How to stop the runaway right and heal the immense harm they inflict

by Dan Ruuska     (v.08.29.07)

America's SUBVERSIVE PROBLEM: beginning around 1980 our country's separate groups of wealth-and-power consolidated into a right-wing juggernaut, stealthily breached the homeland/national security of our self-governance and five classes of common good, and today they freely usurp wealth and power here and abroad with information-control, deceive-and-manipulate, divide-and-conquer support from their media machine.

We the People's SUREFIRE SOLUTION: resurrect and wield our Three Charters of Freedom with a four-element plan America's founders would cheer.

Face the problem. Execute the solution.

An Incentive

Today's runaway consolidated American wealth-and-power is a homeland form of the consolidated-wealth-and-power enemy of 1776 that set off the American Revolution. The list of homeland-enemy injustices, summarized herein (but hidden from America by their media machine), is similar to the (similarly hidden) list of injustices in the main section of our Declaration of Independence and as powerful at igniting corrective revolt.

The homeland enemy's wealth/corporate core has a half-million members, 0.2% of the public. Their Christian-Right core has 30 million members, 10% of the public, who want divine rule and end times for America and, in mutual cooperation with the wealth/corporate core, work against a bright future of principled self-governance and bountiful common well-being (America's hopeful/humane mainstream Christianity is about six-times larger than the nihilistic/inhumane Christian Right). The linchpin holding all parts of the wealth-and-power consolidation together is a group of 537 elected federal representatives, 0.0002% of the public, who violate our trust by serving Wealth and Power at the expense of We the People and our posterity in return for wealth/corporate campaign cash and a bloc of Christian-Right votes. We the People are 270 million strong, the 90% of the public being hurt by America's wealth-and-power juggernaut, who after reading the four-element plan herein will know exactly how to stop the juggernaut and reverse their injustices. The coming democratic revolt, a long-overdue major maintenance and tune-up of our republic during which a principled new political party easily trounces the corrupt red/blue monopoly betraying America, has the legal and moral blessing of our Constitution.

A financial incentive to proceed? A hot selling point for the new political party? $15,000 per taxpayer a year totalling $2 trillion a year -- and growing -- is the amount of wealth we can stop the homeland enemy from annually taking from us.

The Problem

Over the millennia, humankind learned the hard way how wealth-and-power can flare up and hurt the common good: wealth-and-power tends to consolidate, take and hoard wealth and power from others, and harm individuals, families, communities, and nations in the process. Our ancestors evolved two strategies to ward off and combat that danger: vigilantly keep wealth-and-power in careful check, and if that fails, unite and cooperate to stop runaway wealth-and-power and reverse its injustices, through revolt if necessary. That painfully-learned ancient survival wisdom passed down through generations and entered our Three Charters of Freedom: Declaration of Independence in 1776, Constitution in 1787, Bill of Rights in 1791. Two key elements of that vital wisdom of the ages? Separation of powers. Separation of church and state.

