DDL -- Fundamental Governance Rights

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Fundamental Governance Rights

1. Dual Foundings, People First
2. DOI's Extraordinary Rights
3. Predator Elitism's Old Toolbox
4. Second Founding, People Last
5. Top-Down & Bottom-Up Governance

1. Dual Foundings, People First

The USA is a nation of dual foundings. The two foundings have their own sets of principles. The two sets of principles are about as contradictory as principles get. One set is derived from the eons-old "natural rights theory", as expressed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration Of Independence (DOI). The contradictory set are the bigoted beliefs and "values" underpinning the eons-old, unwritten "natural law" of the supremacy of wealth and power -- over everything.

The two sets of contradictory principles reflect the oldest conflict in human history: predation by the rich and powerful elites on those unable to defend themselves -- versus the rights of ordinary people to be free from elitist predation. In new-nation US history, the conflict is personified in rights advocate Thomas Jefferson and predator elitist Alexander Hamilton.

English predator elitists had been socially, economically, and politically overwhelming the traditional rights of Englishmen since the Magna Carta. Most American elite families had been in place on American soil for three to five generations. Although Hamilton's family is not among the established elite -- he was born out of wedlock on a Caribbean island -- the established elites knew from long study that written laws and notions of rights were just things to be manipulated when profits and power were at stake. The majority of American elites had every reason to continue the family tradition.

Most American colonists willingly supported the role of the colonies as economic booster to Mother England. Most of the school-book causes of the War for Independence were only irritants to some, and those were generally the elites. Having to channel trade through England was patriotic to most ordinary Americans, but it cut American elites to 2nd-class status when compared to the English elites and restricted American opportunities for profits and power. The same was true for the limitation of colonial production to raw materials only, and to economic subordination of the colonies to England through the English system of money (the Pound).

None of those considerations were of much bother to ordinary Americans. The definition of 'raw materials' was sufficiently wide to include lumber, livestock, pelts, wheat, tobacco, and other commodities. American merchants could trade those items in the West Indies, as well as in England. American tradesmen -- printers, gunsmiths, silversmiths, iron workers, wheelwrights, wagon makers, cabinet makers, carpenters, etc. -- made what the society needed. In the bizarro currency problems imposed by England, the colonial governments created work-arounds that generally satisfied ordinary Americans.

However, rights were the tipping point. The traditional rights of Englishmen were not negotiable, so far as many, perhaps most, of the American colonists were concerned.

The pro-rights signals sent by the Americans were legion, dramatic, and emphatic. And yet, the English elites continued to violate those rights. The arrogance of the unwritten supremacy of wealth and power meshed into the English greed to profit from their win in the costly, seven-year "French and Indian War", which ended in 1763.

English taxation demands, American reactions to those far-away violations of their traditional rights as Englishmen, and English suppressions of the American reactions would overwind the American mainspring in ten short years, 1765-1775.

First out of England's post-war greed gate was the Stamp Act. It was enacted 22 March 1765, and was intended to raise Ł60,000 per year. It required revenue stamps on every document, pamphlet, newspaper, pack of playing cards, dice and so on and on. One of the Stamp Act's first results was the organization in Boston of the Sons Of Liberty.

When delegates from nine colonies met in New York City as the "Stamp Act Congress", 07-25 October 1765, they protested the tyranny of taxation without representation. It was rights to the forefront from the beginning. The Stamp Act Congress delegates resolved not to import any goods that required a tax.

The "Boston Massacre", 05 March 1770, and the "Boston Tea Party", 16 December 1773, sent spasms of rights-tipped, anti-English passions through the colonies.

When delegates from twelve colonies met in Philadelphia as the "First Continental Congress", September 1774, they issued a Declaration and Resolves of ten rights statements. The Declaration was a sweeping indictment of England's rights-abusive governance of the American colonies.

1. The First Continental Congress' Declaration and Resolves are online at Yale Law's "Avalon Project" site, at http://elsinore.cis.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/resolves.htm.

Numbered in-line notes are my online adaptation of the footnotes traditionally used to document and argue further whatever the author deems necessary or helpful to the thesis.

On 23 March 1775, when Patrick Henry gave his famous speech at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia, he did not say, Give me a ship and a star to steer her by. He said "give me liberty, or give me death".

It is vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, peace, peace; but there is no peace. ... Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?
Forbid it, Almighty God -- I know not what course others may take; but as for me -- give me liberty or give me death!

2. Patrick Henry's famous St. John's Speech to the 2nd Virginia Convention, 23 March 1775, is online at the Colonial Williamsburg site, at http://www.history.org/Almanack/life/politics/giveme.cfm.

On 19 April 1775, the American mainspring snapped. English lobsterbacks marched into fights with American militia at Lexington and Concord. Overwhelming at Lexington, the English Regulars faced suddenly growing numbers of American militiamen at Concord. The militiamen had been "marching to the alarm" all day, from towns all over Massachusetts Bay Colony.

By the time the English reached Concord, they were heavily outnumbered. An English formation, off to search for American munitions at a nearby farm, was stopped in a sharp, deadly skirmish at Concord's North Bridge. Attempting an orderly retreat to the safety of English warships at Charlestown, the English Regulars were badly mauled all the way back.

The American militias did not play by the rules. The English had to march through a steady gauntlet of quick hit-and-run attacks on their flanks -- and nearly endless sniper fire. Enraged English Regulars butchered whole families caught in houses anywhere along the line of march. The English atrocities that day would not be forgotten. At day's end, American casualties were 95. But American guerrilla tactics had cost the English Regulars a formidable defeat and 292 casualties.

For some years, various groups of American colonists had been talking about constitutions that could be made and altered only by the personal consent of the people-at-large.

Thomas Jefferson's proposed constitution for Virginia, submitted June 1776, contained language making use of the county political organization for the purpose of referendums in Virginia's large geographical area.

"None of these fundamental laws and principles of government shall be repealed or altered, but by the personal consent of the people on summons to meet in their respective counties on one and the same day by an act of Legislature to be passed for every special occasion: and if in such county meetings the people of two thirds of the counties shall give their suffrage for any particular alteration or repeal referred to them by the said act, the same shall be accordingly repealed or altered ...".

3. Jefferson's June 1776 Proposed Constitution for Virginia is online at Yale Law's "Avalon Project" site, at http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/jeffcons.htm.

The county, of course, was the basic unit for the election of representatives. Those basic units would have made nation-wide referendums for citizen lawmaking as manageable as were the referendums that elected representatives. 'Elections', after all, are just a 'referendum' -- a vote by all those qualified to vote.

Every war can be broken down into political, economic, and military levels of analysis. The interplay among them, if accurate, captures and describes the causes, as well as the parts played by significant individuals and groups of individuals, more extensively than can less analytical statements.

In the multi-level analysis of the Revolution, we see the elites starting as very divergent from the ordinary people, of course, but as having a strong common cause with them. Rights, freedoms, and liberty as English subjects were a unifying force across all American social strata. Quickly, however, the majority of elites seem to realize that the pursuit of rights, freedoms, and liberty could carry them to the top of a new, large, and potentially wealthy nation. They seem to collectively realize that their independence from the English elites could make them world-class equals of English and European elites. Those heady realizations seem to resolve from fuzzy to clear in the arguments for independence, arguments with a long beginning and a short maturation.

Once independence is resolved, common cause between elites and ordinary Americans alters significantly.

From April 1775 -- and the nascent American army's Siege of Boston, Battle of Bunker Hill, invasion of Canada, and Benedict Arnold's failed assault on Quebec -- to about May of 1776, the arguments for and against independence carom back and forth across most of the colonies.

By early June 1776, the elites' course was clear. Independence from England had to be won. That meant that the elites needed an army. And that meant that baiting the contemptible and licentious commoners with implied promises of the extraordinary rights that some of them had already been clamoring for was just a smart and necessary means to the ends of wealth and power.

Jefferson's writing skills and well-known personal beliefs about rights were just what he predatory majority of elites needed. He did not disappoint. His draft of the Declaration Of Independence, written 11-28 June 1776 at Philadelphia, needed very little editing to satisfy the predatory majority of the Continental Congress.

After July 1776, ordinary Americans were caught up in the DOI's founding principles and implied promises of extraordinary rights. They were rights far beyond the traditional rights of Englishmen. The DOI re-shaped the Americans' original struggle for the traditional rights of Englishmen into a struggle for the extraordinary rights of Americans.

Clearly, all of the subsequent evidence -- from the new state constitutions through the late 1770s, to the continual squashing by elitist judges of citizen rights to instruct their legislatures, to the two national constitutions in 1782 and 1787 -- shows that there was never any intention among the majority of American elites to deliver on the DOI's implied promises. It just bought them the army that they needed in order to win.

