Why gates don ensure domestic tranquility

Generally speaking then IdT's interest is in the equity in the self-generating, self-replicating system we call human society, particularly in the United States and as it is influenced by the organizing documents of the system that is our nation. We are deeply indebted to Dr. Marley for this analysis.

Look at these concepts carefully. The preamble says, "We the People," the Declaration says,. If the people are the sovereign then they must act like the sovereign and require their government to provide the legal and fiscal environment for each citizen sovereign to enjoy the unalienable rights endowed them by their Creator.

This is their equity in the system. When this happens our social welfare program will be reduced to a minimum, our citizens will have access to the processes their rights give them and they can look after themselves.

Nobody wants a welfare state, nobody wants the poor. Well the way to change all that is to give people their unalienable rights, enfranchise them in the society, and they will become the middle class. Give them access to their equity. Rugged individualism, while it was a valuable virtue on the frontier, is not the valid modus operandi for the enlightened democracy.

We are seeing greater and greater evidence that cooperation produces more overall wealth, a healthier and safer work place and a livelier school situation. Not that individualism is bad per se.

It is not. Most artists are not cooperators, for instance, but a society that sees a competitive edge by depriving certain members their unalienable rights is a sick society, especially when there is enough to go around. Like the census takers are persons eligible to vote should be sought out and enrolled, by voting registrars. Persons failing to vote would need a note from their mother, their doctor or pay a 25 to 50 dollar fine.

How can the government rule with the consent of the governed when the governed don't participate and in many instance are encouraged not to participate. We have to get rid of the Electoral College as a last vestige of a slave society whose landed aristocracy was afraid of the people.

Their heart was in the right place. Their pens allowed for a time when their thoughts would need changing and the courts and various amendments have through the years proven them right. More changes are needed to achieve the democratic state our forefathers started but knew they couldn't finish in their life times. We escaped from an enlightened monarchy, we had a flying start at republican democracy.

We have to be a better example to the world than just a bunch of spoiled privileged children exploiting both our European heritage and the natural resources of the Indian Nations of North America.

Taking a hard look at the ecological properties of our society and our government will point the way to the needed adjustments, which can evolve as our society moves from a human economy to a humane economy, from a human to a humane society, from property based human morality to a humane morality based upon the principle of the unalienable rights and ecological equity. The Institute for domestic tranquility looks at the evolutionary history of man, both biological and technological, the properties of man, economics, the law and the two great touchstones of our democracy, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence an is attempting to see the ecological relationships among them.

As Chris Maser puts it, "We view governments and society as subsets of the biosphere. Animal morality is the "Law of the Talon. Who can stay on the top of the hill against the force of all others. Animal morality relates to territory, held during the time of ones prime but lost to the vigor of youth, or the procession of a harem lost to the same cause.

Animals live in real time for the most part and occupy niches in the ecological scheme of things in accordance to their evolution derived endowments. Ecological systems without man display equity, all of nature displays equity, the partitioning of resources.

The "Big Bang" was a decision system and "our" equity from it is the positive matter universe. Animals and plants occupy ecological niches and exploit their abilities to compete. In the animal world there are predators and prey, alpha and beta animals. Alpha animals like the blue shark which apparently do not know fear, and rabbits and mice which are the prey of larger animals are examples. Humans are beta animals from the standpoint of evolution but with super alpha power through technology.

The evidence is clear that humans have learned to use that power benignly and positively and destructively and negatively. The possibility for a human morality arose with the shift from the concept of territory to the concept of property. Territory is a real time procession held for the time the individual has the power to hold it. Property is a language based technology function which is perpetuate through time.

Property but not territory can be inherited. Property gives rise to economics and economics and property give rise to human morality. The Ten Commandments are full of property and economics related injunctions; Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Even worshiping false gods might lead to tithing to the wrong church. During the riots that occurred in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley said it all, "Shoot the looters.

In the Middle Ages and beyond when a good horse was worth more than a slave, purchase price that is, the nobility that owned such horses might get severely irked if an hapless person were to be run down by such a horse injuring the horse.

World War II, the regular insurance companies would not offer life insurance to military personnel in time of war. The government underwrote to program. The government made a ton of money which it distributed to the military in the form of dividends. The demographics of war worked wonderfully in favor of the insurance.

Millions went into service only hundreds of thousands saw any combat, hence a large profit for the insurance venture. In the Korean Conflict and in the Vietnam War private companies provided the insurance. The economics of the world of human morality speaks to disequalities and redistribution efforts to amend these disequalities. This is the world of "All men are created equal," which was a misstatement when Jefferson wrote it and is a destructive myth.

Both statements are false. Malthus was wrong and all men are not equal. There is enough to go around, our technology has always seen to that, and one day transportation and communication systems will make it go around.

