Category: News

Pundits of all political persuasions agree that Barak Hossein Obama has been elected to the U.S. presidency at a crucial time that comes at most once in a generation.  The scope and breadth of the problems, both domestic and foreign, come perhaps once a century.  The question is whether American politics will foster or hinder what could amount to a Second American Revolution. 

President Obama can carry through his hopes for the future only if he can bring along at least a critical minority of Republicans.  The basic split among Republicans for some decades has pitted the neo-cons against the paleo-cons.  At least until recently, the neo-cons have won resoundingly. 

Ironically, both claim to be conservative, but the neo-cons want to impose their own positivist utopias on everyone else by keeping the “people” in their place.  This puts them in the camp of the liberal extremists, who want to do the same thing in order to keep the reactionary extremists in their proper place or destroy them altogether. 

Fewer and fewer Americans know their own history.  The Great American Experiment started on the basis of the Scottish Renaissance, which emphasized enlightened faith as the key to balance and good government.  This was the opposite of the European Enlightenment, which ironically but inevitably led to the French Revolution based on maximized physical power as the solution to all problems.

The Scottish Enlightenment provided the basis of the minority Whig movement in the British Parliament led by Edmund Burke, who was by far the major mentor of America’s Founders.  This movement is known as traditionalism, which holds that the only way to build a better future is to build on the wisdom of the past not on any fantasies about the future.  Unfortunately, America’s Founders rejected Burke’s admonition that revolution is the enemy of justice, not its midwife. 

The basic traditionalist paradigm started to die out at about the time of the American Civil War, when natural law was rejected in favor of positivist law, and the trend has been downhill ever since.  The Republican Party was fractured into an alliance between the reactionary No-Nothing movement and the more enlightened movement that coalesced around Abraham Lincoln.  The No-Nothings got their name from their organizational secrecy, whereby their answer to questions was supposed to be “I know nothing.” This movement started in New York in 1843 as the American Republican Party, but soon changed its name to the Native American Party, because it demonized the Roman Catholics as agents of the Vatican.  It supported what nowadays would be termed rampant fascism. 

In the election of 1860, the bulk of the movement, almost entirely middle-class Protestants, joined Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party, while the minority, who supported slavery, joined the South in the Civil War.  The “No Nothings” have never died out.  In fact they sometimes emerge triumphant by capturing the Republican Party as they did during the regime of President George W. Bush and almost did in their attempt to capture President Ronald Reagan, who abhorred everything they stood for but was too concerned about consensus to exercise strong leadership in pursuing his traditionalist instincts.

The major difference between the two wings of the Republican Party, namely, the still triumphant Neocons and the almost annihilated Traditionalists, is their approach to power.  The NeoCons blithly parrot the Republican Party’s politically correct opposition to centralized power, while doing everything they can to subvert America’s traditionalist commitment to justice.  According to this traditionalist concept, which is almost unknown in America today, justice must originate from below in a culture based on enlightened education and on personal awareness of and loving submission to God.  The Traditionalists are 100% Islamic in all their premises and conclusions, which may be why they have fared so poorly in recent decades.

Thomas Jefferson was perhaps the wisest generically Islamic political leader in American history, as shown by his statement: “No people can remain free unless they are properly educated.  Education should consist primarily in learning virtue.  And no people can remain virtuous unless their entire lives, both private and public, are infused with loving awareness of Divine Providence,” by which he meant God.

The Traditionalists in specific policy matters are quite liberal, but in philosophy they oppose the secularist and utopian socialism of dogmatic liberalism, which speaks of human rights but denies human responsibilities.  The de facto socialists, now typified by Samuel Beer, who died at the age of 97 on April 26, 2009, feared all faith-based movements, because their past history shows how easily they can be perverted to simple fascism.  His solution of secular utopianism and central governmental responsibility for the pursuit of justice, however, according to the Traditionalists, poses a much greater threat.

Samuel Beer was a giant of Anglo-American intellectualism.  Nevertheless, he was a tragic figure.  He correctly saw the evils of big business in its power to concentrate wealth and control the political process in both Great Britain and America, but unfortunately he contra-intuitively sought the solution in further concentrating the power of big government.  He opposed America’s founding principle of republicanism, which was designed to avoid the mobocracy of the majority vote.  Instead, he praised America’s “modernization” in his belief that majoritarian democracy as an ultimate value, based on power not on principle, is the only way to pursue economic and social justice. 

