As Congress Lay Dying

David I salute your clear thinking and service to your country. The leadership you have given to so many of us these last years has been invaluable. One of my regrets during my years of activism against the Bush Administration was not being able to stay around and meet you after seeing you speak in Chicago.

I am slowly coming to the realization that the U.S. was never intended to be a democracy subject to the will of the people, while at the same time guaranteeing certain individual liberties whose existence was not subject to the whim of people.

Your commentary on the death of Congress is spot on. If our Congress refuses to represent the will of the people, then we no longer even have the pretense of a democracy. Sadly that is where we are. This leaves us revolution, either peaceful or otherwise as the only options to change.

I believe I have submitted the following piece on "Majority Voting" before and with apologies to those who have already read it, here is my take on why our so called democracy is undemocratic.

Majority Voting
Dilemma: a situation necessitating a choice between equally unfavorable or disagreeable alternatives.
Democracy: government in which people hold the ruling power, either directly or through elected representatives.

The election structure in the American two-party political system is anti-democratic. It is so because the two parties shut everyone else out of the process. Lincoln best defined democracy as government “of the people, by the people and for the people.” A more apt description of our present government would be “of the parties, by the parties and for the parties.”

The monopoly the two parties enjoy has neither been ordained by the Constitution nor enshrined into law by the Congress. So how do they maintain their stranglehold on our government? Other democracies all across the globe require the winner of an election to garner a majority of the votes cast. Not so in the US. Our Electoral College system requires the winner to get the majority of electoral votes and designates to the states the requirements for how those electoral votes are determined. Since the winner needs the majority of electoral votes, we are fooled into thinking that we have majority elections. Not only can the winner win with a minority of the national popular vote, as both Bush and Clinton did, but the winner can win with a minority in each state. All he or she needs is more votes than the second place candidate.

Why is this undemocratic? To use Lincoln’s definition of government “of the people, by the people and for the people” certainly implies that a majority of the people support said government. Therefore at the most basic level of elections, a majority of votes should be required to win.

What is the net effect of the minority winner system we have? It has allowed two parties to exclude all others from the process. We now have government of the two parties. The two parties have no fiduciary duty to the citizens and what has developed over the years is that the two parties are solely interested in perpetuating their continued two-party rule. Of course there are exceptions with individual politicians, but they can only buck their party so much and almost all, even some of the best intentioned, end up servants of the party and not the people. The only basic difference between the present US and the USSR before it broke up, is that we have two parties that offer the illusion of choice and they had one which offered no such illusions.

Abolishing the Electoral College is only the start. It should be done because your vote does not have the same worth in each state. In Wyoming a state with a population of 522,000 and 3 electoral votes, 174,000 residents translates into one electoral vote. In California, a state with a population of 36,553,000 and 55 electoral votes, it takes 664,000 residents for each electoral vote. Thus each individual vote in Wyoming is worth 3.8 votes in California. This is undemocratic anyway you look at it and needs to be changed.

But simply changing from the Electoral College to a popular vote will not solve the problem of minority elections that we currently have. By not forcing a candidate to get a majority of the citizens’ votes, the major parties have been able to successfully stifle any challenge to their dual rule. This is where the dilemma is. Citizens are forced to compromise their most strongly held beliefs and not vote for so called third party candidates because they will waste their vote and allow the worst candidate to win. Or they vote their principles and risk allowing the candidate they most disagree with to win.

A simple illustration is the participation of Ralph Nader in the 2000 and 2004 elections.
In 2000 Nader received 2.9 million votes, 2.74% of the total cast.
In 2004 Nader received .4 million votes, .3% of the votes cast.
Why did Nader’s 2004 vote totals shrink to 1/7th of the 2000 number, especially during a time when opposition to the Iraq War (which Nader had opposed from its inception) was starting to visibly grow? The answer is obvious. Many Americans blamed Nader for costing Gore the 2000 election and they did not want to waste their vote and allow George Bush another term. They almost completely ignored the candidate whose positions many of them loved, because they didn’t want to waste their votes.

What do other countries do? They require a run off election between the top two polling candidates if no candidate gets a majority in the original election. This allows voters to show their support for the views of the so called minor candidates, while still being able to vote for the “lesser of two evils” in the run-off election.

Look at the upcoming 2008 election. There is little doubt that the majority of Americans want an expeditious end to the Iraq debacle, single payer national healthcare and were almost unanimously against bailing out Wall Street. Yet neither of the two major party candidates supported these positions and the two candidates (Nader and Cynthia McKinney) who support all these positions will receive a very small percentage of the vote. If we had majority voting, Americans would be free to support Nader and McKinney in the first go around and move over to Obama in the run-off election, without the fear that they would be giving the election to McCain. Majority voting also would allow Republicans to vote first for a libertarian or fiscal conservative. It is equal opportunity for both sides of the political spectrum.

To make majority voting easier, Instant Run-Off Voting (IRV) has been developed. Multiple elections are not needed as the voter simply votes for the candidates in his order of preference. If a candidate polls more the 50%, he is the winner. If not, the votes move up the line from the bottom candidates until we have a winner at more than 50%.

Majority elections with Run-Off Voting would make 3rd and 4th party candidates viable and force the two major party candidates to actually listen to the electorate. 100% public financing and paper ballots are also needed to clean up the election process. Without majority voting though, we are doomed to the tyranny of the American two-party system.
Nick Egnatz, Munster, IN
NW Indiana Veterans For Peace

Representatives in the National People's Congress of China are generally mocked and called "hand-raising machines" (because all they do is raising their hands to say "aye"). Looks like we have our own version of the People's Congress.

