INTRODUCTION

Philadelphia, July 4, 2006

Without vision, the People perish. And democratic government dies with them--

So the founders of this nation understood, and so they established not only a constitutional government of three branches structured by checks and balances, but also insisted that the first amendment be incorporated into the Constitution to guarantee that the freedom of the press and public opinion would serve as strategic institutions to allow the people to watch over government and make sure each of its branches fulfilled the responsibilities assigned it by the Constitution--to protect and defend the security, liberties, and well-being of the American people:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

But this July 4, as the people of this country approach the 2006 mid-term elections in the midst of an ill-defined and ill-fated “war on terror,” the securities and liberties that “we the people” established our system of constitutional government to protect are under threat as perhaps never before in the history of our nation:

As we have witnessed in recent days and months, the free press and the security of our fundamental human rights and civil liberties are threatened not only by an executive administration that justifies everything it does--including its attacks on the free press--in the name of prosecuting a perpetual war on terror; but also by a supine Congress that has failed to exert its proper constitutional responsibilities and powers to provide effective oversight of the executive administration in carrying out both its foreign (unsupervised practices of secret surveillance) and domestic (Katrina) responsibilities.

On top of these wrongs, we have allowed ourselves as citizens to be distracted and alienated from our own proper authority to control and direct our government, even as we have allowed private corporate interests to come to dominate the key political processes of elections and policymaking, on which the functioning of our democratic government depends.

To the wrongs of an overreaching executive office, and a supine Congress, we have thus added the evil of allowing corporate lobbyists and consultants to dominate the essential functions of our government, so that what should be the people’s government, our government—a government of the people, by the people, and for the people—has become largely their government—a government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.

Now more than ever, it is therefore important for us as individual citizens and as a nation to remember and put into practice the lesson emphasized by one of the wisest of our founders--the antislavery advocate, scientist, statesman, and philanthropist Benjamin Franklin: A People that sacrifices its liberties to achieve security is deserving of neither, and will probably end up losing both.

As a previous writer on Common Sense at the beginning of our nation’s history stated, “A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.” Today, the dominant custom in our government has become one of corporate lobbyists and consultants dominating both the primary political functions of policymaking and the elections essential to the maintenance of a democratic constitution.

And unfortunately we, as citizens, have by our distraction and inaction largely accepted this take-over as a fait accompli. Without the assistance of any military coup, our government has, for all practical purposes, been taken over by private corporate interests, which have come to so control the framing of elections and the policymaking agenda, that “we the people” have lost effective control of our government.

It is now time for us to unite as citizens of a democratic republic to take back the reigns of government from the corporate interests now controlling them.

For if self-government is the ideal of a democratic nation, and faithful representation of our common interests as citizens by our elected politicians in Congress is the basis of a republican nation, then corporate domination of the institutions of government is the antithesis and subversion of democratic republican government.

If we want to preserve anything resembling true democratic government in the United States in the twenty-first century, we must organize across this nation to take the reigns of government back into our hands as citizens, so that corporations cannot continue to dominate the electoral and policymaking processes in the guise of acting on behalf of the interests of the citizens of this country.

This call to action is addressed to the people of the United States in the belief that we the people still have it in our capacity, if we act now, to begin again the history of this nation, to renew its proud democratic traditions, and to re-establish here in our own country a democratic government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

For it is not by invading other countries with our military, but by remaking our own country according to the ideals of democracy, that we can most effectively influence the history of the world for the better in the twenty-first century--not only for ourselves, but for all people.

The laying a country desolate with fire and sword, and economic spoliation, declaring war against the natural rights of all humankind, and extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth, in our own or any other country, is the concern of every person to whom nature has given the power of human feeling; of which humble but patriotic class, regardless of Party censure, is the Author.*

In this spirit of common human feeling, I therefore offer in the following pages a basic challenge to the American people, supported by nothing more than common facts, readily available to the public, plain arguments, and common sense in pursuit of the goal of establishing effective democratic government in these United States:

I challenge you to join together with your friends, neighbors, and colleagues across the nation to organize a powerful nation-wide movement of citizens dedicated to taking your government back from the corporate interests that are, in their short-sighted drive for unrestrained profit and wealth, driving this country and the world to ruin.

