"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion." Thomas Jefferson; Sept. 28, 1820




How the NeoCons – and the Dems – sunk the Ship of State





As bad as things seem now, it can get worse. This is the conclusion one comes to after reading E.J. Dionne’s commentary in last Monday's edition of the Washington Post.

Dionne urged Democrats to find a vision. Perhaps Dionne simply should paint Senator Kerry as the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz and sing ‘If Kerry only had a brain.’ The fact is, the visionary and moral leadership offered by such stalwarts of the DNC remain the best hopes of people like Karl Rove. There isn’t a vacant deck chair on the “D.N.C. Titanic” during this Democrat cruise.

Whatever happened to the refrain, “Bush stole the election”? Several days ago John Kerry made a hasty retreat from what he had once openly stated to Mark Crispin Miller, (author of “Fooled Again”) that Bush had in fact stolen the 04 elections. The silence is deafening. No one has uttered a peep about vacancy in John Kerry’s trousers these days. This is the man who wanted to be President? The NeoCons who occupy the White House must rejoice daily that Providence has provided them with the current Democratic leadership.

Forty years of Democratic neglect allowed the NeoCons to rise to power through the subversion of the Grand Old Party. So void of ideas has the DNC become, that if they offered voters an equivalent to the Contract with America it would be titled “We’ll Steal Less!”

This would at least hold the virtue of honestly. When Joe Conason penned “Big Lies” he hit the nail square on the head; they stole less than the snorting hoard of NeoCons who marched into Washington on hobnailed boots following the 1994 elections.

While such as John Kerry peer into the abyss of their souls the image of GW Bush peering under his desk for his phantom WMD’s in the Oval Office gives Americans whiplash.

For the Democrats to find leadership means they first must have a vision, and that requires eyes wide open, confronting reality. Vision is not propaganda, but a reality that empowers. Americans are fed up. A recent CNN online poll found that 88% of the country’s voters would gladly leave their political party if only someone offered them a vision – along with the reality to achieve it.

Americans are ready, ready to take power from the leadership of political parties and the their corporate sponsors and put it back into the hands of the people themselves. This is how our Founders intended it to be; that is the vision of America.

Stealing less, might slow the nightmare but it is not a vision.

The sole purpose of government is to do that which the people cannot do individually for themselves. Nothing more.

Americans must take back control of their lives. The worn out rhetoric, propaganda and marketing of fear of the past half century has been used to the death of all we hold sacred as a people. It must stop. We stand poised on the threshold of a change more substantial than the fall of the Berlin Wall. That is the wall between the freedom God meant us to have and a perpetual serfdom to government.

The truth is that Americans are only an idea away from real freedom. Now that they see the reality behind the curtain of Oz they need only take the future into their own hands.

We face cannot trust our elections. Therefore we need to return control to our neighborhoods, both for voting and for registration, there we know who we can trust.

Petty bureaucrats who presume to dictate to us in all parts of our lives ooze with the assumption of authority. These same petty officials also categorically reject all personal accountability for their failures. Therefore we need walk away from the bankrupt services government produces.

Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that there is nothing they can do to change things. But we can.

We can take back control by returning to a government that does only what the people cannot do for themselves.

We must get off all grids created for us by government. These grids; social, economic, utility and otherwise were created by government to serve big government and not us.

Some grids are created by government, others by large corporations such as petroleum and credit card companies. These stakeholders in the game are bedmates. Their sole purpose is to insure our compliance in making them wealthy and powerful.

Grids, the means for centralizing ownership of Americans, send the wrong message about how we organize our lives. Grids teach us to look to 'authorities' rather than looking to each other to solve our problems as people and as communities. Grids teach us to wait for someone else (corporations or government) to come to our rescue. Instead we should be rescuing each other.

There are other grids as well. As individuals we can detach from all of them if we choose. Woody Guthrie wrote a song once, and it went something like this; “… one man’s hands can’t tear a prison down. But if one and one make a hundred, we’ll see that day come round.” The day has come.

Doing it ourselves as individuals and with our neighbors is the vision the Founders knew. A vision; Something neither political party seems to understand. As long as we keep playing their game the music will not change.

Perhaps you do not hear leadership from those who rule over us for the simple reason that it might destroy their power to sell us into economic slavery in the land our fathers and mothers died to create.

E.J. Dionne closed by citing FDR’s memorable speech before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco in which he asserted, that the task of government was to intervene, but not hamper individualism, to protect it from the abuses of the powerful.

Now we know, as Roosevelt did not, that the ability of government to protect rights vanished in the potential for profits to be made in selling us out. Dionne then goes on without a bobble to say that rights are not enough, that we need to consider 'service'. He should remember that service is slavery if it is not undertaken freely. Each of us know when we are serving and when we are slaves.

Start organizing locally so that elections are controlled by those we know. Get off the grid of dependencies. Look into the eyes of your neighbor and find hope, because hope is the vision we need today.