Welcome to the Tweedle-Dee show.
Years ago, I was in an alley in the 11e Arrondissement of Paris, looking at a stenciled graffiti figure which showed a man inside a cage with a ballot box lid on top, reaching up through the bars to drop a vote into his cage. I asked a French guy from a nearby graphics shop (who for all I know, had something to do with the graffiti beyond geographic proximity) what it meant. His English and my French weren’t that good, but I had a pretty good idea what it meant. Now, I’m sure I know.
I know Obama got elected, but nothing will change. Sorry.
A lot of time, effort and money were expended electing Barack Obama as President. And without a doubt, he will make more responsible policy decisions, more responsible judicial and administrative appointments, and restore a great deal of our international prestige.
But.
We still have government by prostitution. K Street isn’t going away. The RNC is using a perverted interpretation of Free Speech to attack the soft-money ban—and stands a good chance of succeeding. Obama has already caved on the Wall Street bailout, FISA and wiretapping, and off-shore drilling. Now, I know that Obama is intelligent and decent. It is a truly historical moment, and it is a very special feeling to be here when the U.S. elected its first African-American President. But I’ll guarantee you right now that nothing significant will change during an Obama administration. It would be nice to be wrong about this, but my thinking is that if we’re really lucky, he may be able to pump up the middle class, and get something done about climate change without enabling the nuclear power abusers before we destroy the ability of the Earth to support human life. But meaningful political change will not happen. Let me put it in blunt, provocative, and metaphorical terms: you are now being treated to the Tweedle-Dee version of the Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum Show.
Bush, that walking piece of excrement who still talks like a drunk even if he is sober, and his puppet master, the arrogant, tactless and evil Richard Cheney, did a fine job of bringing us the Tweedle-Dum—or should I spell it Dumb?—part of the show. Now we’re being treated to a welcome respite in which the ascendancy of the loyal opposition (i.e., the latest episode of the Democratic Party majority) is being heralded as the harbinger of real change.
Ya think?
Did I miss the campaign finance reform? Did I miss the educational reform? Did I miss the mandatory voting law and the 100% turnout? This healthcare reform being talked about, is there any plan out there being trumpeted by the corporate sluts who pose as elected representatives which takes the insurance companies out of the equation and away from the trough? Isn’t Nancy Pelosi still incapable of giving a straight answer to a question? Isn’t Harry Reid still a cowering corporate sycophant without even the spine necessary to give Lieberman the bum’s rush?
Everything America is, is hanging by one vote in the U.S. Supreme Court. If Chief Justice John Roberts hadn’t turned out to have a bit more regard for liberty than his Republican proponents thought, all those 5-4 votes on Guantanamo would have gone the other way, and Bush would be able unilaterally to declare you an enemy combatant and have the military come in the middle of the night and take you away. Think about it.
Now that the Democrats are in charge, do you suppose there will be a momentous effort to impeach Scalia and Thomas from the Supreme Court because they voted for Bush in Bush v. Gore even though they both had family members working for the Bush campaign? Sure sounds like a high crime and misdemeanor.
Inspiring, isn’t it? I mean the effort under the new administration and the leadership being shown from the new Congress, to lay the groundwork for undoing the wiretapping and surveillance laws so repugnant to the Constitution that a sixth-grader reading the Fourth Amendment would say, hey, wait a minute.
I wrote a post a while ago in which I said that Professor Larry Sabato may be right. Professor Sabato had a series of posts on Dkos in which he set out the case for Constitutional reform and his ideas on some of the needed reforms. Well, he is right, but I’m not sure he goes far enough. I know, I know, it seems a bit alarmist in the rosy afterglow of the election victories to be talking about constitutional reform, but if we wait until President Palin sends the jack-booted thugs from Blackwater to round up the dissenters and truck them off to the Halliburton detention centers in the desert southwest, it will be too late. Bush, and his fascist assault on Constitutional liberties and limits was a preview of coming attractions. Make no mistake, Bush will get away with it, even if he has to pardon himself on the way out of office. And that sets a precedent to which the plutocratic forces in this country are paying very close attention. If we all get quiescent during the Tweedle-Dee part of the show, it may wind up being too late.
A thorough catalog and analysis of the necessary constitutional reforms is beyond the scope of this Diary. But a few of the more painfully obvious points are:
● Corporate personhood must end. Like, yesterday. Corporations are not people, they are not entitled to Free Speech and Fourth Amendment rights. The only right they get is just compensation for property taken by the government, and not for so-called regulatory takings.
● Free, meritocratic college education for every citizen who wants it. Well-educated voters are harder to dupe. They have a better chance of participating meaningfully in the debate which is supposed to inform public policy. This may be costly, but if we have $700 billion for Wall Street, and a multiple of that amount for the war in Iraq, then we can afford to invest in our citizenry—in a way that will make us that much more competitive in the increasingly technical world marketplace.