Nonetheless, the DOI was first-rate propaganda of its day. It was read from pulpits and in town squares, road houses and military formations. It was published and re-published in newspapers, broadsides, and pamphlets. It became a constant reminder of what Americans were fighting for.
Obviously, the DOI was successful propaganda from the first. It triggered emotions that needed no further examination of evidence, no further debate. In early July 1776, when it was read on the New York Common in the presence of General George Washington, a rum and ale braced crowd marched down Broad Way to the Bowling Green and tore down a 2-ton, gold-leafed lead, equestrian statue of George III. It was cut into pieces and shipped off to be melted down into an estimated 42,000 bullets.

Jefferson's "consent of the governed" and "personal consent of the people" in their county political organizations quickly became the basis for a great national debate that would rage in and out of courts across the colonies and new states for the next decade. It was the national debate over the people instructing their legislatures.

A significant percentage of Americans believed that the DOI's "consent of the governed" confirmed that the people-at-large had the right to instruct their legislatures on what laws would be enacted and what laws would be vetoed. This was how most ordinary Americans misunderstood citizen lawmaking in Republican Rome. The elites -- who had studied Republican Rome closely in their "classical" college educations and tutored studies -- were not about to correct the misunderstanding.

American elites were also not about to allow the rabble to instruct the legislatures. Despite the off-center understanding, rabble instructing the legislatures would result in the same restriction and minimizing of profits and power as resulted from more independent citizen lawmaking. And, as the Roman plebs had evolved their citizen lawmaking from a thing for plebs only to the sovereign lawgiving for the nation, so too would American rabble want more and more power for their instructions to legislatures.

Clearly, there were many non-predator elitists who saw the DOI's implied promise of direct democracy as the vision for the American nation. Knowledgeable of Roman citizen lawmaking, they understood that the DOI's implied promise of abolishing destructive government in the future, and formulating new government in its stead, would require some sort of sovereign citizen lawmaking. They saw helping the people-at-large as their duty -- the American version of noblesse oblige. But, just as clearly, the majority of the politically active American elites were predatory seekers of profits and power and sworn enemies of citizen lawmaking.

Hamilton's predator "Federalists" would eventually kill off any "consent of the governed" and instructions to legislatures with their 1787 Constitution and its pure representative government. Federalists would redefine 'republic'. Their 'republic' would exclude citizen lawmaking. Measured against the 400 years of the Roman Republic's citizen lawmaking mixed with representative government, what the Federalists produced with the Constitution's pure representative government was nothing more than an elitist half-republic.

In the meantime, the patriots took their independence by force.

The USA's first founding was in the grinding costs and agonies, maimings, deaths, defeats, hatreds, and victories of war, mostly borne by ordinary people.

All the while, the ordinary-people patriots thought that this war-time founding was securing the DOI's principles and extraordinary rights for themselves and their posterity.

The importance of the DOI in the American Revolution was as an anti-climax from the lofty ideals of human rights to the banalities of elitist control and the moral abyss of slavery's human rights abuse. The elites were true to their class, not to their nation.

Nonetheless, political descendants of the Revolution's war veterans and supporting patriots have, in some strong sense, continued the original principled founding through over two centuries of wars and the elites' political incompetentcies. Ordinary people are never far from the DOI's founding principles and extraordinary rights. In some significant sense, we've lived and died for the Declaration Of Independence since 1776.

After the Revolution, DOI importance spiked again during the Civil War -- extending the people's first founding.

Leaders speaking for ordinary people, not leaders speaking for predator elitists, took the DOI principles into the emancipation of slaves. Lincoln used the DOI's statement of freedom, all men are created equal, to subordinate biblical pro-slavery statements to human rights and the Constitution's division of church and state. The DOI's freedom statement drove emancipation.

It was the most courageous and principled attack on entrenched predator elitism in our nation's history.

It was a huge step forward for human rights, even if it was lost for a hundred years. The white supremacy bigots lost the Civil War but won the Reconstruction. The national government, with all the law it needed to protect the rights of Americans of color, abandoned them to the KKK's torture, murder, and socio-political oppression. It was an anti-rights, anti-Constitution period of national disgrace that still sputters on in the hatemongering and death threats of the super-bigoted white supremacists.

Still, the emancipation could not be reversed. The DOI's extraordinary statement of freedom shouted past every lynching and past every violation of American rights, until guilt-ridden politicians birthed the Civil Rights Act of 1965.

Still, the national disgrace is not over. Especially in the south, governmental and corporate racism against blacks has found new forms of hostility. The hatemongering and death threats of neo-nazi and KKK white supremacists is given free rein, maximum media coverage, and too much community support. At the same time, African-American racists everywhere run "black-rage games" on any whitey who becomes a target of opportunity. In our species-juvenile reptilian lash-outs, we show how far we are from a species-mature governance and cooperation -- and how far predator politicians have driven us into divisiveness against ourselves. As long as we are divided, they win.

DOI importance spiked again during the Reform Era -- again extending the people's first founding. And here it locked its legacy of founding principles and extraordinary rights into the constitutional law of many US states.

In the decades after the Civil War, ordinary people themselves took the DOI principles into confrontation with money-power's massively corrupt and rigidly inflexible governments. The "Guilded Age", 1870s to early 1900s, was the creature of corrupt government. Its abyss between rich and poor spewed catastrophe after catastrophe.
The citizen backlash, the Reform Era, happened in two parts.

Reform Era, Part 1, circa 1877 to 1892, was the reaction to money-power's vicious racketeering in the "Crop Lien System". It happened primarily in the southern and western states. Merchants, and, later, bankers, took thousands of farms and reduced free men and whole families to de facto slavery. The citizen backlash was an amazing, mass democracy movement of about a million "populists" who were chiefly farmers and rural townspeople.

On horseback and in wagon camps, citizen leaders founded and organized the co-op economics of the National Farmers Alliance. With any help from government and the elites of the eastern financial establishment, the co-op economics of the hard-working and upright populists could easily have righted the wrongs and given dignity back to those who had been stripped of it by predatory abuses. However, government did not help and, when eastern bankers joined local merchants to crush the co-ops, the NFA was over-matched and out-gunned. Eventually, the democratic, hard-working, and heroic co-ops failed.

The NFA morphed into the People's Party and challenged the corrupt major parties in Election 1890. The People's Party lost, but their heroic efforts helped trigger the Reform Era's Part 2.

4. The leading scholar of the Reform Era's early period is Professor Lawrence Goodwyn. He has published two important books on the subject -- Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment In America, published 1976, and an abridged edition, The Populist Moment: A Short History Of The Agrarian Revolt In America, published 1978. His introduction to the 1978 edition is a must-read for direct democracy advocates. Professor Goodwyn is a democracy movement guru.

Reform Era, Part 2, circa 1898 to 1918, began in the one-two punch of the NFA's populism and the explosive birth of investigative reporting in exposés that rocked the nation. It became the urban Progressive movement.
Mark Twain's 1873 novel, The Gilded Age, was the precursor. Ida Tarbell's early success with her nation-stunning exposé, "The History Of The Standard Oil Company", set journalism's new stage and led directly to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. Ray Stannard Baker's exposés were chiefly on railroads, big business, and big labor. Lincoln Steffans' exposé, "The Shame Of The Cities", riveted readers across the country to McClure's Magazine, which also published Ray Stannard Baker and Ida Tarbell.

David Graham Phillips's 1906 exposé, "Treason Of The Senate", published by Cosmopolitan Magazine, accused Democratic and Republican parties of joining together to "advance the industrial and financial interests of the wealthy classes of the country."

Philips' detailed reporting dug too deeply into his subjects' lives for some. Defensive over Phillips' attacks on personal friends, President Theodore Roosevelt labeled Phillips and his investigative reporter collegues "muckrackers". As Roosevelt remarked at the time, it was a literary allusion to a wretched character in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, who could only look down and rake the muck.

David Graham Philips, 44, was murdered, 23 January 1911. His murderer's rationale for the killing was flimsy, awkward, and generally unbelievable.

There were many other all-star investigative reporters of the period. Samuel Hopkins Adams examined "patent medicines" and pharmaceutical companies. His exposé resulted in the Pure Food & Drugs Act of 1906. As a result of four more major articles by Adams on the drug companies in 1912, the FDA was set up in the 1920s. Burton J. Hendricks exposed life insurance speculation in the stock market. Charles E. Russell exposed the beef trust (monopoly). Thomas Lawson exposed the copper trust. Jacob Riis examined the superrich. John Spargo examined the plight of poor children. There were many others, muckraker journalists and muckraker novelists.