Congress is bruised, battered, disillusioned, and taken advantage of by Bushco during the last eight years. But with time left on the clock of the 110th Democratic Congress they go down for the final count and won't be getting up, until the bell finally rings and their fight is over. Bushco wins that one, proving that a bully in the ring can pounce on a weakling and win every time.

Why we must push for Impeachment, Indictment and Incarceration.

Never settle for a wimpy resolution calling on bush to allow the process to take its course, support nadler’s call if you must, but do not settle for that as the final action. These criminals in the White House must be brought to justice for the sake of our souls. We must, as a people, exorcise these demons who lead the republican and the democratic parties. Yes, I say the democrats are as bad as the republicans. They will allow these murderers to walk out on Jan 20th with no action taken against them. pelosi, reed, hoyer, harman, rockefeller, emanuel, and many more dems are corrupt and if you deny that, you are in the same boat as a republican truck driver. We must continue the work, this battle for the republic is not over with the election of Sen. Obama.

There are a few things that I know, but this is a truism for me, we must have new political parties in the US, and we must start from scratch. We need to answer a simple question, if we say that we are progressives what does that mean We need to build a platform that is really pro life, and I don’t mean the tradition meaning of that phrase; I mean Pro-Life!

The Right Wing has taken over a phrase that should belong to the progressives and used it against us with little blow back, it is time we take the phrase back, because we stand for the sanctity of life, and the survival of the planet. The Right Wing including the religions of the world stand for control, nothing more. Abortion has little to do with the sanctity of life, watching children drown in New Orleans and doing nothing has everything to do with how we as a people react when called to action. The children who have been torn apart by our bombs, machine guns, tanks, landmines, cluster bombs and torture have everything to do with belief in life, every life is worth saving. You are still needed in the streets.

I will continue my protest in front of our democratic representative because he refuses to call for Impeachment, and will end my protest on Jan 20th when bush and cheney are out of the White House. Once bush and his dick are out of power I will move to Indictment and Incarceration. I do not expect congressman blumenauer to change his mind, but his action will never dictate what I do as a proud American Vietnam Veteran.

I will fight this government to my last breath, because a fight is at hand, we are just in a place and time that demands much of us and I will try to honor Molly Ivins and Thomas Paine. (to be a pain in the ass with a sense of humor)

So, if you have the time and want to do something, come and join this little old vet, I be at 729 NE Oregon Street - Thursdays at high Noon.

Never surrender!

For Justice and Peace

joe walsh-Lone Vet
Portland, Oregon

From the Preface at the website http://www.poly-ticker.org (a site proposing "Distributed Government"):

The Constitution has been wrecked. Over the last eight years, an authoritarian-minded GOP Congress handed its power to a secretive and authoritarian GOP president. That president justified his actions by a newly-minted and blatantly royalist theory called "the unitary executive". And, aspects of that theory have been upheld in courts packed full of fundamentalist appointees. Upon returning to power, Democrats pre-emptively threw away the impeachment process.

There is no democracy left in Washington; there is only an increasingly dictatorial executive, enabled by a packed judiciary, and unchallenged by craven legislators.

The Constitution was based on implicit axioms - that all parties to government wanted it to work, that the Separation of Powers was the foundation of our liberty, that all parties would play hard but play within the rules, that the civil service would be impartial, that money would not be the sole deciding criterion for political action. These axioms are, in the famous Nixonian formulation, "inoperative"; and they are not likely to be revived without massive effort.

The Need for Distributed Government

To attempt to return to business as usual with the new administration, as if nothing has been broken, is to willfully ignore the realities of (corporate, religious, and judicial) fundamentalist infiltration and sabotage. We will only get our democracy back when we create mechanisms that defend it against these new and utterly cynical excuses and power grabs, which have been presented as principled political and economic actions.

Electing people who believe that government can be a force for good is a necessary pre-condition for a clean up to take place; but the only thing that can permanently fix our problems are changes to the Constitution which create structures and procedures that cannot be hijacked in the manner we have just experienced. Proposing such Constitutional changes is the purpose of this wiki.

Distributed Government tries to keep as much of the current Constitutional structure as possible. But, it makes changes to address the fundamental failure points of the current system: disenfranchised voters, too much Executive power, out of control intelligence agencies, corporate control of media, etc. Our government arrangements, like our business arrangements, have become too highly centralized. Too much power has been concentrated; it needs to be de-concentrated or our democracy will expire.

In closing this preface, I would simply remark that any proposal for organizing a national government that has a chance of success is going to be complicated. This proposal is no exception....

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I salute Mr. Swanson for having the courage to state this obvious (but politically incorrect) truth; and I invite you to look at the proposal at Poly-Ticker.

tickadmin@poly-ticker.org

what you really meant; "as Congress and Senate sold our civil liberties while they filled their motherfucking pockets with lobbyists cash", didn't you?

and how about this one; "as Congress obfuscated the biggest crime of the Century, that being the Sept. 11, 2001 'treason' committed by Dick Cheney, and Richard B. Myers of the J.C.S., as well as other MOSSAD AGENTS WHO'VE INFILTRATED OUR GOVERNMENT"

the "lay dying" infers it tried to protect us, like a mother would give her life to protect her young.

this congress sold us all out for it's own POCKET FILLING and ENRICHMENT, way contrary to it being a 'victim' as this poor choice of words alleges.

they were willing participants in the TREASON.