In his critique of the American political process, which indeed was unjust in practice, he wanted the throw the baby out with the bath-water.  He wanted to reject natural law, which comes from a source of legitimacy beyond mere human positivism, in favor of a strong populist government.  Although he opposed the NeoCons, he shared the belief of the founding NeoCons, especially Strauss, that the Weimar Republic failed because it supported pluralism rather than centralism and thereby gave free reign to both Communism and Nazism. 

In 1945-46, I was a 16-year-old Freshman at Harvard when Beer arrived to help start the move toward a more holistic approach to knowledge, so that the narrow disciplines were left for more advanced students.  In theory, this was indeed a most productive innovation.  Unfortunately, however, the paradigm he embraced was secularist and excluded the traditional writings and wisdom of all civilizations, which since the days of the first cavemen had derived their creative power from the search for ultimate values beyond the search for mere happiness on earth.  I quit Harvard in January, 1947, in protest against this crime against humanity and against the dignity of the human person created in the image of God.  The greatest regret of my life is that after a career in the U.S. Army I then went back to Harvard in 1956 to earn a J.D. at Harvard Law School, which had long advocated Beer’s ideas and carried them to the most absurd extremes.

The perhaps inevitable result of Beer’s flawed concept of using big, centralized government as the only cure for the evils of big, centralized plutocratic oligarchy was his failure to recognize that the only way to decentralize any kind of power, economic or political, is to reform the institutions of money, credit, and taxation in order to expand or broaden direct ownership of productive wealth.  Whoever owns the means of production, including necessarily its ideative infrastructure, will control political governance.  The only way to avoid political totalitarianism is to pulverize its economic base.  This strategic approach to justice has been developed at great length in many books and position papers available at http://www.cesj.org and http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us and a number of related websites.

Beer’s approach was backwards, because he wanted to increase political centralization, despite its inevitable drift toward totalitarianism, in order to address the evils of economic centralization that underpinned worship of the corporate, plutocratic state.  He wanted, in effect, to redistribute wealth after it had been created, which is theft, rather to distribute wealth during the production process by removing the barriers to broadened ownership of wealth-producing assets.

Like Keynes, Beer was a socialist in his basic thinking and wanted to apply more of the medicine that had made the polity sick.  He rightly opposed the libertarian extremes that rejected all higher values in favor of anarchic freedom, but he wrongly opposed the world’s various systems of normative jurisprudence that were classically based on the natural law that is evident in both science and enlightened religion, including the universal right to property ownership not only of one’s own labor but of productive assets as the only means to avoid wage slavery. 

One can legitimately argue that the only way to change the financial institutions that produce the abhorrent and growing economic wealth gap both within and among nations is to mount a populist democratic movement such as Senator Mike Gravel’s direct democracy, http://www.mikegravel.us/issues.  Indeed, this may well be true.  Nevertheless, reform rather than revolution may be the safest approach.  If the result of the current meltdown of capitalism does not result under President Obama in the fundamental reform of central banking both in America and throughout the world then a political revolution may become necessary, despite the danger that it would result in an even worse system of economic socialism and political totalitarianism. 

Beer’s failure in life was his de facto preference for socialism as the only alternative to capitalism.  He may not have been aware of any other way to avoid the extremism of both paradigms of thought, in which case his own ignorance would be what made him such a tragic person.

Samuel Beer deserves to be studied by future generations.  He was a major figure in destroying the best of civilization in his misguided attempt to save it.  He deserves to be praised for his dedication to a life of principle, even though his entire life was a tragedy both for himself and for humankind.

Unfortunately, the same dilemmas have paralyzed the entire Muslim world for six hundred years, which has witnessed a war between the pragmatic, de facto secularists who ruled through the tyranny of so-called “Islamic Empires” and the “No Nothing” religious extremists who would impose their own tyranny if given half a chance.

What does this mean for the presidency of Barack Obama?  Somehow, President Obama is going to have to negotiate a popular path to avoid both extremes by pursuing compassionate justice in a Second American Revolution.  Ronald Reagan shocked his reactionary Republican supporters by calling for just such a revolution, but this time based on the wisdom of Edmund Burke not on the passion of Paul Revere.