Roosevelt's criticism of the muckrakers slowed but did not stop muckraking. The sharply focused investigative reporting was pushed into the 1930s by Upton Sinclair. It has never really died. With its practioneers driven out of mainstream journalism by right-winger reverse-extortion of advertising dollars, it now thrives in the Internet's alt media and blogs.

Today, as Ray Stannard Baker noticed and remarked in the early 1900s, one of muckraking's chief traits is that its writers do not prescribe remedies for the evils they describe.

Happily, in the early 1900s, others acted on muckraking's destructive analysis. Muckrakers directly affected many constructive changes. For example, David Graham Philips' exposé of the Senate prompted the 17th Amendment, which shifted a Senator's election from the corrupt state legislatures to direct election by the people. It was proposed in Congress in 1912, after Philips' murder, and it was ratified in 1913.
Today, as in the early 1900s, progressives write destructive analysis without constructive analysis. Remedies are somebody else's problems. Unhappily, today's others who would make new constructs to best the evils are overmatched by a depth and width of corruption that is far beyond what the early muckrakers faced. Today's thoroughly organized and overwhelming national and global corruption probably dates only from the creation of the Machiavellian Business Round Table in 1972.

Growing out of the three great springs -- populism, muckraking, and progressivism -- the Reform Era became the greatest democracy movement in recorded history.

In the Reform Era, multi-state citizen organizations aided tens of millions of voters. Direct democracy beyond the mere election of representatives was rammed down the elitist throats of state constitutions by citizens in twenty-six states. In nineteen of those states, citizens gained both initiative and referendm petition processes.

The 'initiative' process allows citizens to propose law and then to vote it up or down in a referendum. The 'referendum' process -- its confusing name an unfortunate holdover from the beginnings of citizen lawmaking, before there was an initiatve process -- allows citizens to propose a veto of legislature-made law and then to vote the veto up or down. The two petition processes are citizen lawmaking and are commonly called "I&R".

But the predator elites came right back with their own backlash.

For over a hundred years, citizen-proposed law offensive to money-power has been selectively and arbitrarily squashed by state officials and judges with "separation of powers" violations and with "binding judicial review" violations.

State constitutions call for the legislature to make all appropriate admin laws for I&R. Unconstitutional statutes are never appropriate. They do not create law, they create anti-law regimes.

Executive and judicial branch officials are instructed by statutes to arbitrarily delay, alter, and/or reject constitutionally defined citizen-proposed law in many circumstances. All such interferences with proposed law are barred by constitutional "separation of powers" provisions. Executive and judicial branch officials may not interfere with the legislative power of proposed law, regardless of whether that legislative power is exercised by the legislature or the civil society.

Any executive or judicial branch official who attempted such an abomination on a legislature-proposed law would be impeached and removed immediately.
Imagine a Secretary of State delaying a legislature committee's vote on a bill for ten days while the Secretary of State rewrites the bill's introductory language. Imagine a Secretary of State repeatedly sending a legislature committee's bill to the Superintendent of Public Instruction to replace words that are above eighth-grade level. Imagine an Attorney General arbitrarily throwing out a legislature committee's bill because it arguably disagrees with standing state law, or because it arguably contains more than one votable subject.

Such unconstitutional abominations are routine practice against citizen-proposed law -- at the direction of unconstitutional statutes.

Constitutionally defined citizen-proposed law in any I&R state is a part of that state's republican form of government. Unconstitutional delays, alterations, and/or rejections of citizen-proposed law violate the national Constitution's promise of a republican form of government in the states -- and the state citizens' rights to their state's republican form of government. In violating this nationally-defined right, the state's public officials violate federal statutes 18 USC 241, felony conspiracy against rights, and 42 USC 1983, civil action for deprivation of rights.

There is no legislative immunity for legislators who engage in felony. Legislators who pass statutes that become part of a federal conspiracy felony against rights are constitutional criminals and felons-in-waiting. They can be criminally prosecuted in federal court, and, in separation actions for the same offense, sued in federal court under tort law.

Public officials do not have to follow unconstitutional statute instructions in any state except in California (??). All other public officials who have followed the instructions of unconstitutional statutes to delay, alter, and/or reject citizen-proposed law have violated 18 USC 241 and 42 USC 1983. They are all constitutional criminals and felons-in-waiting.

Additionally, no US constitution, state or national, defines the judicaial power as including "binding judicial review" of proposed law. The unconstitutional statutes administering citizen-proposed law instruct judges to perform binding judicial review in several citizen-proposed law situations. The legislators who have passed such felony conspiracy statutes and the judges who have performed binding judicial review on citizen-proposed law are all constitutional criminals and felons-in-waiting.

The broad climate of opinion against corruption made Reform Era voters politically sophisticated enough to know that a more viable representative government could be created by minimizing corruption. They wanted, they demanded, a viable, minimally corrupted representative government.

Reform Era citizens were politically sophisticated enough to see that it was the predator elites, deceitfully maximizing corruption, who worked against viable representative government. The people kept themselves in the game, preventing the predator elitists from crushing representative government and gaining the despotism that would give them obscenely excessive profits and power.

How did we lose that political sophistication?

There are many contributing factors, all of them engineered by money-power. Dividing the people against themselves with religion, illegal drugs, and other emotional controversies is very big. Cross-pressuring citizens out of the political processes with lies, false promises, and corruption cover-ups is another. Somewhere down the list of biggees, in a sub-set of disabled public education, is the loss of written history.

US historians have shamefully buried the Reform Era's heroes and their stories. Take any history of the early 1900s and look for stories of increasing democracy anywhere. My own litmus test is Ohio. When the corrupt and inflexible Ohio state legislature would not respond to the people's needs, the people called a constitutional convention, proposed over forty constitutional innovations, including I&R and the recall, and promptly approved the entire package. It was all done in the year, 1912. It is one of the most important democracy episodes in the greatest-ever democracy movement. Look for any mention of it in your favorite pre-WW1 history book.

Money-power rewards and perks the "Madisonian scholars" who bad-mouth or omit direct democracy. Money-power punishes those uppity scholars who examine the truths of Reform Era corruption and the citizens' answer to that corruption.

In school and in society today, ordinary people are barraged with pseudo-scholarship and pseudo-news propaganda, conditioning us to see governance only from government's point of view. It is a sophistry of cumulative lies. When all governance is seen from the massively corrupt government's point of view, corruption is explained away, not a factor, invisible.
Seeing governance from the people's point of view, however, brings corruption out of the woodwork, screaming and shouting. Seeing governance from the people's point of view is the single most important skill that true patriots will ever develop. Once developed, the skill results in many demands for governance, including that corruption be answered and resolved.

The answer to corruption is the same now as it was a hundred years ago during Reform Era I -- increase democracy.

Despite the loss of political sophistication, despite the unconstitutional wreckage of state-level I&R, and despite the horrific and steadily worsening of tyrannical governance, we have not yet lost the legacy left us by the citizens of the Reform Era. We still have the legal reality of fundamental governance rights derived from the Declaration Of Independence locked up in many state constitutions. The legal reality needs a good clean-up, but it's still there to be cleaned up.

Gaining freedom from elitist predation is an ongoing process. The next step, Reform Era II, should be right around the corner.

2. DOI's Extraordinary Rights

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 legally defend those who are threatened or overwhelmed by aggressions against themselves and/or their society.

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.

Rights have an unusual degree of retroactive legality, despite any government's attempt to legally remove particular rights from the society's legal fabric. Suppressors and violators of rights may well be held accountable for their suppressions and violations of particular rights at any future time -- no matter how "legal" the suppressions and violations.

Excepting the Vatican, which was too busy running its well-paid "rat-line" escape routes for murderous, high-ranking or super-loyal Nazis, and excepting some South American countries which were cooperating with the Vatican rat-lines, most of the world community applied this retroactive legality of rights to Nazi perpetrators of the Halocaust.

No matter how thoroughly Nazi law seemed to stamp out human rights for Jews -- after the Wannsee Conference, January 1942 -- no matter how Nazi hierarchies misrepresented to everyone their bogus freedoms to disenfranchise, imprison, and kill Jews and others, many Nazi-directed embezzlers, torturers, and murderers were later imprisoned and/or put to death for their crimes against the human rights of Jews. The coalition of victorious nations illegally protected too many of the individual murderers for bizzaro reasons, but the prosecutions went forward on principle.

Despite the bogus Nazi laws, human rights continued to exist throughout Hitler's fascist despotism. Most Halocaust participants knew it at the time, at least intuitively. Guilt behaviors are all over the Halocaust landscape.