● Private ownership of the media must end. I know, this means no more American Idol, but here’s the news flash: TV sucks, and the commercials are almost as bad as a flesh-eating virus. The media is just too handy a tool for mass-brainwashing (do you think maybe something like this happened with the build-up to the Iraq war?) to leave it lying around handy for the next wave of plutocrats to try and get their hands on it. It’s like the shotgun on the wall in the first act of the Democracy Play, and you can bet it will get fired by the third act. It has to be publicly owned, and my own theory is that all content must be citizen generated, and all broadcast and cable, etc., occurs on a random lottery basis that turns all broadcast into a giant, random Youtube. And don’t give me any marketplace drivel in defense of private ownership of the media. This is same intellectually dishonest trash that has been used to justify slavery, child labor, Hoover’s economic policies, and most recently, Bush’s economic policies. If you’re really uptight about it, we can segregate adult content by channel which parents can block, but, needless to say, the government cannot be given any censorship power whatsoever. Once you educate people and stop filling them full of televised idiocy, what happens? Intelligent self-government.
● The electoral college has to be eliminated. I diverge here from Professor Sabato who thinks that it can be repaired. The electoral college is not a bulwark of federalism. It is a deliberately anti-democratic feature inserted into the U.S. Constitution at a time in history when democracy had never been attempted on this scale, and not at all since ancient Greece. The Framers were not sure that an enfranchised populace might not get out of hand, so they restricted the right to vote to landowning white males over the age of 25, had the Senate appointed rather than elected, and then, just for insurance, threw in the electoral college. But the results are in: it was not the enfranchised populace which got out of hand, it was fascistic plutocrats. These other anti-democratic institutions have been eliminated, and it is time for the electoral college to join them in the dustbin of history. Consider the very strong possibility that Obama had to parrot rightwing drivel on marriage being between a man and a woman (that would seem otherwise to be contrary to his principles), or he loses some combination of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
● We have to go back to the original U.S. Congressional Representative/Constituent ratio in the Constitution. That ratio was 1 Representative for every 30,000 people. Yes, that means we suddenly have 10,000 Representatives. There will be objections that this would be unworkable. Bull. This might have been a cogent concern early in the 19th Century, but today we have a few technical advances to help us organize large groups of people. The 2008 Democratic Convention was attended by 5,000 Delegates and 15,000 media people—and at various times, by tens of thousands of spectators. If we can set up the infrastructure for, and coordinate the activities of, 20,000 people on a one-time basis for a four-day event, we can do the same for a sitting Congress half the size. Congressional staff size averages at least 68, which means we are already coordinating the activities of 30,000 people. Congresspeople will not be beholden to wealthy campaign contributors. If the District size is 30,000 people, that means you or I, with an extra phone line and a copy machine, could effectively run for Congress.
● Don’t vote, pay a fine. This is done in other countries. Second time, bigger fine, third time, two days in jail. Congress to prescribe increased penalties. Registration is automatic the day a citizen turns 18. Polls open for 30 days before the day of the election. Only paper ballots are permitted, electronic ballots are strictly prohibited.
● This kind of Representative numerosity may engender some of the advantages of a parliamentary system, where third, fourth and fifth parties come into play, and coalitions become necessary. This may well be enhanced by requiring 100% voter turnout, and concomitantly bringing more voices to the table. But in any event, these steps or others have to be put into practice to break the chokehold of two-party politics, and the effective monopoly on power of the Democratic and Republican parties.
● Give money to a politician, go to jail. Period. It’s not my field, but we have to come up with a workable system of public campaign finance with concomitant caps on candidates’ personal expenditures. As long as we have private finance of campaigns, the opportunities for plutocratic cooptation of democracy will be present, and to certain people, irresistible. One thing which can alleviate the need for money to conduct effective campaigns is the public ownership of media. We can allocate a certain amount of TV and radio time to candidates in which to stage debates and present their positions. But commercials, and the sound-byte packaging of our politicians must end. Think of the leap forward in political discourse if politicians had to engage in thoughtful, reasoned debates, instead of cowering in fear that one spoken mishap will be broadcast ad infinitum until their public image is crushed.
● That newly democratized House of Representatives alone has the power to declare war. It alone may authorize deployment of U.S. troops beyond U.S. borders. It must reauthorize that deployment every ninety days. It alone may declare martial law, and only in cases of invasion. The President has none of these powers, and any President trying to exercise them is by operation of the Constitution immediately removed from office, and no person is guilty of a crime who uses force to remove him or her from any government property or to transport him or her to prison. The President is still commander-in-chief, but any action he takes in that capacity is subject to reversal at any time by majority vote of the House of Representatives.
● No legislation of any kind may be enacted unless it shall have first been published in both analog and digital forms for public inspection and comment for at least 30 days.
