demand that the national constitution include a bill of rights. At convention's end, there was no bill of rights. The Federalist predators would not willingly limit their profits and power with the rabble's rights.

In evaluating Article 5, we should notice the fact that Edmond Randolf, George Mason, and Elbridge Gerry were not persuaded that it could bring about the deep reform that they saw as necessary. None of the three signed the Constitution.

Desperate as they were, Hamilton and his Federalists did not give away the store. Article 5 gives Congress an ace in the hole: the choice of ratifying any amendment in either the state legislatures or the special ratifying conventions. Recent generations of predator elitists have been actively working toward superrich ownership of the state legislatures. "Soft money", with no limit and no accounting, floods perqs and the reelection campaigns at the state level. Ownership of the state legislatures by the superrich is obvious. Hamilton's Article 5 is a trap.

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Yes, a 2nd NCC (national constitutional convention) can be called by the states, going around the national government. And, yes, the sovereign people are the state in those 18 states in which the people have the constitutional amendment initiative (CAI) already established in the state constitutions.

That is, in the 34 states required to call an Article 5 convention, the people hold the ultimate legal power in 18. Good start.

And, yes, state-level statute law calling the convention could be crafted so that state delegation credentials, delegate recall, and non-binding referendums in the states to instruct the delegates could probably prevent the predator elites from taking over the convention's proposal-drafting powers.

However, the state legislatures are owned by the superrich. Congress -- also owned by the superrich -- can say constitutionally that the convention's proposals will be ratified by the state legislatures, not by the special ratifying conventions that are optional in Article 5.

From there, the possibilities are endless for the convention's proposed provisions to be fast-tracked through, where they are desired by money-power, and delayed, altered, and/or rejected, where they are offensive to money-power.

Those treatments have been routinely and unconstitutionally applied to citizen-proposed law (I&R petitions) in the 23 active I&R states for over 100 years. The civil society is still roundly ignorant of state government's unconstitutionalities, felonies, and treasons with citizen-proposed law. There's simply no reason for the predator elitists to change their winning game for a constitutional convention. See especially the essay, 2nd Look--State Govt Unconstitutionalites Against Citizen-Proposed Law".

We should not trust a national Article 5 constitutional convention, no matter who calls it. In this political culture of lying, where bribery money is SCOTUS-sanctified free speech, it will be a simple matter for the superrich to find sufficient sycophants among the convention's elected delegates. With the fawning parasites of the superrich crafting the convention's proposed provisions, and the superrich-owned state legislators voting ratification of the convention's proposals, citizen rights will be further limited and opportunities for predator greed greatly expanded.

I've shifted from advocating a 2nd NCC (national constitutional convention) based on Article 5 to advocating standalone constitutional amendments campaigned individually.

We can count on our amendments being willingly done by the politicians in Congress after they've gained THE FEAR from the continually escallating, smash-mouth politics of the "Unity America" citizen action plan -- or anything similar. You can find that action plan outlined in "Open Letter To Susan" on DD Revival. Adding a nationally organized jury nullification program to fend off the corrupt state and federal judges will make "Unity America" even stronger.

The amendments should include (1) citizen lawmaking, fully independent of govt interference, with direct-vote referendum ratification dependent on a double majorities approval, (2) direct-vote, nonpartisan election of president, vice president, and attorney general, with the Department of Justice as an independent agency and all three officers subject to the people's recall, (3) all judges of the federal bench fired, pending direct-vote, nonpartisan election by all voting citizens in the individual Court's jurisdiction, with all federal judges being subject to the national electorate's recall, and (4) Congress reduced to a nonpartisan unicameral based on the still-successful 1934 Nebraska model, with three senators per state to protect small- from large-population states.

Note that approving "double majorities" are approval by a simple majority of all those voting nationally, plus a simple majority of states in which simple majorities voted for approval. This is how the Swiss give their national citizen lawmaking a legitimacy beyond question.

The only down-side to any effective citizen action plan to combat the Bush-Cheney Usurpation and fascist-corporatism-controlled political parties is getting Americans sufficiently organized to do anything. Americans have been divided against themselves and expertly driven into self-indulgent cocoons by predator elitists in and out of govt for decades. We are now a do-nothing civil society, primarily out of servility, indifference, anti-Constitutional religious dogma, and simple fear for our jobs, economic perqs, and children's education.

Do-nothing politics means giving away one's political responsibility to anybody, so that nothing more need be done. It has been a major factor in American elitist politics from the beginning.

We go right on practicing our do-nothing politics, despite our national government having been hijacked by a three-branch fascist despotism that has perpetrated a whole catalog of anti-Constitutional crimes, as well as another catalog of felony conspiracies against citizen rights, in violation of 18 USC 241. We go right on with our do-nothing politics despite the example of corruption and tyranny fighting in the Reform Era, circa 1898 to1918 -- the greatest democracy movement of history.

Activating and organizing Americans to take back our Constitution and citizen rights will require organizing innovations that have not been invented yet.

Saul Alinkski's old Industrial Areas Foundation, 1940s and on, may be our only coherent set of organizing clues. Never do anything for anyone that they can do themselves -- never. Understand the world as it is. Fix on the world as you want to have.

Or, perhaps zero preparedness for the coming Yellowstone supereruption, and the consequent deaths of tens of millions of Americans -- because the fascist despotism wants you to shop till you drop -- will do the trick. Perhaps then Americans will come out of their sub-surface cocoons to take back their constitutional republic.

If the 3-branch despotism gets the "Real ID" police state and the "North American Union" in place first, the post-Yellowstone impulse to organize might very well be too late. But, what the hell, ignorance and do-nothing politics are a lot of fun. Well -- until you and your family are broken on the wheel so that the superrich can have your money too.

Grow up or die.

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References:

For the Edmond Randolph motion to forward the first draft of the Constituton to the state legislatures, with supporting speeches by George Mason and Elbridge Gerry -- along with the follow-on attempts by other delegates to persuade Randolph, Mason, and Gerry to sign the Constitution anyway, see the James Madison Journal, 15 September 1787 and 17 September 1787, on the Constitution Society's Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics, document 91-1, "Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, James Madison".

For An annotated Article 5 of the Constitution see the Cornel Law site, "Legal Information Institute".

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Modified Wed 30 May 2007, at 10:10am.

© 2007 by Stephen Neitzke