Around 1980, several forms of American wealth-and-power -- wealth/corporate power, executive/legislative/judicial federal powers, intelligence/military power, red/blue political-party power, mass-media power, Christian-Right religious power -- began to consolidate into a right-wing juggernaut for taking and hoarding wealth and power from America and the world. In the past, our red/blue representatives carefully kept those different forms of power separated and thus harmless, such as when they created the Federal Communications Commission in the early 20th century to watch and regulate the new broadcasting industry in order to prevent it from ever harming America's democracy and common good. Gradually and stealthily over the past quarter-century, the right's wealth-and-power juggernaut grew in strength, overrode our Constitution's multiple supreme-law defenses against U.S.-government takeover by U.S. wealth-and-power, and breached the homeland security and national security of our democratic processes and representative governance (our self-governance) AND the homeland/national security of all five classes of common well-being listed in our Constitution (our Social-Contract benefits). To assure a stealthy breach of our homeland/national security, and an easy heist of our wealth and power, the right wing and their media machine weakened America's ability to detect and fight their betrayal: during the late 20th century they purged more than half of our Declaration of Independence from our public education and national consciousness, the charter's entire middle section that describes exactly WHY We the People revolted in the late 18th century (to stop and reverse war on self-governance and public good by consolidated wealth-and-power); they erased our knowledge of the extensive homeland-security system the Framers wired into our Constitution and Bill of Rights (the many supreme-law defenses against U.S.-government takeover by U.S. wealth-and-power); they deadened our awareness of our supreme power and supreme responsibility, as We the People, to provide unfettered democratic processes, truly representative governance, and America's five kinds of common good to ourselves and our posterity -- and as part of that process they put to sleep our "provide for the common defence" power and responsibility to be alert for and fight off subversion and harm by American wealth-and-power and how it BEGINS with free-speech/free-press whistleblowing and dissent as principled and fiery as Paine's Common Sense (January 1776) and Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (July 1776); they devised a narrow meaning for "homeland security" (safe from foreign terrorism, but not from harm to our democracy and common good by homeland wealth-and-power); they shrank the meaning of "national security" (from the whole security of our self-governance and five classes of common good, to security they provide with intelligence/military power [War On Terror] and rising police-state power [Patriot Act, Homeland Security]); they twisted our "national interest" (from ensure the public interest won by revolting against and defeating consolidated wealth-and-power, we won principled self-governance and bountiful common well-being of/by/for We the People, to ensure the wellness of the consolidated wealthy-and-powerful who subvert our self-governance and usurp our public good through a rigged market-based democracy they trick us to think is real American democracy); they lobotomized the Social Contract from our public mind (in return for our paying the price of self-governance -- steady and strong civic/social responsibility, eternal vigilance and effort and taxes -- We the People, and our posterity, receive the five immense well-being benefits listed in the first sentence of our Constitution since 1787 -- "Justice," "domestic Tranquility," "common defence," "general Welfare," "Liberty" -- the common-good bedrock of our "more perfect Union" and the American Dream); they smoke-and-mirrored away the supreme intent of and supreme responsibility for American law (laws must be "made in Pursuance [of]" the principled self-governance and five classes of public good in our Constitution; laws that enable wealth-and-power to take financial wealth, well-being wealth, and self-governance power from citizens are laws that have no place in America and must be expunged by We the People who, by law, have supreme power and supreme responsibility to do so). Those are some of the ways the right and their media machine softened up America -- cleansed the WHY from our Fourth of July, undermined our founding defenses including freedom of speech and of the press, perverted our nation's purpose, crippled our supreme power and responsibility, blinded us to loss of self-governance and public good -- to take our wealth and power. The right's wild success? They are busily morphing our government of, by, and for We the People into a government of, by, and for Wealth and Power. And they are freely taking wealth and power -- financial and well-being wealth, and supreme self-governance power -- from We the People and our posterity. A result? Opportunity, fortune, and a bright future are becoming less and less possible, and the American Dream less and less reachable, for more and more Americans. Their advertising/PR/news/entertainment/print/radio/TV/film/web media partners spin it all down and cover it up, especially their $2-trillion annual transfer of citizen wealth from the poor and middle-class to the well-off through a system of tax fleecing and corporate gouging AND their collateral taking of homeland lives at the rate of more than sixteen 9/11s every year. Also behind our backs they inflict similar and worse harm on many other nations, and the consequences hurt America. The right and their media machine trick Americans by the millions to support and assist their massive legal/moral wrongdoing. Via many channels of pressure and influence they strip respect for others, personal and social responsibility, cooperation toward the common good, ability to think critically -- core human skills needed for good citizenship -- from the ability of We the People to govern, care for, and protect America. Perhaps their most dangerous manipulation? The five secular moral goals in our Constitution's opening sentence, our American Values by law which vastly surpass the human-to-human goodness required by the Ten Commandments, have been purged from our public mind. Today they are adding homeland police-state power, and more global intelligence/military power, to their power to take wealth and power here and abroad. Under banners of patriotism and piety and moral values, the right wing hurts America vastly more than terrorism ever can.