As many Jewish parents had failed to flee the monsters who would later torture and murder their children, post-war defense of those who stayed ranged through many possibilities. Waiting for and trusting God to provide a miracle was big. Lack of financial resources was big.

Unfortunately, the analysis included the notion that Jews had no human rights under Nazism. Rights, the implication had it, can be turned on and off like a light bulb. Escape with rights turned off, the implication had it, was impossible.

It was a twisted argument meant to assuage the felt guilt of the parents and adults who stayed and whose children or younger family members were murdered. But it was a huge disservice to the future of rights understandings.

While no human rights for Jews in the Nazi state was, in one sense, horribly true after January 1942, it was a later truth that would not have prevented earlier escape.

As an argument for the post-war defense of the failure of Jewish parents to anticipate the threat to themselves and their children, it is a nonsequitur fallacy. That is, given the post-war prosecutions of Nazi-directed murderers, it simply does not follow that human rights had ceased to exist for the Jews during Nazi governance.

The meaningful assertion, but empty argument, that there were no human rights for Jews in the Nazi state (after January 1942), has lead to a widespread misunderstanding of the nature of human rights. Many people mistakenly see human rights as politically relativistic, to be turned on or off by any nation's political structure.

In fact, as the post-war prosecution of Nazi murderers shows, human rights are humanly absolute. Once identified, they have a life of their own and live for as long as there are humans to recognize those rights.

5. The human rights denied and suppressed by the Nazis were later cataloged in the UN's 1948 "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html. Since the publication of the Universal Declaration, the governments of the world have understood that suppression does not and cannot extinguish human rights. Bush-Cheney -- along with Rumsfeld, Rice, Ashcroft, Gonzales, and others -- cannot escape eventual accountability for their torture-murder system, no matter how much unconstitutional and suppressing law they throw at the attempt to escape accountability.

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, squaring those laws with the human and political rights that we know to be ours is the right thing to do.

In the US, the people's sovereignty is not open to debate. As stated or implied in all US constitutions, all political power is inherent in and flows from the people. The people are the nation and the nation's sovereign. There is no reason whatever that we the sovereign people must live with laws that suppress and violate our human and political rights.

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

The people's fundamental governance rights, as derived from the DOI, exist in many states and in hundreds of "home rule" jurisdictions. Because of our federalism, all of our fundamental governance rights from the DOI have a legal reality in our nation's governance. We have only to insert them into our national constitution and the state constitutions that do not now have them.

Our DOI fundamental governance rights are:

(1) Individual citizens have the 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.

Arguing against any of the people's fundamental governance rights is to argue that the people are not sovereign. Such argument is unconscionable and legally irresponsible in the US.

Our fundamental governance rights can only be achieved in a true republican governance of citizen lawmaking combined with representative government.

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.

The pure representative government of the national Constitution is a disconnect between our revolution for independence and present time. The Constitution -- a creature of, by, and for the elites -- represents a near-reversal of the DOI's founding principles. It was for the DOI's founding principles that our Revolutionary War patriots fought, died, suffered, and hated. And even though the Constitution intervened, it was still the DOI founding principles that Americans have lived and died for ever since -- from the War of 1812 and the emancipation of the slaves right into today.

There is no reason whatever that we the sovereign people must live with the national constitution's provisions that suppress and violate our fundamental governance rights. The nation-wrecking of the Bush-Cheney proto-despotism could not have occurred if the Constitution supported the sovereign people's DOI governance rights.

The whole rack of DOI rights were finally and legally won for us by citizens of the late 1800s and early 1900s. The win came in the greatest democracy movement in recorded history. It was phase two of our Reform Era, 1898 to 1918, during which many tens of millions of citizens in 26 states voted to increase the number of direct democracy governance components in their state constitutions. Collectively, those direct democracy components gave legal expression to the DOI rights.

Direct democracy (DD) is governance done by the sovereign people in majority-rules referendums. The elections of representatives are done in referendums. Therefore, the election of representatives is direct democracy.

Including the election of representatives, the eight DD governance components that express our DOI fundamental governance rights group 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).

This is true democracy. It is the sovereign people's petition-proposed direct democracy governance components -- including initiative, referendum, and recall (I&R-R) -- done without officers and without middlemen in any sort of citizen-managing institution, fully independent of representative government, and approved or rejected by binding referendums at every jurisdictional level within the nation.

True democracy is horizontal, non-hierarchical governance done by the sovereign people. It is best done in combination with repocracy.
'Repocracy' is a new word, meaning "vertical, hierarchical governance done by representative government". Its use will allow us to better describe the nature and reform needs of representative government. Its use will allow us to avoid the elitist sophistic claims of repocracy being a 'representative democracy', an 'indirect democracy', or a 'parliamentary democracy'. Those are all contradictions in terms. Just the rigid majorities of party-line voting in our legislatures and Congress, coercing representatives to not vote their conscience, makes repocracy undemocratic. Whatever it is that repocracy does, it is not democracy. Repocracy needs its own word.

The combination of true democracy and repocracy is true republican governance. It is a mixed form of government ruled intrinsic to the Constitution by the Supremes and many other high courts in the early 1900s.

The people's true democracy will need a still-strong, but more-regulated repocracy to help protect the people's rights for a long time to come. A properly regulated, helpmate repocracy can protect rights from encroachments that the people cannot. The helpmate repocracy can help protect the people from themselves.

When a zealous majority of the sovereign people themselves call for an action that violates individual or or minority rights, the helpmate repocracy can prohibit the action, based on the constitution's rights protection provision. The only recourse of the zealous majority would be to alter or eliminate the rights protection provision -- a step that few majorities, given the time to reflect and reason, will be willing to take.

The properly regulated repocracy will face constitutional provisions defining and providing for mandatory punishments of the feasance violations -- malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance -- against the constitution. On pain of being imprisoned and stripped of social, economic, and political power by an independent Attorney General and Department of Justice, working with a federal judiciary dependent on the people's nonpartisan election and possible recall, powerful individuals in repocracy will be more willing to prevent government itself from enacting unconstitutional statutes that violate rights for the sake of profits or power.

Anti-rights corruption coerced by the superrich and their corporate predators will suddenly have too high a cost for most individuals in repocracy.

Contrary to predator elitism's sophistries, such a properly regulated repocracy, will not chase off the best and the brightest. It will, howeever, chase off the big-ego-tiny-minders who live for the thrills of corruption. It will give the best and the brightest increased tools to help protect the people from greedy corruption. It will give the best and the brightest increased motivation to serve. It will aid us in developing the same cooperation between sovereign civil society and public-servant repocracy that exists in Switzerland. And, while never perfect, that is a cooperation with intensities and national advantages that committed American political party partisans today would find nearly unimaginable. It is a cooperation that minimizes corruption and maximizes national unity.

Ordinary Americans can represent and speak for themselves. With citizen lawmaking fully independent of government interference, the lower house of a partisan bicameral legislature is superfluous, as Nebraska has successfully shown for the 69 years since 1937. All US legislatures, including Congress, need to be reduced to nonpartisan unicamerals on the Nebraska model.

The predatory elites need partisan bicamerals to better do their anti-rights corruptions. The sovereign people have no earthly or spiritual need for partisan bicamerals. Just the "conference committee" between the two camerals is responsible for more corruption and undebated "riders" than the law should allow. The conference committee disappears in the switch to nonpartisan unicameral. One less thing.

The importance of citizen lawmaking in state and sub-state jurisdictions is more significant than most of our society knows. It is certainly more significant than what the anti-democracy elitists will admit.

Citizens in forty-nine states have the right to referendally approve or reject any constitutional amendment proposed by their legislature. (Only Delaware citizens are denied this sovereign, direct democracy power.) Thirty-four US states have one or more of the I&R-R (initiative & referendum -- recall) components. Twenty-four states are "I&R states", with at least the statute initiative and statute veto. Eighteen of those states have the CAI -- constitutional amendment initiative -- the single most powerful of the direct democracy components.

For nearly a hundred years, seven states have had all of the direct democracy components, except the statute affirmation. Since 1912, Nevada has had all eight of the direct democracy components, including the statute affirmation.

For the direct democracy powers held by citizens in any particular state, see "States DD Chart" on this site. Note that the statute referendum in Kentucky is a 'referendum-the-veto' in name only. It is incapable of vetoing legislature-made law and is nothing but an elitist joke on Kentucky's citizens.

The importance of direct democracy's citizen lawmaking extends to thousands of sub-state "home-rule" jurisdictions -- cities, counties, boroughs, school districts, water districts, etc. Most have at least statute I&R, and some add the recall. Hundreds of those "home rule" jurisdictions are in states that do not have I&R at the state level.