● Let’s clean up the Supreme Court. Now that we have a vastly more democratic House of Representatives, let’s have them nominate and confirm Supreme Court Justices. And let’s give them the power of impeachment by super-majority. After a 15-year term they get a government salary for life (and are prohibited from private employment or remuneration of any kind) and a position on a national political review, a free publication in which they have license to discuss political, constitutional and legal issues.
● The Fourth Amendment needs to be restated. No search means no search, digital, analog, or otherwise. There are no exceptions for national security or anything else, but there is a FISA-type court from which secret warrants can issue on a preponderance showing of probable cause, which warrants are reviewed by the court every 90 days to determine if they should be reauthorized, and which are made public after the court determines publication will not compromise any legitimate security concerns. The court’s judges to be appointed by and to report to leadership of, the House of Representatives.
● No treaty trumps U.S. laws, and no treaty may divest a U.S. court of its jurisdiction or finality. There is a NAFTA court which can theoretically overturn any U.S. court, including the U. S. Supreme Court. Is this a good thing? Maybe not. It remains to be seen whether the U.S. Supreme Court would sit still for this, but it should be spelled out in the Constitution to eliminate ambiguities.
● The public commons: the DNA code is public property, and is not susceptible of private ownership. A balance, I’m not sure what, needs to be struck between incentivizing research and that public ownership. Similarly, GMO’s are not allowed in the U.S., and no company doing business in GMO’s is permitted to do business in the U.S. Terminating seeds are prohibited. Private ownership of public water sources is prohibited.
This is obviously only a beginning. Certainly, extant protections for individual liberties have to be continued, and it is tempting to consider adding more. However, for the most part, my thinking is that Constitutional reform should concentrate on process rather than specifics, and leave much of the specifics to an enlightened electorate a good deal more democratically represented by a 1/30,000 House of Representatives. The last point on public commons arguably strays a bit into specifics, but these issues seemed to be both important enough, and enough affected with the public interest, to justify inclusion in the reform proposal.
Also conspicuously absent is a discussion of whether to go the route of convention or 2/3 votes in both Houses, not to mention the strategy of how to build public consensus sufficient to generate such change and see it through ratification. In part, I think the need for consensus is one reason to largely stick to process reforms—this way hot-button issues that could complicate ratification prospects in individual states could to at least some extent be avoided. And as for building consensus, let me suggest that this debate is the first baby step on that road.
This is a debate that needs to be had. Professor Sabato thinks constitutional reform may take a generation and longer. I'm not sure we have that much time. First, change is occurring too fast to rest comfortably in the thinking that we have 20 or 40 years to take care of the glaring and obvious defects in our democracy. Second, the plutocrats just got out of grade school with Bush, and will be looking to raise hell in junior high school. It’ll take awhile for the Republican Party to lick its wounds and come up with a new champion of the common person. However, with the media in corporate control, and the media-fostered degradation of the attention span of a largely uninformed and incompletely-educated public in their toolkit, it’s a task on which they will be able to execute. My thinking is that we have until 2016, not later than 2020 before you see the rehabilitated Republican Party on the rise with some new mediagenic closet fascist fronting a campaign of lies in service of plutocrats expecting this time to get over the top. If we don’t get this done in 10-15 years, we may very strongly wish we had.
Indeed, this is a debate which offers no downside. Even if my extrapolation from the facts is unduly pessimistic, having this debate would do several things. It gets people involved in thinking about what their government is doing, and what it should be doing, and that all by itself is a good thing. It serves notice to plutocratic forces that people are actually paying attention, and that overreaching might just provoke outcomes they don’t want. By expanding the debate around liberty, and the toolkit to which the public might resort, it moves the center of the debate toward the progressive end of the spectrum, and legitimizes tactics of public participation that prior to the debate might have seemed positively radical. Indeed, to the extent part of the charter of government is to do public good, a debate on the desirability and character of constitutional reform can expand the public awareness of how the government should be doing good works, which can serve as a tonic to the poisonous lies and filth that is free-market ideology.
I welcome your thoughts on campaign finance reform, on breaking the stranglehold of the two-party system on the levers of political power, on the contours of reclaiming the media for the public good, and on how we might incentivize beneficial genetic research in the absence of private ownership. These are the obvious ellipses in the diary: I also welcome thoughts—debate—on other process constitutional reforms, critiques of my proposals, and of my case for that reform. Your thoughts on building consensus, and in particular, on short-circuiting the efforts of corporate media and disinformation that could be expected to be brought to bear against it would be valuable. The pros and cons of bicameral passage versus convention also need to be fleshed out. Holding these ideas up to scrutiny is an important part of the incubation of any successful social impetus-building.
We are the beneficiaries of some of the best work of some of the most brilliant minds of the 18th century. But I cannot help thinking that, were they alive today, they might have been a good deal less patient with the machinations of the Bush Administration than we have been. And I respectfully suggest that we dishonor the inheritance of liberty if we sit idly by, afraid to act, while our democracy slowly falls to ruins around us.