In the 1980s they removed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Fairness Doctrine and many FCC public-service requirements from broadcasting, and they loosened FCC restrictions on media consolidation, which gave rise to right-wing hate radio, Christian-Right religious broadcasting, and right-slanted mainstream media content especially our news. The members of today's mass media -- instead of serving America with principled free speech, instead of protecting America as a vigilant free press -- block and distort vital information that America needs to be able to function with principled self-governance and bountiful common well-being. And they single out and pillory whistleblowers and dissenters who dare expose any of the right's myriad violations of our democracy, public good, and Law of the Land: violations of our democratic processes and representative governance, violations of our five classes of common good, violations of our Constitution's Preamble and Articles and Amendments. They blend advertising, public relations, journalism, and entertainment into deceptive and manipulative "communication" designed to protect and serve the right -- including to trick citizens to esteem and assist the wealth-and-power that's hurting them and their families and futures -- "communication" they steadily inject into our public mind with mass media they control: print, radio, television, film, increasingly the internet. They influence our universities to teach and grant degrees in those "communication" skills. They built that Information Monopoly and Persuasion Weapon -- that advertising/PR/news/entertainment, print/radio/TV/film/web Media Machine -- for the ancient right-wing purpose of taking and hoarding wealth and power.

As we watch their popular Red vs. Blue Show -- how red and blue are different democratic choices, how red and blue compete against and fight each other -- behind the scenes red and blue collude to serve consolidated wealth-and-power. An example: in 1987 the Republican Party and Democratic Party co-founded the Commission on Presidential Debates -- a private corporation funded by wealth-and-power donors to both parties -- which operates under the guise of being a taxpayer-funded federal commission, shields red/blue candidates from hard questioning, shuts out candidates from other parties, all to cement their red/blue monopoly grip on power, all assisted by the wealth-and-power media machine. As our elected representatives, reds and blues both help the right wing take financial wealth, well-being wealth, and supreme self-governance power from We the People and our posterity -- reds more so than blues -- as their repayment to the right for wealth/corporate cash and Christian-Right votes. Vote red or blue, either way the right wins.

Some of the right's divide-and-conquer manipulations carried out by their media machine? They orchestrate domestic discord, such as by pitting conservatives against liberals and vice versa, to destroy the "domestic Tranquility" needed for citizens to unite and cooperate to govern, care for, and protect America. They slice and dice our electorate into many divisive and competing self-interest segments, each concerned about itself and not the common good. They shatter into fragments, and scatter to the wind of time, perceived evidence of their wrongdoing -- so that citizens see only bits of the overall problem facing America, one quickly-forgotten piece at a time, and cannot assemble the myriad past and present wrongdoing events into a clear pattern of systematic injustice like Thomas Jefferson did when he wrote our Declaration of Independence. They influence civic-action, public-interest, and independent-media groups to work separately and apart isolated from each other -- to each serve its own niche interest, to each rally to its narrow hot issue of the day -- to be unable to consolidate into a formidable unified force to effectively protect and foster the whole national interest (America's self-governance and common good) under assault by the right, to be unable to help plan or mount a broad-based full solution to fix America like the founders did to create America. They polarize and politically-fragment citizens to prevent a united state of America -- to neuter the collective civic power of their victims: the more than 200 million citizens they are busily usurping wealth and power from -- so that "We, the People" cannot possibly team up and cooperate to "provide for the common defence" against the right. The right divides us to conquer us.

The Framers understood and feared humankind's ancient political disease -- runaway, destructive, consolidated wealth-and-power -- and took measures to prevent the wealth-and-power disease from ever flaring up within and hurting America. They created multiple supreme-law protections and defenses against the disease, a robust homeland-security system to eternally ward off and suppress the disease: Democratic processes and representative governance to keep the disease in check and safely dormant. "[I]nsure domestic Tranquility" to maintain an undivided, undivisive We the People able and willing to unite and cooperate to fight the disease. "[P]rovide for the common defence" against the disease. "[N]o religious Test[s]" to prevent religion in public servants and other members of the public trust from feeding the disease. Trial by jury as a direct citizen check against unjust prosecution, unjust courts, and unjust laws spawned by the disease (for example, juries have supreme power and supreme responsibility to nullify bad laws -- laws NOT "made in Pursuance [of]" our Constitution -- such as laws that favor consolidated wealth-and-power and hurt self-governance and public good). Separation of powers, and separation of church and state, to prevent separate components of wealth-and-power from consolidating and growing into the disease. Freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, to sound alarms about outbreaks of the disease and to rally citizens to fight the disease. Surely our experts in Constitutional law can cite other founding protections/defenses against the wealth-and-power disease. The Framers wove these homeland-security measures into our 1787 Constitution and 1791 Bill of Rights. Since 1980, America's growing wealth-and-power juggernaut -- the right -- undermined and overrode all of them.