This is the reality that Reform Era citizens earned for the Declaration Of Independence's founding principles and extraordinary rights. Their legacy of true republican governance, locked into 24 state constitutions, is just sitting there, ready to be cleaned up at the state level and ready for us to take to the next level -- national constitutional renewal.

We are a working microcasm of Ervin Laszlo's complex systems theory. Our first organized attempt to gain citizen lawmaking, and its many societal benefits against predatory abuses of rights, has largely failed. In failing, that Reform Era "microshift" left us with the lessons and tools that can make the next organized attempt more likely to succeed.

The lessons and tools of the failed microshift are made more important by today's global need for a "macroshift".

"The gist, according to Laszlo, is that technology and globalization have unbalanced social structures, upended values and priorities, sparked resource exploitation, and 'downgraded the livability' of our planet. The result is an unsustainable situation that could trigger political conflict, financial vulnerability, and deteriorating environmental problems during the coming decade unless 'a new way of thinking' takes hold."

The quote is from Amazon.Com's review of the September 2001 book by Arthur C. Clarke, Macroshift: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable World, Forward by Ervin Laszlo. Highly recommended.

3. Predator Elitism's Old Toolbox

Predator elitism's toolbox dates from tribal times, before societies organized into nations. Elites' predatory sophistries, vacuous arguments, and Machiavellian deceits are recorded in some of history's earliest writings.

From the dawn of society-beyond-tribes to 18th Century divine-right monarchies and the US Constitution, there has been little change in the shroud of elitist deceits that keep the people down. There has been little change since then. The US "natural aristocracy" elites of the 1780s were as accomplished in the use of predator elitism's already-old toolbox as are the American homegrown fascist elites of the 21st Century.

6. In 1944, the New York Times asked then-Vice-President Henry Wallace to write a piece on American fascism. Wallace's commentary eerily echoes into today's superrich, their non-paternalistic and now-stateless corporations, their industry-wide and global associations, and their Business Roundtable. which ties together and organizes almost all industries. As a sample of Wallace's observations:

"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. ... They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective, toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection."

Henry A. Wallace, The Danger of American Fascism, New York Times, Sunday 09 April 1944. Available online on the Truthout site at http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/082103F.shtml.

Classical sophistry (which dates from the 300s BCE and is still heavily used today), logically vacuous arguments, convoluted polemics, outright lies, Machiavellian deceits (which include today's "spin"), depraved lawmaking, violations of constitutional rights for the sake of profits and power, and ensuring that superior persons are above and beyond the rule of law whenever possible -- as well as political corruption resulting from bribery, class-driven coercion, usurpation, and murder. All of those things, and more, are predator elitism's old toolbox.

7. The American class-race elite were well-trained for using Machiavellian machinations against ordinary people. Their college educations and tutoring had schooled them in both truth-driven Aristotlean logic and deceit-driven classical sophistry.
Classical sophistry mimics the persuasion model in Aristotle's classical rhetoric. It's persuasion created by the factors of logos (documentary evidence), ethos (the greatness of the speaker), and pathos (the tragic experiences of the speaker and his friends). While Aristotle's rhetoric relies on truth statements and sound arguments, both grounded in ethical intent, classical sophistry is made of deceitfully plausible falsehoods, grounded in unethical intent.

Falsehoods are the key. Find the lie and the sophistry unravels into non-persuasive gibberish.

In Federalist 6, Hamilton argues that "Commercial republics, like ours" will never waste themselves in wars on each other, because commerce causes men to be "pacific". What was Hamilton thinking? Commerce has been one of the all-time leaders from the dawn of nations in the causes of war. Built from its one-eyed Constitutional approval, the commerce of slavery was one of the leading causes in our own Civil War, just 73 years after Hamilton launched his "commercial republic equals peace" sophistry. The Civil War was a shrieking example of the failure of commerce to see its own faults. And just 45 years after Lee surrendered to Grant, with just four years to go before the beginning of WW1, a hair-brained Brit, Norman Angel, made the same sophism popular all over again. His 1910 book, The Great Illusion, proved again that commerce makes war impossible.

As long as falsehoods are stupidly unseen, sophistries have great persuasive power -- even when they are demonstrated historical failures. Be wise with speed. Notice falsehoods and dismiss the arguments that depend on them.

The anti-sophistry views of Aristotle and Cicero were well-known to American elites. Both great thinkers had branded sophists and their sophisms as liars and trickery, counter-productive to community. Still, the greedy "natural aristocrats" of the US elites chose sophistry over sound logic and right reason. Their Federalist Papers are an exercise in sophistry.

Persons with high station in life can get away with use of predator elitism's old toolbox more easily than can ordinary people.

Seen from the elites' point of view, the toolbox is necessary. The greed of predator elitists for obscenely excessive profits at the expense of ordinary people is repulsive and unacceptable to the majority of any society. The greedy are not given free access to obscenely excessive profits anywhere.

The greedy must find any way they can to take their excessive profits. Staying truthful, honest, reasonable, and legal have always been unacceptable restrictions for the vast majority of elites. Worse, the mob mentality of predator elitists in corporate and government hierarchies frequently carries their violations of truth, honesty, right-reason, and law to psychopathic extremes.

Predator elitism is just one of the alpha strains of bigotry. Predator elitists have their own peculiar combination of pseudo-superiority, hatred, ignorance, fear, and malice. The same holds, of course, for individuals infected with the other strains of alpha bigotry: white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, radical conservatism, radical liberalism, radical communism, and on and on.

Throughout history, alpha bigots are just species-juvenile individuals behaving badly.

Upper class predator elitists are generally the most dangerous alpha bigots, because they usually have the most social, economic, and political power.

Of course, non-predator elites and elitists are just part of the qualitative differences between people in any society. Non-predator elites and elitists are not of concern in the age-old conflict between ordinary people pursuing rights and predator elitists pursuing profits and power to the exclusion of anyone's rights.

We can better understand predator elitism's old toolbox by looking at what beliefs the predators have demonstrated through history. The beliefs underpinning the age-old natural law of wealth and power supremacy also underpin the toolbox' means of gaining, holding, and increasing wealth and power.

Predator elitism's age-old set of bigoted beliefs, still held by today's class-race elite, include, but are not limited to --

Individuals and groups who are genetically and biologically superior naturally gain social, economic, and political power over inferior persons.

Persons with the highest superiority are always of the male gender and descended from the wealthiest and most ancient families of the best racial group.

Loyalty to the upper class and creating excesses of wealth, power, and secrecy for themselves are the honor and goals of superior persons.

Superior persons deserve favored treatment because of their superiority.

Superior persons have the natural right to conspire together to give themselves extra wealth and privileges at the expense of inferior persons.

Superior persons have the natural right to use so-called "fundamental rights" to bait inferior persons into doing what is needed, and to restrict or revoke those "fundamental rights" whenever it is expedient. Restrictions or revocations of "fundamental rights" must be covered up, stonewalled, and whitewashed with sophistry, convoluted polemics, and emotions-triggering propaganda simultaneously with the events.

There must be a literature of deception in place for any and all topics of social, political, financial, and military importance. Superior persons must ensure that there are continually evolving sophistries, convoluted polemics, emotions-triggering propaganda, and vacuous arguments to cover up, stonewall, and whitewash betrayal of commoner principles by superior persons. In the literature of deception, emphasis must be given to those sophistries, polemics, propaganda, and vacuous arguments that (1) emphasize governance from the point of view of pure representative government, omitting any perceptions of governance from the point of view of civil society, (2) create powerful functional sovereignty for representatives, omitting any perceptions of popular sovereignty, (3) describe direct democracy as one of the great evils of mankind, and (4) maintain a judiciary supposedly independent of representative government, omitting any mention of the possibility of judicial dependence on civil society's electoral approval or civil rulings leading to exile ('recall' in modern times).

Superior persons must continually contribute writings to the literature of deception that emphasize the opportunity of any individual to acquire wealth and power. Such acquisitions cannot automatically make the individual a superior person, but that fact is to be hidden. It is the opportunity that will bait inferior persons into supporting the elitist ideology, in the hope that they themselves will someday become rich and powerful.

Groups of the most superior persons must have the society's ultimate political power, regardless of whether they are in or out of government.

There must always be a governing power elite, comprised of major corporate owners and directors, financial sector leaders, high-ranking military officers, compliant judges, prominent political leaders, and the head of state and his key advisors. The power elite must be loyal to superior persons and loyally supported by the wider elite community. The power elite must be free to set policy on civil liberties, constitutional principles, secrecy, and war or peace.