However our eyes may have been dazzled up to this point by the show of corporate interest, and our ears deceived by the pandering of corporate lobbyists; however private prejudices may have warped our political wills, or corporate interests may have darkened our political understanding, I plead with all American citizens now to open their minds and hearts to the voice of democratic political reason (not narrow party prejudice or ideology) and common sense. And if you do so as a citizen, I am sure you will begin to see what you must do in the days ahead to win your government back to the service of the common good of the citizens of this country.

Introduction--Part 2

Perhaps the thoughts contained in the following pages about how we, as citizens, must reclaim the reigns of government from the control of private corporate interests, are not yet wide-spread enough to shape a fundamental reform of our politics in this year's mid-term elections. Perhaps these ideas about the kind of concerted action needed by the American people to make sure our elected representatives reassert democratic control over the practices of government are not yet common enough to bring about a nation-wide transformation in policy for the common good of all the people of this nation.

But if this be so, it is my hope that these pages may serve to provoke the kind of sustained public debate about fundamental issues of democratic government that may eventually affect, over the pivotal months ahead, the kind of revolution in political understanding and vision that will allow the American people to forge the unified political sentiment needed to renew the democratic institutions of this country, and to reestablish for ourselves and our posterity a government of the people, by the people, and for the common good of all the people of this nation.

Instead of a government of and for the private interests that now dominate the country’s political agenda and law-making, we need—now more than ever—a government that will work in our common interests to establish and enforce laws (for health, safety, energy independence, and environmental protection) for the common good of all the citizens of the United States, and not just for the wealthy few or the narrow corporate interests represented by the lobbyists that pay the highest bid. Our government and the policies by which we are governed should not be up for sale to the highest bidder in our cities, our states, or in Washington, D.C.

Under the current circumstances of economic globalization, many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and will challenge the faith and principles of all who believe that humankind can best govern itself and participate in fulfilling its highest destiny through democratic means. These circumstances have already deprived many people and nations of the world of the ability to participate effectively in determining their own destiny, and have caused many to lose faith in the powers of democratic self-government.

Terrorism is only one manifestation of that loss of democratic self-governing power and faith. Whether ever greater numbers of the people of the world fall victim to this loss of democratic power and faith in the years ahead may well depend on what the citizens of the United States are able to do, or fail to do, in the months and years ahead, to renew the effective institutions of democratic governance that make the perpetuation of the democratic faith possible.

Without the democratic practice to back it up, democratic faith becomes futile, at best, and at worst becomes a delusion or cover to distract attention from the imposition of the tactics of anti-democratic, imperial force. And without the creative vision needed to renew democratic practice, our democratic faith—even in this greatly privileged nation--may fail in the years ahead. The Author dearly hopes that what follows may begin to nurture a rebirth of both democratic vision and practice among the citizens of this country.

I have nothing more to say by way of introduction, except to ask that readers will, for the time they take to consider the words that follow, suspend their familiar opinions and views, and allow their patriotic feeling, combined with (rather than opposed to) their reason, to determine the justice and validity of the arguments presented here; and that in response to their reasoned consideration and discussion of these arguments, they will decide how best to put on the true character of democratic citizens for conducting the struggle ahead.

And I would pray that all of us in this pivotal election year may, as citizens, through open and vibrant discussion of the kinds of issues raised here, learn how to enlarge our views beyond those that have for too long restrained and enslaved our political imaginations, and have thereby kept us from acting effectively as citizens to pursue our own best interests and common good as individuals and as a nation. To this democratic struggle, and to the betterment of us all as citizens and a democratic nation, I dedicate all that follows.

*Who the Author of this production is, is not important at this time, since the entire object of this writing is to focus attention on the ideas and arguments here set forward, and on their implication for the immediate future conduct of the citizens of this country during this election year, regardless of the particular party or class background of this pamphlet’s author or its readers. Yet it may be said that the author has no official role or connection with any political party, and is under no sort of party influence, public or private, beyond the influence of the patriotic “party” of democratic republican reason and principle, upon which the best traditions of government in this country were established. Such reason and principle is all the more important to emphasize today, since both our dominant political parties have been governing in ways that defy and violate this reason and its principles. It is now up to the citizens of this nation to exert their democratic authority in action, in order to bring both parties back into line with principles of reasonable and good government. It is to this most truly progressive party of citizens, wherever they live and work, that the Author truly belongs.