Our usual methods of good citizenship and active democracy -- including reading and watching the news to stay informed, writing letters to the editor and blogging on the web, working on self-governance and common-good issues, whistleblowing in the public interest, engaging in principled dissent, contacting our Senators and Congressperson, supporting our favorite political party, voting in every election -- barely work anymore.

The right-wing homeland enemy -- consolidated American wealth-and-power and their media machine -- subverted our democratic processes and representative governance into a rigged market-based democracy that prevents self-governance and hurts the common good, and has already made sure our current methods of democracy cannot possibly stop them.

Worry not. Other democratic methods can stop the runaway right.

The Solution

First, size up the enemy and identify their vulnerabilities. The homeland enemy's wealth/corporate core -- the wealthy, Corporate America, Washington and its red/blue monopoly including the hard-core right, intelligence/military leaders, heads of our mass media -- has only a half-million key members (0.2% of the public); they control our country and usurp our wealth and power with the media machine and rigged democracy they set up, and with the religious bloc they recruited to boost the size of their juggernaut by more than fifty-fold. The enemy's recruited Christian-Right core, today seizing political power more hungrily than the wealth/corporate core, has 30 million members (10% of the public); they follow an inhumane brand of Christianity that emerged a century after our Three Charters of Freedom came into being -- a nihilistic born-again Christian Zionism heavily based on the Book of Revelation and on out-of-context Biblical passages spun to preach intolerance and inhumanity, a loud and aggressive and domineering and selfish religion uncaring of the born, but caring of the unborn to mask their unconcern for the well-being of living and breathing people -- which was not the religion of America's founders nor is it the religion practiced by America's 200 million conservative and liberal Christians today, a giving religion based on true Christian values, selfless humanity, taught by Christ (mainstream Christianity is about six-times larger than the Christian Right); those in the Christian Right condone and abet the wealth/corporate core's inhumane actions here and abroad because they believe the causal worsening conflict and suffering, especially in the Middle East, will speed arrival of the "end times" they yearn for which include the end of America and We the People and our posterity; America's founders believed that people are innately good and inherently capable of wise and humane secular self-governance, as revealed in the opening sentence of our Constitution, but the Christian Right believes that people are innately bad and must be ruled by their harsh version of divine power; although We the People have supreme power according to our Constitution, although the separation-of-church-and-state affirmation "[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion" became "supreme Law of the Land" in 1797 without controversy, the Christian Right wants their inhumane vision of God to have supreme power over America; they push for their interpretations of the Bible to be infused into American law, for Christian-Right executive/legislative/judicial leaders to rule America, for their religion to infiltrate more deeply into our domestic/foreign policies and military, for taxpayers to spend more and more to help accomplish their religious goals (federal spending on all Christian-Right causes totalled about $1,500 per taxpayer in 2003, our de facto religious tax on the rise); the Christian Right to America is fast becoming what Islam's Wahabiism is to Saudi Arabia -- intolerant, inhumane, intertwined with state; America's wealth/corporate media companies skillfully disguise the Christian Right's relatively-new, small, subversive, immoral religion as being traditional, mainstream, patriotic, rich in family/heartland/moral values, and popular. The wealth/corporate core and Christian-Right core both desire to dominate and control people, and both profit from hurting America and the world; for example if conditions worsen in Iraq, if we nuke Iran and they retaliate, if the Middle East explodes, if more terrorism blows back at America, the greater the flow of taxpayer money into our military/intelligence and homeland-security industries, the less our self-governance and the fewer our Social-Contract benefits especially in the justice and general welfare and liberty categories all accompanied by rising social/economic homeland strife and taxes (mostly on our posterity through deficit spending), and the stronger the rapture index (indicator of closeness to "end times") and the growth and clout of the Christian Right -- a win-win for the wealth/corporate core and the Christian Right; thus in symbiotic alliance to achieve similar goals of wealth-and-power acquisition, they harm our principled self-governance and bountiful common well-being; to eliminate that dangerous threat to the homeland/national security of our democracy and common good -- to break up that toxic alliance -- neutralize the power of the wealth/corporate core, including its media machine, and the power of their religious bloc dies also. True conservatives and true liberals, in belief and deed, are rooted in our Constitution's law and humanity; the members of the right wing seem rooted in what preceded our Constitution -- the unjust consolidated wealth-and-power that set off the American Revolution (the right-wing domination and inhumanity described at length in the main section of our Declaration of Independence) -- and they falsely portray themselves as conservative, and their media machine as liberal, as they violate the very law and very humanity our 1776 revolt gave birth to. America's different forms of wealth-and-power, in the past kept separated and thus harmless by our leaders to protect our self-governance and public good, today are drawn and held together -- consolidated into the homeland enemy -- by the actions of 537 red/blue elected federal representatives (0.0002% of the public), our democracy's corrupted heart that pumps wealth and power out of We the People and into the consolidated-wealth-and-power few. The enemy's victims, the many millions of citizens being plundered and hurt (90% of the public including mainstream Christians who outnumber the unChristlike Christian Right by six to one), can rise up in lawful/moral democratic revolt and replace that corrupt heart with a principled one.