At a gathering on April 25th, Professor Hossein Nasr answered a question about the Islamic position on justice by stating, “One will know whether one is truly pursuing justice if one can do so with serenity.” So far, by this criterion President Obama seems to be uniquely qualified.

The Rose Institute, in conjunction with Claremont McKenna College Professor Ken Miller, would like to announce the recent launch of Miller-Rose Institute Initiative Database at http://initiatives.rosereport.org/. The database lists all successful citizen-driven ballot initiatives in the twenty four states where they are permitted. The database holds great promise for research in the area of direct democracy in the United States.

I had the pleasure on Monday of being on a panel with Akhil Reed Amar, the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, author of “America’s Constitution: A Biography” (Random House, 2005), and, for a few more weeks, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School. The panel was sponsored by the student chapter of the American Constitution Society, the center-left adversary of the hard-right Federalist Society.

Our topic, it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog to hear, was the National Popular Vote plan.

Professor Amar is one of the intellectual fathers of N.P.V. Way back in 2001, just a year after Bush v. Gore pushed the country off a cliff, he and his equally brainy brother, Vikram David Amar, who teaches at King Hall, the law school of the University of California at Davis, wrote a three-part article demolishing the main arguments for the electoral-college status quo and outlining most of the elements of what was to become, five years later, the N.P.V. proposal. The Amar brothers are N.P.V.’s Locke and Montesquieu.

 

Anyway, at this panel, Akhil Amar made two excellent points that deserve to be underlined.

 

1. It is often said that the Framers came up with the electoral college scheme because they wanted to set up “a republic, not a democracy.” They abhorred anything that smacked of direct democracy.

 

This is untrue. They specified that the House of Representatives, which in their view would be the single most powerful component of the constitutional design, would be elected by the people. Most of them also favored popular election of state governors. At least as important, the Framers put the ratification of the Constitution itself to a vote of the people or what amounted to a vote of the people.

 

What the Framers objected to was not democracy per se, but to democracy based on inadequate voter information. While ordinary people could adequately inform themselves about local political figures, or about a document whose text they could read for themselves, they would have no way of garnering sufficient information to judge potential Presidents from distant places. Or so (many of) the Framers thought. If this objection was ever valid, it’s obviously obsolete now, when the average citizen knows more about the personalities, biographies, and beliefs of the leading Presidential candidates than about his or her local sheriff or legislator.

 

2. Anyhow, the real reason for the electoral college wasn’t all that high-minded guff about voter information, or even some noble desire to protect small states. It was to enhance the power of slaveowners.

 

Electoral votes are alloted to states not according to the number of voters but according to population, with the disfranchised slave proportion counted at a forty per cent discount. The three-fifths rule wasn’t as good a deal for the (white) South as counting slaves as whole persons would have been, but it was a good enough deal to allow them to dominate both Congress and the Presidency for most of the pre-Civil War period.

 

We don’t have to guess that this was the overriding motivation for going with “electoral” instead of popular votes. You won’t read about it in the Federalist Papers, but you can in the private diary James Madison kept at the Constitutional Convention. The Amar brothers pinpoint some evidence. On June 1st, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, the man who contributed the phrase “We the People” to the preamble, expressed support for popular election, noting that “Experience, particularly in N. York & Massts, shewed that an election of the first magistrate by the people at large, was both a convenient & successful mode.” On July 19th, Madison summarizes a speech of his own:

 

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.

 

Now that civil war and the Voting Rights Act have allegedly “obviated this difficulty” for good, it might be time to liberate ourselves from that voters should be subjected to an elaborate process of “substitution.”

 

For links to the text of the Amars’ original articles, scroll about halfway down.

 

P.S. The day before yesterday, the Nevada Assembly became the twenty-seventh state legislative chamber to pass the National Popular Vote bill, which so far has become law in Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, and Hawaii.

In the special congressional election on April 7th, Green party candidate Matt Reichel came in third out of three, getting about 7 percent of the vote.  Reichel endorsed the National Initiative and Mike Gravel endorsed Reichel.

As voter’s trickled into the polls Tuesday to vote in the 5^th District Congressional race, Green Party candidate Matt Reichel was hoping the meager turnout would improve his chances for an upset over his heavily favored Democratic opponent.  

Reichel, a 27-year-old Northwest Side resident, is running against a frontrunner he described as part of “the Democratic machine establishment.” Although Democratic candidate and Cook County Commissioner Mike Quigley is expected to win easily, Reichel wasn’t ready to concede the race Tuesday morning.

