What will it take for Americans to truly fix their government, and how bad will it have to get to motivate them?

Satori Level 3 Commenter 4 years ago

Thanks for responding to my Request. =)

Whoever the candidates du jour happen to be, none of them will fix our government. Let me define what that means clearly:

It does mean lowering taxes, so Americans aren't spending one third of what they make to subsidize federal treasons like warrantless wiretapping, and unconscionable acts like human torture (whatever it may be termed by those who practice it).

It means actually yanking corporate charters once again when large corporations, who are only allowed to exist if they contribute to the public good in their quest for profits, begin to actually undermine our society with things like monopolistic practices, monotonous megaphone media messages against the public morals, highly-bottlenecked news sources that smile at political treason (still a hanging offense, mind), and exploitative business practices (not just in the workplace, but in the marketplace as well).

It especially means returning accountability to the statesmen whose job it is to represent us, and impeaching where appropriate, hanging for treason where necessary anyone who subverts their own country or knowingly exceeds their lawful authority.

It definitely means stringing up attorneys for defrauding the citizenry with what the law calls "words of art", obscuring the law, acting outside of it with an at-law status, and in their careful doubletalk becoming a knowing party to obreption and political treason by wallpapering over concern for the law with deceptive overemphasis on "legality" - "legal" being different in that it has the form and appearance of law without necessarily having the same substance and authority as law does.

It means getting the government out of peoples' private lives and back to negotiating treaties, keeping a lawful money supply, managing interstate disputes and settling matters of interstate commerce, and nothing but.

It means correcting the deliberately-concocted fallacies that the federal government has jurisdiction outside of Washington D.C., and that it has any authority to legislate any private citizen's activities, including gun ownership.

It means not training soldiers overseas for "urban combat" to be overpowered police officers right when the country's political and economic systems are about to collapse and the citizenry will need "subduing" here at home.

It especially means correcting this problem:

http://www.gemworld.com/USAvsUS.htm

which you'll never hear about in the bottlenecked media.

It means recreating a system in which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are again possible - without federal licensing and permissions granted to the citizens to which it is accountable: that is the basis of liberty, that a government should live in fear of its citizens and not the reverse.

It also means not magnifying partisan politicians as though they weren't two sides of the same coin, and becoming party to obreption by selling two middling forms of treason with very little difference with them as though they were swashbuckling, avant garde political activists or masked avengers.

It means that freedom of speech, even in a political arena, is guaranteed, but that any citizen may lawfully sue for slander or libel for slurring, obfuscating epithets that many neo-conservatives so casually lob around, obscuring constructive political approaches - when there are any - with hate- and rumor-mongering.

I won't even discuss Iraq, as our defense is supposed to be provided for by citizens owning guns, and every able-bodied male above the age of 18 comprising a common law militia. It's rather difficult to invade a country when you do not have soldiers, but rather a citizenry - living and working at home - that is armed to the teeth.

I find it impossible that you don't see the problem with all of this. But I apologize for my lack of clarity in my Request.

Thanks again for responding.

Satori Level 3 Commenter 4 years ago

A lot of the presumptions and assumptions made in political debate - or the lack thereof - today involves spinning out new contexts, justifications and dogma. I'd prefer to bypass those new contexts, when simply returning to the law is something we can all agree on. I don't give modern American political concepts the time of day, because they're not founded in the law. By keeping simply to the law, we can filter out differences in opinion and rhetoric, and simply get back to focussing on the facts upon which we can all agree.

Neo-cons, neo-libs... I won't answer a finger-pointing argument with finger-pointing in return. The Blame Game is mere buck-passing, and is unworthy to engage in - particularly on a political equivalent of the Titanic. I'll simply reassert my statement that freedom of speech is guaranteed, and any citizen may sue for slander or libel. If they did, rhetoric and venom would no longer predominantly distract from valid political arguments, because people would be again accountable for what they say. Particularly the news media, whose purpose it is to be the watchdog of the citizenry. As for your reintroduction of the idea of "the other side(s)", since we have established that partisan politics is not going to address clearly-stated issues, that distinction becomes irrelevant and therefore meaningless to make, does it not?