[And from this same party of citizens I actively seek suggestions for the improvement of this work in progress. Please note your comments and suggestions in the comment boxes provided at the end of each section of this document. Thank you--]

1. An Urgent Appeal to Common Sense in Support of Democratic Government

As the people of this nation more than two hundred years ago initiated the great series of democratic political revolutions that in the course of the next two centuries would reshape the political geography of the world, I believe we can again reverse the recent tragic course of our government and begin to shape the history of the world in the twenty-first century for the better--rather than the worse--IF we commit ourselves as the people of this nation to achieving a revolution in the practices of democratic citizenship.

As Tom Paine wrote in 1776, “the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” While some would wrongly interpret and manipulate such universalizing sentiments to assert the imperial authority of the United States over the rest of the world, the democratic spirit of Tom Paine’s Common Sense tended in quite the opposite direction, and the import of this spirit remains powerfully relevant today—in this sense: If the citizens of the United States allow the leaders of this country to continue to abuse its unprecedented power in the world and to act more like an empire than a democratic republic, then the cause of humankind in the twenty-first century will be fundamentally harmed.

But if, on the other hand, American citizens stand up now for the best ideals of democracy by reasserting the principles of human freedom, justice, and rights on which this nation was established, and for which this nation at its best has stood, then the United States can in the years ahead reestablish for itself the respect in which most of the nations of the world once held it—before the current administration launched us on our present course of military interventionism and imperial ambition.

Our current crisis of government is by no means entirely new since this crisis in our democratic institutions has been growing ever since the middle of the last century when President Eisenhower warned the citizens of this country of the dangers to democracy of allowing a powerful “military-industrial complex” to develop without restraint.

But our developing constitutional crisis, which is being fostered by the ill-defined and potentially perpetual state of war--declared to be a so-called “war on terror”—along with the unprecedented powers our current President and Vice-President have been claiming in order to prosecute this war, and which powers our supine Congress has allowed them to assume with little opposition, has brought this long-developing crisis of democratic government to a head.

Because of this crisis in the institutions of democratic government, the citizens of this country now stand at a pivotal turning-point in American history, much as Rome did at the time its republic was converted into an imperial dictatorship by Caesar.

Unlike the people of Rome, however, the people of the United States have great historic and institutional virtues to build on, in the work of taking back our institutions of government, and pulling our country back from the imperial brink. We have firmly established traditions of citizen-rule, public opinion, civil rights, and the free press, to build on in our struggle to draw our government back to the work of representing the common interests of citizens, rather than the private interests of corporations and the imperial ambitions of a powerful few.

Our traditional institutions of self-rule, if we learn again to take them seriously, and to demand that our elected representatives take them seriously, will continue to provide us the surest instruments by which we can work together to turn back our government’s march into a new kind of corporate-imperial police state, and will allow us to take back our democratic control over the reigns of government.

To fail in this democratic responsibility as we struggle to reestablish in practice the principles of democratic and restrained self-government, which are the ideals for which this nation stands, will be to fail not only this country, but all humanity.

As long as the majority of our current government leaders continue to act with the presumption that, just because we are the most powerful nation in the world, anything we do must inevitably be for the good of humanity—such presumption will not only continue to erode the international respect in which this country was once held, but will fundamentally undermine the institutions of democratic republicanism on which our government was founded.

Continuing down this path will be for the United States to pursue the path of imperial Rome, rather than to continue to chart our own path as the longest-lived republic in the history of the world. We are now in serious danger of allowing our long history of struggle for the principles of democracy, human freedom, and justice to disintegrate into the same pattern of all other nations in history that surrendered their security and liberties in order to pursue unbridled power and wealth in defiance of the rights and feelings of the rest of the world.

Whether the United States pursues the same direction as these other failed nations in the years immediately ahead of us will depend almost completely on what the citizens of this nation now do. We cannot any longer depend on our leaders to show us the way. Our leaders have shown us where they would take us, and it is down the path to oblivion. So it is up to the citizens of this country to show its leaders where they need to take us if they wish to remain in office as our elected representatives.

If we do not reassert clear democratic control over our government, on behalf of the common good, and win it back from the corporate powers that now dominate it, we can be sure only of one thing: the future will not develop as we would wish it, either for ourselves or our posterity.

2. Worse than George II: Corporate Control of the Reigns of Government

While today we do not have the King of England to contend with in bringing about our needed revolution in the powers of citizenship, there is another Power, with the pretensions of overlordship, that is today’s equivalent of King George II of England. This overlord is not simply our own George II, who is in many ways only the most visible representation and (the least eloquent) spokesman for the real Power against which democratic citizens must struggle.