After studying the homeland enemy -- and after rediscovering and recharging the supreme power and supreme responsibility of We the People -- team up conservatives and liberals into a 200-million-strong civic power, neutralize the small right-wing common enemy and its media machine, and restore and grow our principled self-governance and bountiful common well-being. CivicPowerUSA.org's four-element plan -- a big-picture full solution based on our primal urges for justice, ancient human wisdom, early American history, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights -- shows how. In brief, unite and cooperate to fix America much like we did to create America:

Element 1. Create a modern version of the Continental Congress, a broad-based national civic-action coalition operating outside the influence of Washington D.C. for the purpose of homeland/national defense against the right, to unite and build and direct citizen forces to fight today's consolidated-wealth-and-power enemy that is remarkably similar to the consolidated-wealth-and-power enemy of 1776. (More than half of our Declaration of Independence, the central section the enemy within diverts America's attention away from today, describes the right-wing enemy of 1776 AND details how it hurt We the People back then much like the right-wing homeland enemy hurts America today.) Two of the many "We, the People... provide for the common defence" tasks awaiting the new congress? Dispatch a modern version of Paul Revere's Ride to warn America about the enemy. Issue a modern version of the Declaration of Independence to describe the enemy, list the enemy's many injustices and explain how each one violates our Constitution in technicality and spirit -- to show exactly how they subvert and hurt our democratic processes and representative governance and five classes of common well-being, to show exactly how they betray their own country and people and posterity -- and declare resolve to defeat the enemy and return America to, and grow, the principled democracy and generous humanity our republic's founders wrote into our Constitution.

Element 2. Rebuild America's first line of defense -- eternal vigilance, free-speech/free-press alarm system, united citizen response -- against American wealth-and-power threats to the homeland security and national security of our democracy and common good. How? Strengthen the weakened core citizenship skills needed to fathom and live up to our Constitution -- respect for others, personal and social responsibility, cooperation toward the common good, ability to think critically -- the four core wisdom-and-humanity skills which ages ago assured survival of our species; in the early 1980s, before the right's insidious destruction of good citizenship became wildly effective, the traditional hallmarks of adult maturity -- respect, responsibility, cooperation, critical thinking -- were still listed as social/emotional/cognitive human-development goals on our two daughters' elementary school report cards; until recently these fundamental human abilities were deemed vital for democracy and the public good ("If society lets any considerable number of its members grow up mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame for the consequences," wrote philosopher John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859; "Unless we teach wisdom and humanity, we are doomed," concluded a PBS documentary on public education, 1980s; "As the nation [America] infantilises itself, the point is finally reached where the abandoned infant [an America cast off by itself from human-development tradition and thus no longer self-protected by wisdom and humanity] has nothing to do except break up its cot [destroy its own democracy and common good]," wrote Empire-of-the-Sun author J.G. Ballard, The Guardian, 2004). Restore public understanding of real American democracy: how We the People are the government, are the State, with supreme power-and-responsibility to carry out our Constitution including by wielding its several homeland-security weapons against U.S.-government takeover by U.S. wealth-and-power; how the separation-of-church-and-state affirmation "[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion" became "supreme Law of the Land" in 1797 without controversy; how the opening sentence of our Constitution calls upon We the People to give far more human-to-human goodness, far more humanity, to ourselves and our posterity than the Ten Commandments do; how the supreme purpose of freedom of speech and the right to keep and bear arms is to strengthen citizen power to protect America's democracy and common good, how the First and Second Amendments are supreme citizen responsibilities more than they are entitled individual rights; how laws not "made in Pursuance [of]" our Constitution -- laws that serve wealth-and-power at the expense of We the People and our posterity, laws that hurt our democratic processes or representative governance or any of the five categories of common good, laws that violate the Preamble or any Article or Amendment -- are bad laws, illegal laws, that We the People are obligated to nullify/eliminate with our supreme power including while as a member of a jury. Resurrect an ancient civic duty: watch and regulate wealth-and-power to prevent it from flaring up and then dominating, plundering, and hurting people. All of public education, not just teachers and schools, would take part in this vital homeland-security, national-security program.