Those who do not agree that superior persons should dominate socially, economically, and politically are the enemy.

The highest quality education must be guaranteed to the children of superior persons and must be made available to youth who demonstrate a natural superiority through intellect and athletic prowess.

Inferior persons are to be kept divided against themselves, under-educated to the maximum extent possible, supplied with adequate diversions, forced to contribute to the wealth of superior persons, and routinely regimented into military formations to be sacrificed for the protection of the lives and wealth of superior persons.

Political leaders who attempt to unify inferior persons against superior persons are to be hunted down and killed by persons whose motives cannot be connected to the wider elite community.

Those are central beliefs of predator elitism as seen from the predators' point of view. They are a tangible error-set. The bigoted beliefs are not arguably justifiable, not a practical means of unifying a nation's strengths, and not a credible defense against the nation's enemies. They are, instead, flatly immoral and/or illegal, intentionally and despicably divisive so that the majority cannot focus on the predators' immoral and illegal practices, and a constant source of national fatal weakening that aids any internal or external enemy.

Predator elitism's bigoted beliefs translate into the need for all their toolbox items.

Starting with the ancient Roman elites and their obscenely sophisticated usury, over 2,500 years of highly developed predator elitism arrived in early 1600s colonial America as a locked-in, unexamined belief-set held by the bigoted Gentlemen.

For the colonial to new-nation generations of US elites, there was a natural order of things. Rabble were expected to bow and scrape, literally. The traditional rights of Englishmen were all well and good, but they had been subordinate to the increasing of wealth and power for hundreds of years. The preservation and increase of social, economic, and political power for the elites was the supreme unwritten law of all nations. All so-called rights were subordinate.
Commoners and slaves were rabble and distinctly not Gentlemen. Rabble could not do politics, law, business, or military command. Rabble were the dirty-fingernail crowd. They farmed, sometimes became tradesmen, and fought in the front lines of wars that provided the elites with more profits and power.

It was the duty of the Gentlemen to give the rabble a government that would save them from their own licentiousness.

When the Gentlemen said, "All men are created equal", they clearly meant that all Gentlemen are created equal, nothing more. Government, the Gentlemen agreed, must benefit the Gentlemen, first, last, and always.

Gentlemen could always find some way to manipulate the rights of rabble so that there would be no real and lasting conflict with the natural law of wealth and power supremacy.
Our "founding fathers" were very different in reality than how they are described by subsequent elites and their parasites. We don't have to reduce the bigoted 1780s elites to criminals. However, romanticizing them as being something greater than what they were is irrational. The majority of them were wealthy, powerful, and educated men who lived the unexamined life and bigoted beliefs of predator elitism.

The landscape of predator elitism has evolved very little over the past two-hundred-plus years. The objective has always been obscenely excessive profits and power for the select few, aided by the wider elites community. Trickle-around works, among friendly elites.

There have been bumps in the road for the predators. The Reform Era, the Great Depression, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's social-justice presidency slowed them. But those temporary trouble-spots were overcome with superior organization and massive corruption leading to the anti-law regimes of unconstitutional statutes and the making of depraved law behind the smoke and mirrors of deceits, vacuous arguments, and outright lies.

For example, the safeguards against future Great Depressions -- articulated in the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933 and, in predator fascist eyes, excessively restrictive to profits -- were repealed and replaced with the massive depravities of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Modernization Act of 1999. In place of safeguards against depression, we now have nothing. The fascist elites are now free again to cheat consumers, investors, and retirement pension funds with a wide variety of frauds made legal by the depraved provisions in Gramm. It is a nearly unlimited laissez faire, with no safeguards against Great Depressions.

As it has throughout recorded history, cheating made lawful for predator elitists quickly extends to unlawful fraud and larceny. In the first few years after the enactment of Gramm, the banking and financial services industries looted the American public of hundreds of billions of dollars in the bookkeeping frauds of communications giants and in the stock market machinations called the "Wall Street Scandals".

Most of the looting was done by sticking investment banking together with stock market analysists -- a connection made illegal by Glass-Steagal, but legal-again by Gramm. That's just one of Gramm's approximately 140 depraved provisions. Banking and financial services have just barely scratched the surface of the looting bonanza offered by Gramm. Adding to the legal cheating, the illegalities of bookkeeping fraud and stock investment fraud accounted for hundreds of billions of dollars in larceny on their own.

With Gramm opening the gates a crack, psychopathic alpha bigots of the predator elitism variety cranked up the flood of fraud, gouge, and larceny. Have they done it before? Yes. See especially the Great Depression and the 1998 trillion-dollar failure of the LTCM hedge-fund, a failure that took us to the edge of another Great Depression. Will they do it again? Yes.

Are we now legally protected from anything similar happening in the future? No.

After Enron and its hoard of look-alikes, and after the Wall Street Scandals, Bush and his proto-despotism's goosesteppers in Congress made all sorts of anguished wailings, angry noises, and bombastic promises to restore consumer confidence (as if citizens no longer exist, as if there is only government and consumers). When the promised fixes were enacted into law, abracadabra, no fixes. Just the usual, hollow, loop-hole-riddled, unenforceable, depraved law.

The despotism's controlled media parasites, of course, were already too busy with new diversions and making the despotism look good to be bothered with any old news that might offend money-power. Gotta keep those advertising dollars, social perks, and career elevation points rolling in. Nobody ever gets fired from the media for making money-power look good. Even writing some occasional criticism is OK, as long as it is instantly marginalized. But cross the line into criticism that cannot be marginalized, and its asta la vista, baby.

8. The thin coverage for Bush-Cheney's impeachment prospects under the Section 603 revelation, and the thin coverage for the DOJ move to squash the lawsuit against Bush's illegal wiretapping order because it might expose some very Nixonian "state secrets", demonstrate that mainstream media's behavior continues to conform to the insightful analysis by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy Of The Mass Media. See especially the new introduction to the book's 2002 edition. "...It is our view that, among other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. ..."

Today's landscape of US predator elitism is the class-race elite's ownership of national government, objectifying their bigoted beliefs and justifying predator elitism's old toolbox. For predator elitists, the ends always justify the means. Wallace's 1944 words have iron in them.

The willingness of the majority of predator elitists to violate any constitution or law that gives them more profits and power is why we are in this place of massive corruption today. We need to regulate and minimize the power of predatory elites, their corporations, and their business-wide organizations.

We cannot afford to continue giving the predatory elites the unlimited control that they have under the Constitution's present political dynamic. We need to renew the Constitution. Renewal requires that we understand the historical beginnings of the systemic problems that we face now.

4. Second Founding, People Last

The second new-nation "founding" was by the 1780s class-race elites. They were true to themselves, their class, and their class' progeny -- not to their nation. They did their founding straight out of predator elitism's old toolbox.

The 1780s American elites had long-since adopted the English elites' notion of an unwritten natural law of wealth and power supremacy. The older elite families had been practicing the unwritten supremacy for three to five generations on American soil. In class-race elite sentiments, the unwritten supremacy of wealth and power was and is preeminent over any written law or guarantee of rights -- Magna Carta and US Bill of Rights included.

Historically, the unwritten supremacy of wealth and power was available to any aristocracy. American elites of the 1780s called themselves a "natural aristocracy".

The gaining, holding, and increasing of social, economic, and political power transcended any written law and could be limited only by overwhelming force, legally or murderously applied. As the 1780s American elites demonstrated in Shays' Rebellion, they were capable of more legally and murderously overwhelming force than were the ordinary people. Shays' Rebellion taught all surviving participants and onlookers that there would be no sentimental cooperation, no gushy unity among Americans, when it came to profits and debt. It was "us and them" all the way. Money-power first, ordinary people last.

As it had been in ancient Rome, in the feudal systems of the dark and medieval ages, and in the bogus-divine-right monarchies and Machiavellian principalities of more modern times, so it would be in America.

As through history, the 1780s American elites assumed themselves to be the rightful rulers of everything. They were preparing for the past glories of their class, not for the democratic future of their nation -- no matter what might be inferred from the 1776 Declaration Of Independence.

Blatant dissembling and sweeping deceits had always been the keys. The elites had always said and promised whatever was necessary to make the people think that they are a needed, valued part of the picture. Even around inflexible and murderous outbursts such as Shays' Rebellion, the dissembling and deceits were slathered on the ordinary people like butter on warm toast. Keep the people in the game, even while they are butchered for profits and power. It's a skill set that predator elitists have handed down from generation to generation for thousands of years.

To the elites' surprise, American state and local governments became much more equality- and democracy-oriented after the 1781 win at Yorktown.