The present-day equivalent to old King George is not our current president, but the corporate powers which he and many of the members of Congress represent. This power is most directly manifest in the ubiquitous and dominating presence of corporate lobbyists, consultants, and their media spokespersons across the entire realm of our national and state governments.

As the corporate lobbyists and consultants have undertaken to shape the policies of our government according to their best interests, from their positions of power and wealth; and as the good people of this country have become grievously oppressed by this combination, we have an undoubted obligation to inquire into the pretensions that shape the behavior of both, and to reject their usurpation of our democratic rights as citizens. And so it is the purpose of the pages that follow to inquire into the pretensions that currently support and uphold the corporate domination of our government, to better understand what has so far kept the people of this country from reclaiming it for themselves.

But let us be absolutely clear about what is problematic with the power of corporations today: While the basic problem we need to address in this country in order to reestablish democratic forms of governance is the problem of corporate control over governmental decision-making, I do not intend to demonize corporations as such. Within their proper sphere, corporations are the great engine of modern economic life, and there is nothing wrong with them so long as they do not take the control of government away from the citizens to whom government owes its primary responsibility. So nothing in what follows is meant to imply that corporations are inherently evil.

Corporations can be the engine of great good, in their proper sphere as the engine of economic life. But outside this appropriate sphere, private corporations can also become the engine of great wrongs and oppression whenever the citizens and governments of any country allow them to take control of the institutions of political thought and decision-making.

It is this great wrong, and the numerous injustices that result from it, that the citizens of the United States now need most directly and immediately to address, if they wish to preserve any real democracy for their posterity.

So, to summarize: The core problem that the citizens of this country need to address is not the simple existence of private corporations. The wrong that needs to be remedied is the fact that the people of this country have, over the last fifty years, allowed corporations to take the place of citizens in holding and controlling the reigns of government.

We have allowed this to happen in spite of President Eisenhower’s warning to American citizens, in the middle of the last century, of the dangers to democracy of allowing a powerful “military-industrial complex” to develop without public restraint. Corporations will, by their nature, obviously seek greater power and control wherever they are allowed to do so. It is therefore up to citizens and their governments, not to demonize corporations, but to act to reassert their legitimate democratic authority to put corporations back into their appropriate place as the engines of economic development rather than the controllers of political decision-making.

Prevailing political discourse has so confounded private corporate interests with the public interests of government, that there seems to be little basis any longer for distinguishing them, which is of course precisely what most favors the continued domination of corporate interests over the common public interests of citizens in the future.

So long as political discourse remains so weak and vapid, without the clear means of highlighting the distinction between government practices and policies that favor corporate interests over the public interests of citizens, and so long as the dominant media continue to enforce a mode of discourse that “protects” the public from the real political struggle and contest of views that become visible when the distinction between private corporate interest and the public interest is exposed to the light of day, there will be little opportunity for the citizens of this country to begin to reclaim even the field of public discourse for the common good, let alone the institutions and practices proper to democratic self-government.

3. The Slippery Slope Into the War in Iraq, and the Failures of Democratic Nation-Building

Because of the fundamental confusion of private and public interests in framing the rationale, policy, and the means for going to war in Iraq, the United States was doomed to get bogged down in a tragic quagmire because it took upon itself an ideologically-motivated mission of democratic nation-building, without having first rediscovered for itself what democratic institutions of for its own self-government were required of both the leaders and agents of democracy in any country.

Democratic institutions within the United States were already failing, for lack of understanding and nurturing, and in such a context of self-inflicted blindness the new executive of the United States took up a mission of democratic nation-building in Iraq. From the beginning, unfortunately and tragically for all, this was a mission of the blind leading the blind.

The failure of this imperial mission, for anyone with eyes to see, was inevitable. Without Vision, the people and democracy both perish. And it has become all too obvious that beyond the lies that helped move the United States into war, the fundamental lack of democratic vision made the people and institutions of the nation not only susceptible to being manipulated by those lies, but set it up to fail utterly in the fundamental tasks of democratic nation-building once Saddam Hussein had been overthrown.

If the new leadership that took over the White House in 2001 had, for example, paused for just a moment to consider the first and most basic principle of democratic nation-building, which is that you cannot impose democracy on a people by military means, our government would not have made the first great mistake in the conduct of the Iraq War, which was to assume that the only important planning was the military planning that went into overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Anyone truly interested in, and committed to, democratic nation-building at home or abroad understands that the second key principle of democracy building is the need to support, nurture, and provide a secure and safe environment for the development of the civil institutions of democratic society. Such understanding would have put a premium [as the United States did after World War II in its occupations of Germany and Japan,] on the importance of providing the kinds of military police and security forces that would have established secure order and peace, immediately after the formal end of the war.