“We really have a chance to strike hard because Quigley’s kind of in that middle ground where he’s not the machine favorite, but he’s not a progressive,” said Reichel, sitting behind a cluttered desk in his modest Lincoln Square campaign office. “What we’ve seen today is that the presence out at the polling places isn’t quite what you’d expect in Chicago. Meanwhile, we’re out there, we’ve done well in the forums and the debates … this is all helping us.”

The 5^th District has historically voted heavily in favor of the Democratic Party. In the special primary elections leading up to Tuesday’s race, Quigley received about 12,100 votes, almost three times more than Reichel and all six Republican Party candidates combined.  

But despite long odds, a few volunteers joined Reichel Tuesday morning as he set out placards in Lincoln Square, shook hands with morning commuters, and voted at the Bethany Retirement Community on Ashland Avenue. Another two dozen Reichel supporters were out canvassing the 5^th District neighborhoods as polls opened at 7 a.m.

“Matt’s a really charismatic speaker and he gets people excited about politics,” said 23-year-old Columbia College student August Grebinski, who became Reichel’s campaign manager after learning about the election on Facebook.  “It’s obviously a long shot, but like any long shot there’s always a chance he could pull it off.”

The 5^th District seat opened up when the incumbent, Democrat Rahm Emmanuel, was named President Barack Obama’s chief of staff. Former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski previously represented the district, which spans the North Side and western suburbs from O’Hare International Airport east to Lake Michigan.

While Reichel faces an uphill battle, he’s already overcome one hurdle that tripped up some 20 other candidates – securing a place on the ballot.

Reichel, a freelance French interpreter and translator, beat out four other Green Party members to claim the third ballot slot alongside Quigley and Republican candidate Rosanna Pulido, the state director of the Illinois Minutemen Project.

Chicago Election Board Chairman Langdon Neal agreed that “the real competitive election was in March for the primary.” But, despite Reichel optimism, Neal said that the “disappointingly low” turnout on Tuesday morning would likely lead to a Quigley victory.

“This is a heavily Democratic district,” Neal said, “and usually the primary winner is the easy winner in the general election.”

Not taking anything for granted, Democratic candidate Mike Quigley was out early Tuesday morning at the Ravenswood Metra station, shaking hands and urging commuters to visit the polls.

“We’re cautiously optimistic,” said Quigley, whose campaign emphasized his role as a reformer on the Cook County Board. “But we know if we don’t do our job today we could be disappointed.”

Back at his office after a long morning of greeting voters and putting up campaign signs, Reichel seemed less sanguine than he had at the start of the day.

“We could pull off a historic upset, and we hope that happens,” he said, seated beneath a wall covered with campaign signs. “But if it doesn’t happen, the real realistic goal is to beat the Republicans.”

When asked what lessons he’d take away from his first campaign for public office, Reichel exhaled as he sat forward in his folding chair. “It’s harder than it looks."

This Saturday I depart for Seoul to begin a speaking tour of universities in hopes of generating interest in the Korean National Initiative and jump starting a campaign to get it enacted by the people of S Korea. I am giving myself two months to test whether their is sufficient political will with the Korean people to empower themselves to make laws.

If their is sufficient response I will stay in Korea until an election is held. Success here will establish a new governance model to be emulated around the world including the United States.

This session the Oregon House has an opportunity to move on legislation to help put citizens back in the center of our state’s citizen initiative process.

House Bill 2895 calls for the creation of citizen panels comprised of voters from across the state, who will review measures that have qualified for the ballot and report their findings to voters statewide. The proposal is aptly named the Citizens’ Initiative Review.

The goal behind the reform is to provide Oregon voters with well-reasoned information as they make their voting decisions. It is a sensible alternative to the sound bites and overblown rhetoric that now assault voters during the election season.

As representatives of the League of Women Voters, we steadfastly believe in improving our system of government through citizen participation and reliable information. The Citizens’ Initiative Review approaches that same goal in an innovative way.

A Citizens’ Initiative Review engages a panel of 24 Oregonians in a public review of a statewide measure on the ballot. These registered voters, selected at random to represent the demographic and geographic makeup of the state, are convened over five days to hold an in-depth public deliberation on the measure under review. By participating in hearings where advocates and experts present background information, data, and the pros and cons of the initiative, the panel has the time to fully understand the issue and the diversity to consider competing points of view. It’s a rare opportunity to have a well-reasoned public discussion about these often-contentious issues.