The elites should not have been surprised. Equality and democracy were, after all, what ordinary Americans had fought for. Nonetheless, the elites were distressed that positions of wealth and power were being won by commoners with merit and popularity among their peers. Those positions of wealth and power, the elites thought, rightfully belonged to the class-race elite.

The 1780s American elites insisted that only they, the Gentlemen, were competent to do business, politics, government, military command, and law. Commoners were not educated enough and were far too licentious to be competent. For commoners to insist on taking away any part of the elites' world of privilege was an unthinkable heresy.

From the elites' point of view, commoners taking positions of wealth and power that they were unworthy of was part of the intolerable licentiousness of commoners.

As Gordon S. Wood reports in his 1969 book, The Creation Of The American Republic, 1776-1787 -- " 'This revolution', David Ramsay told Benjamin Rush in 1783, 'has introduced so much anarchy that it will take half a century to eradicate the licentiousness of the people'."

The first step of the new-nation's second founding was the 1782 ratification of the USA's first constitution, the Articles of Confederation. They were ratified by the state legislatures, not in a referendum, not with the "consent of the governed" by direct vote. It was the first national-level violation of the DOI's implied promises.

With the Articles, the American version of an elites-favoring governance was stumbling towards its own reality. The predator majority of the Continental Congress who wrote the Articles used sophistry and Machiavellian deceits to fool the gullible people into believing that the written laws and the rule of law prevailed. However, behind closed doors and out-of-doors, the elites greedily fought over and arbitrarily ruled and counter-ruled on land speculation schemes with such ferocity and divisiveness that the ratification of the Articles was delayed for two years.

Clearly, the rule of law was a fiction from the beginning. From the beginning, the unwritten supremacy of wealth and power was the supreme law of the land. Whoever wins, wins. Money-power first, people last.

However, there was something wrong with that first step away from the deceitful promises of the Declaration Of Independence. The Articles were working for the commoners, but not for the elites. Drastic changes were needed.

The elites organized, invented the fiction of troubled times in the "Critical Period" -- the fiction of abject social, economic, and political failure of government because of the un-fixable Articles -- battled the people over their claimed rights to instruct legislatures, squabbled among themselves for wealth and power, and angled toward replacing the Articles with something that would work for the old-school elites.

9. As a fix for the Articles, the Constitution was needless over-kill. For how the Articles could have been fixed for the national good, see especially, Merrill Jensen, The Articles Of Confederation: An Interpretation Of The Social-Constitutional History Of The American Revolution, 1774-1781. University of Wisconsin Press, 1966.

The predator elitism glory that was Rome had been intensely studied by American elites of the 1750-1790 Revolutionary War generations. Now, as they discovered that the Articles were a mis-fire, there was an obvious and conscious decision made to use the Roman Empire as a model for the next step.

Roman patrician lessons for predator elitism's posterity had started with the super-vague "12 Tables" constitution, circa 451 BCE. The "12 Tables" taught future elites that arbitrary rulings, to favor the elites' expediencies over the commoners' principles, are defensible only when judges can work from a constitution's super-vague provisions. Then, the arbitrary decisions needed to advance profits and power can be defended as flexible, stable governance that, unfortunately, had to rule against ordinary people in mitigating circumstances -- read, every time -- for the sake of lawfulness and for the good of everyone.

Fortunately for the world, the Roman plebs weren't buying it. With great self-esteem brought on by warmaking prowess, and with an improbable political sophistication, the plebs dropped in a turn-key system of citizen lawmaking, circa 449 BCE. The elites of the times pejoratively called it a state within the state. Perhaps it was. But it worked to benefit the whole state, Senate and patricians included, for 400 years.

The mixed form of governance added horizontal citizen lawmaking to vertical representative government. Then and now, the mixed form is the balance of powers that every polity needs. The modern Swiss experience is proof positive, as is the modern US I&R states experience, and as was the ancient Roman experience.

The Roman patricians had no choice but to go along with the fait accompli of 449 BCE. The overwhelming power was on the side of the plebs and their equites friends. They were the already-invincible Roman army.

Despite the Patricians' continual corruption, the Republic's subsequent 400 years of citizen lawmaking was an enriching success. The sovereign civil society used citizen lawmaking to create many opportunities of good governance, which frequently overcame stunning societal adversities with little else than what Abraham Lincoln later called "the better angels of our nature". Citizen lawmaking was key in the rise of a Greco-Roman civilization so significant that it still instructs us in many ways today.

10. For the context of Lincoln's astute perception of our "better angels", see his 1st Inaugural Address, 04 March 1861. It's online at http://americancivilwar.com/documents/lincoln_inaugural_1.html.

That last gasp of sweeping reason and sound argument before war could not persuade the South's white supremacists. However, it puts Lincoln's situation on a parallel with many immensely dangerous situations that ancient Roman citizen lawmaking saved by persuading "the better angels of our nature" on both sides.

A strong case can be made to show that the Civil War would have been unlikely had the nation been equipped with the legitimizing safety-valve of sovereign citizen lawmaking from its beginnings. Our Civil War was a product of the inflexible rigidity of Southern "values", fixed by 73 years of inflexibly rigid profits and power, South and North. The rigidity of profits and power had been ordained by 73 years of the elitist government hierarchies of presidents, Congress, and the federal bench. It is certain that all of that rigidity would have been softened by our "better angels" in non-hierarchical citizen lawmaking going forward from 1789.

History shows clearly that the policies of the corrupting Roman patricians did exactly the opposite of enriching Roman society. Groping for profits and power, patricians of the Republic continually missed good governance opportunities, while corruption-targeted citizen lawmaking continually caught or created such opportunities.

After the elites had crushed the Republic and replaced it with the despotism of the Roman Empire, their political history is a morass of missed opportunities -- with no citizen lawmaking to contribute anything more. The gap between rich and poor became an ever-widening abyss. At the end, both sides slid in. Hello, Dark Ages.

Elites of the Republic and elites of the Empire -- dumb and dumber.

The end of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE left the Eastern Roman Empire intact at Constantinople. In 529 CE, scholars began the codification of Roman law at the direction of the Emperor Justinian. Finished in 534, it is the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the "Civil Law". Rediscovered in the Middle Ages, it became predator elitism's frontpiece of law.

Despite its occasional wisdom and protection of some rights, Justinian's "Civil Law" is informed by more than five hundred years of despotism. It does not mention democracy, and it does not mention fundamental human rights or fundamental political rights in governance. Predator elitists have seen to it that the elitist "Civil Law" of Rome has remained a paradigm of law and lawgiving ever since.

There are strong currents of Justinian's "Civil Law" in the American elites' system of pure representative government under the Constitution.

Out of the greed that learns no lessons from the historical failures of greed, the American elites were determined not to let the American people anywhere close to sovereign citizen lawmaking. Rights and equality restrict profits and power.

Unhappily, American commoners lacked the motivations, warmaking prowess, and political sophistication of the 449-BCE Roman plebs. There would be no American fait accompli for sovereign citizen lawmaking.

In September 1786, with the elites losing the national debate over the commoners' rights to instruct their legislatures, Alexander Hamilton sent a "report" from the failed Annapolis Convention to Congress and to all state governments, calling for a constitutional convention to revise the Articles. Greedy elite majorities in and out of all the governments had a vested interest in controlling the commoners, and Hamilton knew it.

Approval of Hamilton's plan for a constitutional convention, including the elitist selection of delegates to the convention was done. Congress approved, 21 February 1787. The states followed. Delegates were appointed by state governors and ratified by state legislatures. The DOI's "consent of the governed" was sidestepped again. Rabble, the elites asserted, cannot do politics -- especially when they might restrict profits and power for the elites.

The sordid, manipulations-loaded tale of the Constitution's writing in the summer of 1787 is captured in the several journals kept, off and on, by various delegates. The ground rules of voting in the convention heavily favored the predator majority, intent from the first days on minimizing democracy, maximizing corruption potential, and making things right for the unwritten supremacy of wealth and power. Super-vague provisions that empowered arbitrary rulings by class-driven judges were order of the day, every day.

11. For all the delegates' extant journals, see especially, Max Farrand, ed., The Records Of The Federal Convention Of 1787. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, vol 1-4, 1911.

However, many powerful, non-predator elite individuals did not share the predators' greed. Many such individuals believed that the nation's future was in the promises of the Declaration Of Independence. Many of those saw through the intentions of Hamilton and his clique.

Sixty-four delegates -- all prominent, highly credentialed leaders in their own right -- where chosen in the states as delegates. Nine refused to attend.