That neither of these two fundamental principles seems to have been clearly comprehended, either by the executive administration, the Congress, or the Press (which was largely uncritical of the conduct of the war), only underlines the degree to which the basic understanding of the fundamental institutional prerequisites of democracy had disintegrated among the political and cultural leadership of the United States.

But because our country’s leadership is by no means simply stupid, we must enquire more deeply into the reasons this most basic understanding of the two primary principles of democratic nation-building was so easily and completely ignored in the conduct of the Iraq War--in ways that have had fatal consequences for not only every family of the 2400+ US soldiers killed, and the tens of thousands maimed in Iraq since May 2003, but also for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed and maimed since Bush gave his “Mission Accomplished” victory speech on the deck of the USS Lincoln.

Why were these fundamental democratic principles of nation-building not part of the planning or conduct of the war in Iraq? If they had been, the insurgency might have been suppressed from the beginning, and tens of thousands of American casualties, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, might have been spared.

This is where the confusion between private and public interests becomes pivotal for understanding the failures of not only the war in Iraq, and the so-called war on terrorism, but also the ongoing failures of our government’s response to Katrina, and its failure to serve the real needs of national security and civil liberty within the United States. In the absence of clear distinctions between public and private interest, and the democratic vision that can develop only on the basis of such distinctions, these failures, and many others yet to come, are inevitable.

In the absence of any clear distinction between private corporate interest and the common good of the peoples of the United States and Iraq, the military intervention became a corrupt game of war profiteering, and the profits of the few came at the price of the blood of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

4. The Distinction Between Corporate Interests and the Public Good

Private corporations as instruments of the pursuit of private profit are not evil by nature, or destructive of the common good, if their limited purpose and value are clearly understood, and arrangements are made to allow them to fulfill their proper role within the larger frame of a well-regulated democratic commonwealth.

Corporations are powerfully constituted to serve the economic and social purposes for which they were originally created: to produce profits for their shareholders. In order to create profits, they must employ labor, and produce products, both of which can be good things for the nation, so long as the processes of employment and production do not unfairly exploit the labor of employees, or do damage to the environment in the process of production.

But problems develop for democratic government when corporations are allowed to pursue profit without any appropriate governmental oversight, for it is then that processes of labor exploitation, environmental degradation, and political corruption develop.

This is why one of the basic functions of good government is to set up the appropriate laws, rules, and regulations to provide a fair field of play for all corporations, so that all can profit without unfairly exploiting labor or the environment, and without having unfair advantage over other corporations in competition with them. This is the ideal embodied in the fair market, which depends on good government for its order and the administration of it rules.

As in any human endeavor, if someone does not enforce the rules of fair play, the law of the strongest, which can quickly descend into the law of the jungle, often comes to prevail, and to determine winners and losers with little regard for the common good of either private corporations or the labor and environment that are required for a sustainable and productive market society.

In order to have effective and good government, which can provide clear and fair laws and rules for the effective regulation of private corporate interests to foster the common interest of all, it is vital that these same private interests do not dominate the rule and law-making process. If one of the main functions of government is to provide the rules that will protect the common good, the representatives of government must have the independence of judgment and vision that will allow them to make laws and policy for the primary purpose of achieving the common good, rather than to have them making laws and rules to favor only some individual corporation, or combination of private interests that seek to substitute their own interests for those of the public good.

The palaces of dictators and tyrants are built on the ruins of democratic government that result from the unbridled pursuit of private profit without regard for the common good. The infrastructure of modern civilized life public life is provided by roads, schools, hospitals, and the laws and public services that would not exist without good government. The distorted idea so popular today that makes government a negative that human beings would somehow always be better without serves only the imaginations of those self-deluded enough to think they would actually be better off living in a state of nature, without any public services.

Yet this negative mythology of government, propagated for the benefit of corporate interests and great private wealth, is so overwhelmingly dominant today that no one in public life seems to be willing to suggest that paying taxes to support the government might be the most valuable act of public life that any citizen can perform. Or that paying taxes might actually be the best form of philanthropy for wealthy people to participate in.