As for suing for slander and libel, whether or not you believe it is correct it remains the law. Consider that we have freedom of speech, and that is guaranteed. But it does not guarantee the right, for example, to go outside your neighbor's bedroom window in the middle of the night and stand there screaming your head off. The point at which speech ceases to be an expression of fact or factually-based opinion it becomes abusive. It is the abusive behavior, the encroaching behavior, for which a citizen is accountable, and not for the fact that it was speech. To pretend that it is the speech itself that a citizen is held accountable for is to cloud the issue, and that of course defeats the purpose of political diologue and descends into psychological manipulation. It may not be intentional on the part of someone making that argument - people often pass on meaningless messages that they have heard elsewhere - but if what's desired is a functional political system, it's everyone's job to apply some basic critical reasoning skills to the messages that come their way. It shoots down the rhetoric. When people don't do this they're simply spouting meaningless political static, and that is not a valid basis for a political discussion or debate. This is why news sources must check their facts, and this is why slander and libel are suable under the law. If they weren't, everyone could spout baseless accusations and calumnies about everyone else, and freedom of speech would not be secured in the midst of all the worthless static everywhere. Which is often the case in America today.

The country is in the process of collapsing. We have a paper money - excuse me, not money anymore but "legal tender" - not backed by gold, and the Fed announced over a year ago that it would no longer disclose how many Federal Reserve Notes are in circulation. To mark the occasion, the new Notes have been gaily colored to more closely resemble the peso, or perhaps Monopoly money. Executive profit margins are up, prices have been steadily raised to accomodate them since the 1950's, and now dual-income families have replaced single-income families in the majority of households by sheer necessity. Remember women starting to opt to work in the 50's? It caught on, and with more disposable income corporations raised their profit margins and prices to match. Now they're hiring cheaper labor overseas, and there aren't proportionally as many jobs. Welcome to Gen X. Here are your mass-produced shows, computer games, and federally-imported drugs... now settle down.

Whether you believe that Iraq was the right thing to do (I think there's something in the Bible that urges people to slaughter other people half a world away, but the passage escapes me at the moment) or the wrong thing to do, the fact remains that it was not lawful, nor within the federal government's legitimate authority to do so. From the Militia Act of 1792:

"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That each and every free able-bodied white male citizen of the respective States, resident therein, who is or shall be of age of eighteen years, and under the age of forty-five years (except as is herein after excepted) shall severally and respectively be enrolled in the militia, ... "

State militias, not federal troops. Living at home, not fighting abroad. The States were supposed to handle the defense; the Federal merely standardized them all... at least at first. A few more decades, a little more encroachment year by year, and now the Federal government, having jurisdiction only within its lawful scope of authority and within Washington D.C. itself, is taking citizens from the States and sending them across the globe. Pure treason, and the specific question of Iraq itself, pro or con, could never have arisen if the Federal government were acting in accordance with its specific, and rather limited, authorities. And if its citizens were keeping its feet to the fire by keeping them accountable every time they strayed, by remembering what the law of the land actually is.

More than getting politicians in with fiscal sense, we need a politician who isn't continuing to commit fraud and treason at all. Perhaps that's a lot to ask for... but treason is still a hanging offense, and if they are protected from that we should at the very least be impeaching them and ending their political careers as fast as they can attain office and subvert that office, until they start to take the hint. And that doesn't come about by drawing meaningless distinctions within partisan politics.

I quite agree that corporations have a natural tendancy for things to go their way. There was quite a lot of debate over whether they should even be allowed, at the start. The eventual outcome was the granting of charters to form corporations, giving the privilege of existing as legal entities provided they served the common good - such as building the Panama Canal, something few private citizens would ever have been able to raise the investment capital for on their own. But what is granted conditionally must be revoked when those conditions no longer apply, and that is exactly what occurs when corporate charters are revoked, and why they are revoked. Because large corporations have, as you describe, the "natural tendancy" for them to want things to go their way, and because that will generate abuses. And because people knew that going in, and provided for it. Have a look: http://www.pushhamburger.com/morenews18.htm

I don't recall anything about going Communist... where did you get that idea? And I sure as hell don't want a Democracy, because this country is not a Democracy. It's a Republic, and politicians who suggest otherwise are publicly confessing to treason. "...and to the Republic, for which we stand..."? Any politician in office who doesn't know what form of government their country has should be impeached immediately, and then sued for criminal negligence and incompetence ... at the very least.

And so I prompt Americans to consider the state of their government, and not argue over opinions - neither of them based in the law - but to actually learn the limited scope of authority these people have to act within professionally, and keep them accountable for that. It's easy to whine about this politician, or to complain about that, or to label the ot