Just think. If the above bare-basic Homeland Security had been firmly in place in 1980, we would have prevented America's wealth-and-power and their media partners from consolidating into the dangerous right-wing homeland enemy of today. Their many acts of direct and consequential harm during the past quarter-century never would have happened: They jacked up the price of higher education and burdened students with long-term debt to create and feed the student-loan industry (a brand new way to extract wealth from the unwealthy). They transformed our healthcare system into the world's most expensive and unfair to profit the health-insurance and pharmaceutical industries (another new method to mine wealth from the public). They raised total federal/state/local taxes for the poor and middle class but lowered them for the well-off, and for the well-off they reduced federal effort to collect owed taxes and made laws to allow tax sheltering and cheating thus forcing the poor and middle class to make up the difference (to transfer more citizen wealth up to the well-off). They boosted the number of forms and total amount of federal-supplied corporate welfare, increased federal spending on government overhead (intelligence/military, missile shields, Homeland Security, endless war, and so on), intend to privatize and thus increase citizen cost of many general-welfare services (Social Security, Medicare, public education, and so on; roads and bridges, water and energy supplies, other infrastructure), and gave free rein to many industries (such as investment, banking, consumer credit) to extract wealth from citizens using Enron-like business practices (all to funnel more citizen wealth into corporations). They undertook massive deficit spending and heavy federal borrowing to hide escalating federal spending (which transfers our posterity's wealth to the present well-off). They removed so much justice that America now has the world's highest reported incarceration rate; largely minorities and the poor are behind bars, mostly for lesser offenses, increasingly in for-profit prisons (which are a taxpayer-funded growth industry for the well-off). During the 1980s Cold War in Afghanistan -- a war funded with our tax dollars and secretly with equal sums from Saudi Arabia who injected Wahabiism into the region to help the U.S. build a proxy military weapon of militant Islamic warriors for fighting Russians, a war urged on by the Christian Right -- they recruited/armed/trained Islamic fighters from around the world including in the arts of terrorism, and transformed the region's moderate Islam into militant Islam including by providing Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks of militant Islamic teachings, which gave rise to al-Qaeda and the Taliban; when thousands of Islamic fighters returned home after America no longer needed them as a proxy military weapon to fight Russians in Afghanistan, the militant Islam they bred and the terrorism skills they taught spilled out into the world, which led directly to 9/11 (a tragedy they immediately forged into a manipulation tool for taking wealth and power). In the 1990s they put the Iraq war on the drawing board (to take wealth and power there) then awaited a Pearl-Harbor event to launch it (to pull it off, they HAD to falsely assign 9/11 blame to Iraq). They committed, spun down, and hid many other legal/moral wrongs during their vast betrayal of America (study CivicPowerUSA.org). Their Washington partners -- the executive/legislative/judicial branches of our federal government -- applied unjust diplomatic/armed force and failed to enforce just laws, enacted unjust laws, and produced unjust court decisions -- and thus committed executive-branch, legislative-branch, judicial-branch wrongdoing -- to help carry out the above campaign of domestic and international wealth-and-power acquisition. Their media partners -- members of their advertising/PR/news/entertainment/print/radio/TV/film/web media machine -- protected and served them, and tricked Americans by the millions to assist them, as they planned it, did it, and got away with it.

If we accomplish Element 2's fundamental civics education today, then America would know how to begin to defend itself against the homeland enemy's mounting assault on our democracy and common good AND how to prevent such large-scale betrayal from ever happening again: Element 1's broad-based congress of concerned citizens and groups would quickly form itself, synthesize the enemy's myriad acts of wrongdoing into a crystal-clear pattern of Runaway Subversion And Harm By Those In Whom We Place Our Trust, and present it to all citizens to assure success of Element 3 or Element 4.