Once again, the lack of distinction between public and private interests causes all to think of government as somehow the enemy of their private interests, so that no one is able to speak up for the positive and absolutely essential value of government, which provides the public infrastructure that makes all private civilized life, including the profit-making of activity of corporations, possible.

Of course, the mere existence of government institutions by no means guarantees that the public interest will be well-served, since bad government may do more harm than good to the common public interest. But the best way to guarantee that we will have bad, rather than good government, is for citizens of any country, and especially the wealthiest citizens, to fail to pay their fair share of taxes, and fail to guarantee the election of representatives who can recognize and act in behalf of the public good, over and above private interests.

This awareness is at the core of good government: its institutions, and its public servants know how to distinguish between private interests and the public good, and by recognizing the fundamental importance of this distinction, they have the most essential tool by which they can focus on serving the needs of the public good, and be on guard against being led astray, or held hostage, by private interests.

Of course, were human beings perfectly virtuous, and able on their own to always act in behalf of the public good, in spite of their private interest, we would need no government to regulate our behaviors in favor of the common good. But it is precisely the great virtue of good government in the modern era, that unleashes the power of private interests to pursue profit without having to guess at how they should restrain themselves to protect the public good, which self-regulation would always put the most virtuous and public-spirited at the greatest disadvantage, since the least restrained and self-regulated would tend to profit the most, while the more self-restrained would profit the least, and the market would work in ways that were the antithesis of fair.

By allowing and cooperating with government to allow it to set the same rules to govern the market for the benefit of all, the full powers of ordered liberty are unleashed to be their most profitable for both the individuals directly associated with corporate pursuits, and for the society overall. This is the great virtue of good government, which establishes the equitable rules for all corporations to pursue profit with the least restriction, so long as labor and the environment are not exploited to the detriment of all.

Here then is the origin and foundation of good government, which is always necessary because the imperfect moral virtue of individuals is never enough in itself to guarantee that human beings can live well together without their cooperation as fellow citizens to make up for their mutual imperfections through the public work of government. And here too is the design and end of government: the guarantee to its citizens of both freedom and security from the depredations of powerful private interests, both corporate and terrorist.

Far from being a drag on individual virtue and achievement, government, at its best, is the great instrument human beings have as citizens to help them to correct for their individual imperfections in ways that can create superb monuments of human achievement and good out of the imperfect materials of human life.

It is time, once again, for the citizens of these United States to rediscover (as we did during the Great Depression) the great work we can do together through government if we take back our government from the control of corporate interests and use it as it was meant by the founders to be used by its citizens—to achieve the greatness of human political achievement for the common good.

5. Toward a Common Sense Policy Agenda for the Common Good

That the interest of every part of the country may be attended to, representative government will work best when the elected do not form to themselves an interest separate from the electors. This is why it is not only to have frequent elections, and for the elected representatives to frequently returning home to mix with the public that elected them, but also to have clear laws against the kinds of campaign finance funding that lead elected representatives to have interests more in accord with corporate lobbyists, who become their paymasters, than with the people of their district who elected them to office.

The frequent interchange between elected representatives and the citizens who they represent, will be most firmly secured by such campaign financing laws, as this frequent interchange establishes a common interest with every part of the community the politician is supposed to represent, and allows the community and its elected representatives to mutually support each other. On this interactive mutual support between citizens and their duly elected representatives (not on corporate lobbyists and consultants) depends the strength of democratic government, and the happiness of the governed.

The fidelity of elected politicians to the citizens who elected them, rather than to corporate lobbyists on which too many politicians come to depend for their campaign financing, must now be secured by clear and strong laws that establish campaign finance reform across the country, but especially the nation’s capitol. Mandating publicly financed campaigns, with clear limits on private contributions, and especially on contributions from corporations, would be the best way to achieve this kind of reform, to begin to take political campaigns and the electoral process back from the corporate lobbyists and consultants.

If the citizens of this country finance electoral campaigns through public financing regulations, then politicians will once again have to address the needs and interests of citizens in the development of policies to achieve the public good, rather than the corporate interests that demand attention when corporate lobbyists and wealthy individuals with corporate interests provide the major share of campaign financing.

So taking the electoral process back through clear and rigorous public campaign finance laws is one primary step toward taking our government back for the benefit of the citizens of this country. There are many good proposals already developed for implementing such laws, and all that is necessary now is for the majority of citizens in each state and congressional district to rise up and demand such reform with a clear voice that says no politician, republican or democrat, will be elected to office unless they are clearly dedicated to pass such reforms.