After several days of testimony and deliberation, the panelists develop a "Citizens’ Statement" to report their findings as a new page in the Voters’ Pamphlet.

The League of Women Voters of Oregon evaluated a Citizens’ Initiative Review demonstration process on Ballot Measure 58 last fall. Our League evaluator found the process to be fair and balanced, with both sides of the measure given equal opportunity to present their cases and answer questions of the citizen panel. She observed that participants felt empowered by the process and appreciative of the chance to engage in this form of direct democracy.

We support HB 2895’s aim to expand a pilot of the Citizens’ Initiative Review process on one to three measures on the 2010 ballot and to print the citizens’ statements in the Voters’ Pamphlet. Continuing the pilot would allow for testing various ways to improve the process to make it as trustworthy, economical and logistically practical as possible. The 2010 review would be grant-funded, so the pilot would have no fiscal impact.

Establishing official, fair, and open public hearings on ballot measures, and then providing to all voters the findings of the Citizens’ Initiative Review, is one way to restore integrity to Oregon’s initiative process.

Just as Oregon was the first state to use the citizens’ initiative process, we are the first state looking at conducting a Citizens’ Initiative Review of ballot measures. The timing couldn’t be better.

Marge Easley is the President of the League of Women Voters of Oregon. Kappy Eaton is the Governance Coordinator for the League of Women Voters of Oregon.

On March 26, 2009, I felt a sense of generational pride in my government. President Obama was testing out an excitingly new means of representation by addressing public qualms and quandaries of the people via an online white house forum. That’s right, the internet. Now I’m not old enough to remember a time when the internet didn’t exist, a fact that has greatly influenced my generation. For better or worse, this is a fact that I am proud of, as it marks the end of accepted authority. In the digital age if there’s a question needing answered, you have nothing but your intelligence, hand-eye coordination, and a library card to stop you from finding entire communities faster than you can think them up.

So when I read that the man I voted for president would be utilizing the very implement that incalculably aids me and my many like-minded peers on a daily basis, there was a sensation of vindication.

Finally, a president who doesn’t need to have explained what "a google" is, maybe this will herald a renewed age of direct democracy. Upon visiting the forum, I was genuinely shocked to notice that 4 out of the 10 major issues (e.g The Budget, Financial Stability, Jobs) were dominated by pro marijuana legalization questions. Not only were the most popular questions by far pertaining to the ‘cannabis question’, but also the subsequent second, third and sometimes fourth most voted on questions in each category were also marijuana related. Surely this is not what the Obama administration had in mind when they polled the American people. But over 3 million votes were cast in either favor or opposition to these questions, with the general opinion seemed inextricably tied to this central point.

The President however limited his statements on legalization to:

"… whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation. I don’t know what this says about the online audience…The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy."

As a proud American, and responsible cannabis user, I take personal offense to this remark. It seems that our leader is proposing that the online community is populated by potheads, rather than concerned Americans. Do you mean to say we are too lazy or stoned to stand up and be counted at the tradition town hall meetings, or is it that we are too scared? It is, under current federal law, still against the law.

I’m not a criminal, and I’d like to keep it that way. I’m also a proud cannabis user, who like many of you would not admit to that on a government survey. So where can we meet, organize and lobby our interests without fear of retributions? Since 1965 20 million people have been arrested for the nonviolent offense of possession, so excuse me Mr. President if it’s a good way to save money. The point is this industry is in place, and not going anywhere. I agree you can’t think to fix the long coming financial problems facing America by simply legalizing it. Sure, an infusion of cash would replace the hemorrhage of money that is the Drug War.

Alcohol prohibition was always toted as the nation’s "great experiment", so why when presented with the freedom of personal choice, it seen as an outrageous debate not worth even discussing? I know you don’t want kids telling their parents the president said it’s ok to do drugs, but you did promise to always listen to the people, and tell us what was on your mind. I always thought President Obama was different not because he admitted to trying marijuana, but the alacrity with which he placed it in perspective. It didn’t ruin his life, damage his brain, or destroy his future. Well you know what, for some 20 million other Americans, it did, who knows how many of them wanted to become president.