 The Bush regime
has done, and continues to do, enormous damage to America as a civil
state. Almost everything has been corrupted: balance of powers,
separation of church and state, fiscal and monetary policy, foreign
relations, the electoral process, civil liberties, government openness,
the rule of law, limitations to corporate influence, media
independence. These are the bulwarks of a functioning civil state, and
they are all teetering, threatening to fall and push America into
economic chaos, massive civil strife, and right wing totalitarianism. I
remain convinced that this disastrous undoing of the American
democratic framework in just three short years has come about
principally because of Bush's sheer ignorance of the importance of
these critical democratic institutions and balances, rather than from a
deliberate desire to subvert democracy for partisan political advantage
and hence risk destroying what was once the best model of liberal
democracy in the history of human civilization.
But no matter what the cause, there is already a huge task ahead
rebuilding the massive damage to the social, political and economic
fabric that the Bush regime has wreaked. America cannot afford to wait
to start planning the work that needs to be done to undo the misdeeds
and errors of the past three year, the seeds of which had already been
planted by lazy, greedy, ignorant administrations before the current
unelected president seized power.
Here is the tip of the iceberg: the five comprehensive, far-reaching
programs that must be instituted quickly and effectively as soon as
Bush has been ousted to begin to rebuild the structural damage, restore
international credibility to the American politic, and prevent a
recurrence of the abuses and ruin that have been inflicted jointly by a
small group of ideological psychopaths and their cohorts in big
business and in shady right-wing extremist organizations, with
astonishingly little outcry and outrage from the American public or
those whose job it is to represent and protect their interests.
- Returning
political power to the people through
their elected representatives. That does not mean replacing those
representatives with referenda and other quasi-democratic instruments
that allow elected representatives to abrogate or ignore their
responsibilities to the voters and to the health of the republic. It
means introducing quick and effective electoral reform that will strip
corporations, churches, pressure groups and other undemocratic
institutions of their ability to exert any influence whatsoever over
elected officials. It means an end to the outrage of redistricting. It
means independent audit of the entire voting, vote-tabulating and
electoral dispute resolution process to ensure the candidate with the
greatest voter support attains office. It means replacement of
Tweedledum Tweedledee first-past-the-post electoral processes that
guarantee election of only the richer and less controversial of two
often indistinguishable candidates of the mainstream parties, with
multi-party processes that encourage grass-roots participation in
politics and enable candidates with little money and good, positive
programs to defeat candidates who run negative campaigns, offer no
ideas or policies, and are indebted to moneyed corporate and
ideological funders. It means joint, collaborative, time-limited
appointment and regular review of the judiciary to ensure selection of
the best-qualified non-partisan judges. It means automatic invalidation
of election results where a plurality of eligible voters do not vote.
It means massive strengthening of the checks and balances between the
executive, legislative and judiciary bodies to ensure than none
controls the political agenda. It means making interference in the
political process by religious groups a criminal offense.
- Revitalization
and retrenchment of civil liberties. Personal civil
freedoms must never again be removed or threatened by legislation under
any circumstances. The myriad of invasive laws and regulations brought
in by the Bush administration under the flimsy and fraudulent pretext
of fighting 'terrorism' are an abhorrence to any democratic state. Such
laws must be declared unconstitutional in perpetuity. The definition
and legal pre-eminence of personal rights and freedoms must be
clarified and extended, to prevent future trampling by unscrupulous
administrations, and to encompass the additional rights and freedoms
included in the UN Charter such as the right to a set minimum standard
of living. The outrageous granting of 'personal' rights and freedoms to
corporations and other undemocratic institutions must be undone, and
the powers of corporations drastically curtailed and rolled back to
their original intended function: the efficient raising of capital.
Corporations are not persons and are not entitled to rights, period,
and the granting of rights to corporations is always and inevitably at
the cost of rights of individuals. And no one should be able to hide
behind a corporation in the commission of criminal acts and civil
misdeeds.
- Limitations
on government spending authority. Governments should not be
permitted to impoverish future generations or discriminate against the
poor and disadvantaged in their fiscal and monetary policies.
Government debt levels should be capped at a set, responsible
percentage of GDP. Governments need to have charters that clearly lay
out minimum levels of service that they must provide, consistent with
their constitutional authority, and they should be subject to annual
independent audits to assess whether they have provided these levels of
service and identify remedial actions where they have not. The combined
effect of these three limits: Strengthened civil liberties (including
the right to a minimum living standard), Limits on government debt, and
Audited minimum levels of service provision, would be to severely
restrict reckless, predatory, discriminatory and irresponsible
government spending. Governments must become once again stewards of the
public purse for the public interest. Payment of most of government
revenues to political supporters, pressure groups and moneyed interests
is an abuse of power, a threat to economic stability and an affront to
justice and democracy.
- Reinstatement
of the rule of law. In America, the rule of law has been largely
replaced by the 'rule of man'. That means that enforcement authorities
now have massive powers to make personal judgements and exercise
personal discretion about what is and what is not legal and acceptable
behaviour by citizens. As a result, people can be deported on a whim,
kept in prison and denied basic constitutional freedoms based on one
anonymous individual accuser's discretion. Laws have become so vague
and enforcement powers so vast that there is no longer any inalienable
standard of legal and illegal. If you have money and expensive lawyers,
you will almost surely get off scot free for crimes that a poorer
citizen will equally certainly be executed for. And being right and
law-abiding is no longer as important to your peace and security as not
offending bureaucrats and not getting your name in
arbitrarily-populated databases.
- Re-educating
the electorate. The shabby state of Americas public education
system, and the massive concentration of media control, have combined
to produce what is probably the greatest 'dumbing down' of the
electorate in America's history. As a result, most Americans are not
current on any of the critical issues facing the country, other than
those jointly hand-picked one at a time by the administration and the
subservient media who were substantially responsible for the
administration's election. Nor does the average American have even a
base level of knowledge of the history of democracy, of civics, of
global geography or history, of economics, of the function and workings
of government, of any of the
subjects essential to the meaningful expression of their voting
franchise. The media must
take responsibility to educate and inform the public, not merely pander
to the results of the Neilsen ratings. And everyone needs to make the
effort to learn more, to talk with each other more about issues that
matter, to raise the level of public awareness and discourse, to
reverse the 'dumbing down' of America and start a generation of
'smartening up'.
That's just the start. There's a lot more to be done. But these five
programs would go a long way to re-building America, a land today
horrendously divided, obsessed with fighting the wrong enemies,
paralyzed with fear, abandoned to narrow, cynical special interests,
politically corrupted, and crushed by economic mismanagement. Bush is
probably the worst president in American history. But he's merely been
the accidental spark that has set off the tinderkeg of political,
moral, legal, social, educational, and economic indifference, neglect
and incompetence that has been building in America for more than thirty
years. It's time to start again, to return America to the greatness
that once made it the world's most admired nation, rather than its most
feared.
(The drawing above, entitled
'Working Together', by Sioux artist Ioyan Mani, is one of a stunning
collection of drawings available for viewing and purchase here)
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