Element 3. Ask today's White House, Congress, Judiciary, red/blue parties, and mass media to switch allegiance: from serving Wealth and Power back to serving We the People. If they balk at becoming a public trust the public can trust, undertake Element 4.

Element 4. Launch a new political party devoted to serving We the People by fostering the democratic processes, representative governance, and five classes of common well-being in our Constitution. The party's platform? Huge gains in Social-Contract benefits -- huge gains in justice, domestic tranquility, common-defense strength and homeland/national security, the general welfare, and liberty -- at an average savings of $15,000 per taxpayer a year by eliminating today's rampant tax fleecing and corporate gouging. (To compile the five lists of Social-Contract benefit gains, and to compute the huge taxpayer savings, study CivicPowerUSA.org.) Citizens would flood to the polls and vote out the red/blue monopoly that helps the right to usurp citizen control, slash citizen benefits, and plunder citizen wealth. During six years of elections (longest term of partisan office), 200 million conservative and liberal voters -- who are being socially, economically, and bodily hurt by the right in the many ways explained in the new Declaration of Independence issued by the new Continental Congress (see Element 1) -- would yank out the red/blue linchpin that holds the wealth-and-power juggernaut together, and grind the runaway right to a halt. The 537 new federal representatives, and legions of new state and county and municipal representatives -- all backed, overseen, and assisted by a nation of vigilant active citizens -- would restore and grow America's self-governance and common good and thus carry out our Social Contract, our Constitution.

A secret of success? Spot and surmount the right's divide-and-conquer manipulations of numerous kinds that, like in a well-planned military campaign, fracture the massive collective civic power of We the People into tiny, competitive, divisive, impotent fragments of power so that each and every individual and group civic effort toward the public/national interest -- civic effort to build and secure principled self-governance and bountiful common well-being (civic effort sometimes labeled by the right as Anti-American or Pro-Terrorism) -- can be singled out and easily brushed off or crushed by the well-organized full might of the small right wing and their media machine. Their many divide-and-conquer manipulations prevent We the People from uniting and cooperating to govern, care for, and protect America. They want -- and are rapidly achieving -- "Divided We Fall." We need "United We Stand" against their mounting heist of our wealth and our power. In no-nonsense language, fully explain this to everyone in America.

Another? See through and lay bare their favorite deception: Cover Up Wrongdoing With Feigned Good. For starters, fully understand then reveal to everyone how they cover up Iraq, their premeditated armed heist gone bad. Their plan to plunder Iraq's natural-resource wealth, state-owned assets, and citizen wealth including by shaping Iraq's governance/economic/social systems into wealth-usurping systems benefiting U.S. wealth-and-power and by turning Iraq into a rigged profit paradise for multinationals -- a plan in the works for many years before 9/11, a plan issued by the White House a month before their March-20-2003 shock-and-awe launch of the war, a plan administered today by their large heavily-fortified U.S. Embassy complex in Baghdad staffed with thousands of personnel loyal to the right wing, a plan our troops are supporting -- is titled "Moving the Iraqi Economy from Recovery to Sustainable Growth." The World Bank/International Monetary Fund headquartered in the USA with new offices in Baghdad's Green Zone, in appearance a praiseworthy humanitarian group devoted to alleviating world poverty but in reality an international branch of the acquisitive homeland enemy, has used nearly identical titles on similar plans worldwide for the same wealth-extracting purpose; "savage capitalism," "vulture capitalism," victim nations have decried. Executive Order 13290 issued the day the invasion of Iraq began, United Nations Resolution 1483 extorted by the White House from other nations on May-22-2003, EO 13303 issued within hours after UNR 1483, and EO 13315 issued August-28-2003 together authorize USA/World-Bank/IMF/multinational control and extraction of Iraq's state wealth and citizen wealth by pen-and-sword means of our embassy and permanent military presence, troops or mercenaries, in Iraq; these directives implement the decade-in-the-making predatory plan the White House issued a month before launching the war. The more deadly and destructive and drawn-out the Iraq war, the more money for our wealth/corporate military and war-service and rebuilding industries -- who earn $5 million an hour net profit, half taxpayer cost of $10 million an hour (as of July 2007) -- and the more satisfaction and clout for the Christian Right who see and support the bloody conflict as a prophesied precursor to end times. Less than 5% of that $10 million an hour goes to our troops; vastly more goes to our privatized military: the wealth/corporate-hired well-paid mercenary force of Americans and foreigners, employed mostly for support and security, is about equal in size to the number of our troops -- and is growing. They cover up their Premeditated Armed Heist Of Iraq's State Wealth And Citizen Wealth and "Destroy/Invade/Occupy/Rebuild Iraq!" Gold Rush For U.S. Corporations with Support Our Troops who are Defending America and Giving The Gift Of Democracy To Iraq. Expose to the entire American public how the right undertakes similar deception -- how they hide their myriad illegal/inhumane acts behind masks of patriotism and piety and moral values, how they hide their anti-life uncaring of the born behind masks of pro-life caring for the unborn -- to take wealth and power from We the People and our posterity.

