Mike Gravel: A Declaration of Independence for 2008

Powerful. I dig old Mike Gravel. Tell it, Michael. Listen up, y'all.



QUOTE When in the course of human events, unattended grievances make it necessary for citizens to reexamine the structure of their government and bring about change.

We were once a great nation, created by immigrants from foreign lands who populated a bountiful continent.

We now witness our nation’s prestige and our domestic liberties considerably diminished.

We, who suffer the consequences of a dysfunctional system of government, seek to reaffirm our founding principles and to improve upon the structure of representative government.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. To secure these rights, Government is instituted in society, deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed.

However, if a Government controlled by special interests becomes unconcerned with the public’s wellbeing and destructive of the people’s rights, it is the duty of the people to change that government to provide security and happiness for its citizens.

The malevolent corrupting power of money on the body politic has caused repeated injuries to the public interest.

To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a suffering nation and a disillusioned world:

The Presidency and the Congress are steeped in the cult of secrecy that denies a free people knowledge of what their government is doing to them and to others in their name. Secrecy is the foremost destructive force to democracy.

The Presidency and the Congress have failed, after the oil shock of 30 years ago, to provide leadership to end our dependency on oil. Continued reliance on oil distorts our foreign policy and causes Americans to disproportionately pollute the environment.

The Presidency and the Congress have been complicit in permitting a small, rapacious, greedy minority of money managers and corporate titans to manipulate the U.S. and global financial markets for their selfish gain.

The Presidency and the Congress have redefined the criminal act of terrorism as an act of war in order to maintain the nation in a constant state of war, which in the words of James Madison is the worst of all evils in that it facilitates the control of the many by the few.

The Presidency and the Congress have obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing the right of habeas corpus to fellow human beings, regardless of national origin, and by transporting them to secret prisons in foreign countries to be tortured and held without knowledge of their crimes or their accusers.

The Presidency and the Congress have plundered our treasury to fund unnecessary and illegal wars and foreign military adventures based on lies and misinformation.

The Presidency and the Congress wage psychological war on their own citizens to induce unfounded and unreasonable fear of non existent threats in order to militarize America’s culture and make acceptable ludicrous defense expenditures––greater than all the rest of the world combined––when in fact there is no nation capable or desirous of threatening our security.

The Presidency and the Congress, in pursuit of an illogical “war on drugs,” export military weapons that violently destabilize foreign democracies. Their “war on drugs” ravages America’s inner cities, destroys the families of our most disadvantaged citizens, and puts more of its own citizens in prison than any other country in the world.

The Presidency and the Congress encourage and fund our self-appointed role as “the world’s policeman,” becoming the basis for American Imperialism and for distorting our nation’s budget priorities with excessive funding for the military-industrial complex.

In every electoral contest, Americans vote for change. Yet real change is never realized. Despite creative advances in the private sector of human society, our public sector––government––is mired in partisan stalemate, unable to respond to the complex global demands of the 21st Century.

The political structures of our current representative democracy were designed in the 18th Century and are not susceptible to change.

Therefore, We Citizens of the United States of America, in our capacity as the sovereign creators of our government and its Constitution, solemnly declare that we seek a greater role in our own self-governance, beyond that of merely voting and giving away our power to politicians on Election Day.

We choose freedom––the right to participate in the central power of government––the right to initiate and vote on laws––in partnership with those we elect to our governing legislative bodies. As sovereign human beings we have the innate right to collectively make majoritarian decisions on the policies that affect our lives.

We, the people, recognize that elected officials at all levels of American government have no incentive to share legislative power with the people.

Therefore, we pledge our efforts, for as long as it takes, to circumvent government inertia by directly voting to enact, as the law of the land, the National Initiative for Democracy. This federal ballot initiative amends the Constitution in a manner similar to the precedent set in Article VII. It creates an Electoral Trust, separate form representative government, to implement, on behalf of the people, legislative procedures established in an accompanying federal statute.

The enactment of the National Initiative essentially creates a Legislature of the People in every government jurisdiction of the United States, operating in a legislative partnership with elected federal, state and local legislative bodies.

Enacting the National Initiative in the United States––or for that matter in any country––continues the major advances in direct democracy begun by the Swiss in 1848 and improved upon when copied by 24 American states and hundreds of American local governments over the last 100 years.

The global impact of empowering people to vote directly on public policy issues that affect their lives will change forever the paradigm of human governance––a goal worthy of pledging our lives, our property and our sacred honor. UNQUOTE
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