Fifty-five delegates attended. Of the fifty-five attendees, thirty-nine signed the finished document. Sixteen did not sign. Many left in the first days, as soon as Hamilton's intention of overthrowing the Articles was apparent.

There were forty-two delegates still seated at the convention's end, 17 September 1787. Of those forty-two, thirty-nine signed. Three refused and rejected all efforts of the others to persuade them to sign.

Those three great, pro-democracy, pro-rights political leaders, who had been among the convention's most active delegates in the debates -- Edmund Randolph and George Mason of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts -- refused to sign.

The reasons that they gave at the time, best described in James Madison's journal entries for 15 September and 17 September 1787, should be carefully studied by every school child today. Instead, the episode lays forgotten, buried under tons of pro-elitist and anti-democracy propaganda -- stacked up by over two hundred years of "Madisonian scholars" and other predator elitism parasites.

12. Madison's journal is available online at the Constitution Society's Liberty Library site at http://www.constitution.org/liberlib.htm. It also appears in many printed texts, including Max Ferrand's compilation of convention journals, cited above.

Madison, on the motion by Randolph that set the stage for the three great democrats refusing to sign the finished document -- "Mr. RANDOLPH animadverting on the indefinite and dangerous power given by the Constitution to Congress, ... made a motion importing 'that amendments to the plan might be offered by the State Conventions, which should be submitted to and finally decided on by another [a second] general Convention'.

"Col: MASON 2ded. & followed Mr. Randolph in animadversions on the dangerous power and structure of the Government, concluding that it would end either in monarchy, or a tyrannical aristocracy; which, he was in doubt, but one or other, he was sure. This Constitution had been formed without the knowledge or idea of the people. A second Convention will know more of the sense of the people, and be able to provide a system more consonant to it. It was improper to say to the people, take this or nothing. As the Constitution now stands, he could neither give it his support or vote in Virginia; and he could not sign here what he could not support there. With the expedient of another Convention as proposed, he could sign.

Despite sound arguments by all three democrats, Randolph's motion was rejected by the convention's predator elitist majority.

Madisonian scholars have boosted pure representative government to keep out the sovereign people, direct democracy, and citizen lawmaking. Mustn't let the rabble in. Mustn't spoil the plan for the right people gaining obscenely excessive profits and power.

As soon as the constitutional convention was over, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay began writing a series of propaganda letters for newspaper publication. In the first letter, written by Hamilton -- now known as Federalist 1 -- he promised that the letters would be "offered in a spirit which will not disgrace the cause of truth." It didn't bother the three propagandists one whit that their deceits were all signed with one name, "Publius".

Stacking three different individuals into one presenter's name disgraces the cause of truth. And, topic by topic, argument by argument, the Machiavellian deceits, distortions, omissions, fallacies, sophistries, and outright lies of all three authors mightily disgrace the cause of truth. They were true to their class, not to their nation.

The Federalist Papers are chock full of half-baked and easily unraveled sophistries. Those sophistries were the wall of ideas that justified the burial of the DOI's extraordinary rights, freedoms, liberties, equality, and direct democracy.

13. For a more rigorous examination of many of the deceits of the Federalist Papers, see the State Of The Republic, 1776-2004, Chapter 3, "New Nation USA", section (c), "Ratification Bible" -- on this site.

The Federalist Papers were also a public but coded "elite channel of discourse", which informed the wider elites community of how elites would control the licentious comoners. The Federalist Papers made clear that representatives and their government, unsullied by any democracy beyond their election by the rabble, would be the sovereign. By ratifying and following the plan, elites north and south would have unlimited opportunities for obscenely excessive wealth and power.

Those coded messages were not lost on the majority of money-power elites who gathered at the unconstitutional and illegal "Ratifying Conventions" to deceitfully speak for themselves, not for the people.

14. The public but coded "elite channels of discourse" were named by William Greider in his 1992 book, Who Will Tell The People: The Betrayal Of American Democracy. See Part One, "Realities of Power", section 3, "Bait and Switch". Greider applies the concept only to use in our modern times, but, in reality, elites have had public and coded communications among themselves since the advent of hand-written papyrus scrolls.

The class-race elite did not blink at violating the inviolable Articles to gain the Constitution. To them, their unconstitutional and illegal ratification of the Constitution was perfectly allowable. It was the means to the needed end -- the entrenchment of the unwritten supremacy of wealth and power over commoners' rights.

The Constitution's last article reads --

Article XII. The ratification of the conventions of nine States, shall be sufficient for the establishment of this constitution between the states ratifying the same.

15. The Constitution is online at the Constitution Society's Liberty Library at http://www.constitution.org/liberlib.htm.

The Constitution's Article XII is flatly unconstitutional. It violates the ratification process for amendment of the Articles of Confederation. It usurps the inviolable Articles. The ratification process for the Articles is given in Article XIII.

... And the Articles of this Confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the Union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every State.

16. The Articles Of Confederation are available online at the Constitution Society's Liberty Library at http://www.constitution.org/liberlib.htm

With the Federalist Papers published in book form and used as the ratification bible at every state ratifying convention, Hamilton's predator Federalists persuaded the wider elites community to go along with their plan for control of the licentious rabble. The unconstitutional ratifying conventions did their work.

After the fact of their usurpation of the Articles, the Federalist predators persuaded the Congress and the state legislatures to complete the ratification process given in the Articles. But no amount of such coverup can alter the Constitution's unconstitutional Article XII and the facts of the Constitution's unconstitutional ratification.

The core of the eons-long history of predator elitism is expediency overwhelming principles and inviolable law. From its first days, the Constitution demonstrated the American elites' willingness to violate any law for the sake of profits and power. Violation of our constitutions by the elites remains the single largest political problem in our national history.

Because of its unconstitutional and illegal ratification, the Constitution is the single largest unconstitutional anti-law regime in our national history.

Technically, the Constitution's illegality encompasses everything that has been done under its unconstitutional "color of law". Technically, it is not law at all -- it is anti-law.

Still, dealing with the Constitution, renewing it, will require sophisticated solutions to meet its authors' demands for a solemn event of change, to keep our national continuum intact, to save the Constitution's worthy core, and to maintain the hard-won human and political rights that the Constitution houses.

After over two centuries as the accepted legal fiction, the Constitution is beyond scrapping as the simple illegality that it truly is. Still, after meeting most of the requirements for a sweeping renewal, there are some parts of the DOI's fundameental governance rights that we can demand as being superior to the Constitution's illegality. "Consent of the governed" is one of those.

Future amendments to the Constitution simply must be ratified by referendums of all the people. Nothing in the illegality of elitist-favoring 1780s ratifying conventions for the Constitution elevated ratifying conventions above the sovereign people's rights of direct approval or rejection of amendments. In fact, the illegality of ratifying conventions needs to be swept out of our legal fabric as soon as possible. We need to force a stand-alone amendment that gets the job done.

There would have been no Bill of Rights if the matter had been left to the elitist authors of the Constitution in 1787. It was only in the blatant illegality of the ratifying conventions that more-determined Americans demanded a Bill of Rights as the quid pro quo for their approving the Constitution. The elites relented, of course, but they would control what went into the Bill of Rights, and the DOI's extraordinary rights need not apply.

The Constitution was ratified in 1789. The Bill of Rights was not written until 1790, and not ratified until 1791. It was shepherded through its process by predator elitists, so that it would contain only the "traditional rights of Englishmen". It contained none of the extraordinary rights from the DOI -- for which ordinary Americans had fought and won their nation's independence.

5. Top-Down & Bottom-Up Governance

We live in a nation dominated by predatory money-power and its corruption of nearly everything. However, for the sake of equality, rights, freedoms, liberties, sustainability, and the rule of law, problem solving and lawmaking purely needs to be both top-down and bottom-up.

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 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 without 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.

17. 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. Emphasis supplied.

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.

The Bush-Cheney-PNAC fascist despotism and its predator elites have drawn the circle that shuts us out. But they are not the sovereign here. They are only, temporarily, a corrupt money-power government that is controlling us unconstitutionally and illegally.
We the people are the sovereign here. We need to draw the circle that takes them in, so that we can strip them of their excessive social, economic, and political power. 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 we can use to take them in is fully independent, sovereign citizen lawmaking.

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 have a protective, top-down government. We just can't give them any arbitrary discretion that allows the greed doors to be forced open.

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 governance, non-voters are on their own. And the protection of human and political rights of a financially poor, troubled minority of ordinary people is also 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 corporate and governmental greed and corruption that is the spinelessness of all major nations and of fascist globalism.

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 still need a properly regulated, help-mate, representative government.

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 for neutralizing 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 elites.