A third? Remind the public how deception is an ancient weapon used against an enemy, against prey. The right's enemy? The supreme power and supreme responsibility of We the People to provide unfettered democratic processes and principled representative governance (and thus prevent the right from building up and taking control) and our power-and-responsibility to provide generous well-being to ourselves and our posterity (and thus keep individual citizen wealth, shared citizen wealth, and the wealth of our posterity out of the hoarding hands of the right). The right's prey? The natural-resource wealth and state-owned wealth of America and the wealth of We the People and our posterity (similar to their many predations abroad). During Element 1's nationwide Paul Revere Ride, warn all citizens about how their power and wealth are the enemy and prey of today's deceptive public trust.

If citizens of 1776 were alive today, they would respond to the vile dishonesty of today's public trust -- today's White House, Congress, Judiciary, red/blue parties, mass media -- with national moral outrage and mass corrective revolt.

The problem in brief: a Theocratic Plutocratic Kakistocracy unjustly rules America today. The solution in brief: We the People uninstall that illegal form of government and reestablish the Secular Humanistic Republic in our Constitution.

Ancient Greece, besides giving us the words "democracy" and "theocracy" and "plutocracy," gave us "kakistocracy:" government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens -- government by the worst. Early 17th-century France gave us the word "republic:" a government or state in which supreme power lies in citizens who elect principled representatives responsible to them -- government by the public, who in vigilant defense of their republic, watch the worst like a hawk and keep them on a short leash, and if that fails, overthrow the worst and reverse their subversion and harm through democratic revolt. Cast Off Kakistocracy And Build A Republic is the theme and intent of the fiery document of dissent -- written by America's greatest whistleblower, Thomas Jefferson -- that we celebrate every Fourth of July. See why the right, and their media machine, keep understanding of "kakistocracy" and "republic" out of our public education and public mind?

Achievement of Elements 1-4 -- a long-overdue major maintenance and tune-up of our republic -- would include corporate reform (beginning by eliminating "corporate personhood"), judiciary reform (even of today's corporate-right, religious-right Supreme Court), and political-influence reforms (especially lobbying, campaign-finance, and media reforms). These reforms are needed to fully heal the right's many deep wounds to our democratic processes, to our representative governance, to our equal justice for all, to our domestic tranquility needed for a united state of America and national common-cause cooperation, to our common defense and homeland/national security of our principled self-governance and whole common good, to our general welfare of many kinds including public education and healthcare as well as several forms of public safety and socioeconomic security, and to our liberty and its privacies and freedoms.

Cost of campaign-finance reform? $50 per taxpayer a year (study CivicPowerUSA.org). Eventual savings? $15,000 per taxpayer a year. The 300-to-1 return on investment, although not nearly as lucrative as today's wealth/corporate profits from campaign contributions to reds and blues, would strongly appeal to ordinary citizens. Members of the new Continental Congress, writers of the new Declaration of Independence, builders of the new political party: use this hot selling point to skyrocket voter turnout and guarantee landslide success of Element 4's democratic revolt.

The subversive problem and surefire solution are further explained within CivicPowerUSA.org, a big-picture full-solution democracy weapon/tool based on common heritage and common ground shared by all true Americans: our primal urges for justice, ancient human wisdom, early American history, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution, and Bill of Rights. By applying this democracy weapon/tool -- it comes from millions of people over the millennia, even from our DNA, not from this one concerned citizen -- conservative and liberal We the People can unite and cooperate to fight and defeat our dangerous right-wing common enemy, consolidated wealth-and-power and their media machine, and fully achieve our common dream of the lawful, humane, safe America embodied in our Three Charters of Freedom.