Second, is the much more difficult process of regaining control, as citizens, of the law and policymaking process in this country. This is much more difficult than campaign finance reform because, while electoral campaign reform is one policy and legal issue, with a clear focus, taking back the overall process of policymaking will require fundamental reforms of the way our entire political process works. Yet this, too, is just as possible as campaign finance reform, if the majority of this country’s citizens, young, old, and middle-age, poor, wealthy, and middle-class, become active in vocally demanding that such policymaking reforms be initiated.

There are two primary prerequisites of citizen action required to achieve significant reform of the policymaking process to take it back from corporate lobbyists and consultants, and bring it back to the service of the common good of all US citizens.

--The first prerequisite is the same as that required for campaign finance reform: an aroused and vocally engaged citizenry of all ages and economic and social classes.

--The second prerequisite for taking back the policymaking process is a clear citizens’ agenda of policy reform, which makes clear the distinction between the private interests of corporations and the common public interests of citizens.

In order to articulate such a citizens' agenda that makes these distinctions clear, the first thing we need to do is reject the idea, invented by corporate interests, that citizens are merely consumers of government services. This whole consumer framework, which came into predominant use by government during the 1990s, is fine for the market in private goods, but is completely inappropriate for the public goods that citizens are responsible for providing for themselves through good government. Citizens are not the consumers of government; they are its producers, managers, and directors.

The idea that citizens can be treated as consumers of government services, as if these services are just like any other products of the private market-place, is the greatest symbol and sign of the way that not only have corporate interests taken over the policymaking process, but they have taken over the fundamental framing of the way citizens are being asked to understand their own relationship to government.

Because getting the entire perspective on government is so crucial to creating the right context for policymaking, it is essential that the first element of any citizens’ agenda for the democratic common good clearly reject the consumerist frame, and recognize that when it comes to our government, citizens are in charge, and are by no means confined to the subordinate position of being simple consumers. This is where clear distinctions between the public interest and the corporate interests begin.

The government is not the market, though corporate interests would love to have citizens continue to think of the government in this way, since that gives them full reign to treat government as if it is just one more part of the market which they have the right to dominate and control for private profit. If citizens do not want a government that is treated like just another part of the private market, they must clearly reject the consumerist mentality when it comes to thinking about, and acting toward their government.

As we reject the idea that citizens are mere consumers of government, and realize that we are its producers and authors, we make clear the most foundational distinction between private corporate interests and public interests, on which everything else in the entire citizen’s agenda for democratic policymaking depends: As citizens, we are not consumers of government as if it is something produced by foreign entities separate from us.

This is our relationship to corporations. As citizens, we consume the products of corporations, and do not have any direct influence over the decisions that corporations make. Corporate interests would like us to believe that our relationship to government is the same, so that citizens feel disempowered in their relationship to government, and do not feel they have any direct influence over the decisions made by government.

If the majority of US citizens act toward their government the same way they act toward private corporations, then the government has become, for all practical purposes, just like a corporation. And Americans have surrendered their own fundamental control over their own government. And the corporations are all too happy and willing to supply the direction and control to government that citizens have surrendered.

So, dear fellow citizens of the United States, if you wish to continue to have a government that treats you like consumers, like people who have no direct authority to determine what it does, than simply do nothing, and you will continue to get exactly the kind of corporate-controlled government you have been getting for many years now. But if you wish a different kind of government, one that will once again serve your interests, and become your government, and that will treat you as a sovereign citizen rather than a consumer, you need to rouse yourself to action, and demand that your government become yours again, by working with others to assert your legitimate authority over the decisions that government makes, so that corporate interests will no longer continue to have free reign to make decisions, in your absence, for you.

If you do not want private corporate interests to continue to make decisions on your behalf, as if their decisions can ever accurately reflect the public interests of citizens, you need to make sure you are at the decision-making table. And you can do this by working with others—joining together with the many already constituted citizens and public interest groups working to take policymaking back, or by creating with others your own public interest group—to demand that your government begin to make policy according to your interests, rather than according to the private interests of corporations.

As you assert your full authority as a sovereign citizen to be a primary part of the decision-making process in governmental policymaking, you will also need to develop a clear framework for talking about the kinds of policies that reflect the common interests of citizens, and distinguish your interests from private corporate interests, and thereby provide a clear basis for distinguishing a set of citizen-based policy priorities from what is now in place as a primarily corporate-dominated policy regime.