Recall Jefferson's words, "and to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. The citizen should get what every other citizen gets; the unalienable rights, equity in the system, for which purpose the government was established. Remember we have two recipes for government: one, Jefferson, is an autecological approach, individuals and the unalienable rights. The second the Constitution with its preamble with both autecological and synecological properties, justice and welfare for individuals and defense and tranquility for communities.

We know we can spend unlimited amounts to counter our beta brained paranoid fear of foreign aggression. What we have yet to discover is that we can spend just as lavishly for domestic Tranquility and for much better purposes.

Spending for defense is just what it says it is, spending. Spending for domestic Tranquility is investing in our future. Does the tax collector get more money from the killing of people or the healing of people do we get more taxes from unskilled uneducated, illiterate people, or highly trained, skilled and literate people. The comparisons become sheer nonsense.

Defense and war time prosperity is the grandest illusion of Western Society. Japan and West Germany, our two former enemies whom we pacified speak eloquently to the matter. They are on a peace time economy and we are on a war time economy. They are making money and we are borrowing it from them and selling our capital assets to foot the bill. Glasnost and perestroika are essential if the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries are going to emulate Japan, not the United States.

We are not the model. Its not democracy the Russians want it is economic power. We have the best social framework. We have the most workable social model. Do we need a strong defense? Yes we do but the money spent for defense should be spent on defense not to achieve some social or ideological goals. We have to protect and advance our political hegemony. We also have to protect and advance our economic hegemony.

Both must work in tandem. We can not borrow for defense, neglect the infrastructure, allow business and industry to go hog wild on borrowed money and expect to retain any semblance of leadership either at home or abroad in either our economic or political hegemony. We just have ignored several of the most important parts of the legacy of the founding fathers in our pell mell pursuit of human values greed while losing sight of the humane values.

The World System is harsh and unforgiving. Immanuel Wallerstein makes this quite clear in his two volume work, the World System. He and some of his colleagues indicate in other papers that the game may already be lost to Japan. Fernand Braudel in his three volume history of capitalism describes in great detail how economic strategies rose and fell and how western civilization thrived on innovation and creativity.

Both Wallerstein and Braudel are ecologists as well as sociologists and historians. Are we doomed to go down like the Roman or British Empire? We are different. We have a system of government that is capable of great, sudden and swift course corrections. Has our leadership smelled the coffee? It protects democratic governance, ensuring regular elections of those who hold most key offices. It creates a structure of government that provides checks and balances, such as the separation of powers at the federal level and the division of powers between the federal government and the states.

It seeks justice, such as ensuring that no person is deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. It safeguards liberty and, especially in the Bill of Rights, protects fundamental rights such as freedom of speech and the press, religious freedom, trial by jury in criminal and civil cases and protection from cruel and unusual punishment.

It promises equal protection of the law. Many constitutional provisions did this. Article 1, Section 9, prohibits Congress from banning the importation of slaves until , and Article 5 prohibited this from being amended. Article 1, Section 2, provides that, for purposes of representation in Congress, enslaved black people in a state would be counted as three-fifths of the number of white inhabitants of that state. Ultimately, it took a Civil War and constitutional amendments to eliminate slavery.

But racial inequalities that can be traced back to slavery have existed throughout American history and persist today. Dean Erwin Chemerinsky gave a talk on the perilous state of the U. Constitution this summer.

UC Berkeley photo courtesy of Berkeley Law. The Constitution also is flawed in not being true to its democratic premises. The Electoral College means that candidates who lose the popular vote can be elected President of the United States. This has happened five times in American history, including in and In no other country in the world that considers itself a democracy can the loser of the popular vote be deemed the winner of the election.

The Electoral College is inconsistent with the most basic notions of democracy. Likewise, the method of choosing the United States Senate cannot be reconciled with democracy. Every state gets two senators as a result of a compromise made at the Constitutional Convention in Nor will this change: Amending the Constitution requires approval of three-fourths of the states, and there is no way that states which benefit from this will ever approve changes that decrease their political power.

The Constitution is silent on how it is to be enforced. Without enforcement, the document is little more than just words on parchment. The power of courts to enforce the Constitution is nowhere mentioned in the document. In , in Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court held that the judiciary has the power to declare laws and executive action unconstitutional. The court explained that the Constitution was meant to limit government, and without enforcements, those limits would be meaningless.

He won his first seat in the House of Representatives by accusing his opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas of communist sympathies. His accusations, however, were not upheld. Jimmy Carter ran against the bureaucracy. He had a number of good ideas, but how to run the executive branch of the Federal Government was not one of them. Reagan gave us the "Evil Empire" in spades with cooked up intelligence estimates and a feel-good-be-happy, it's "Morning in America," way to look at life.

George Bush, as noted above, ran on a platform of Willie Horton, etc. Twenty years of mobocracy has so completely, turned off the electorate that "None of the Above" got a substantial vote in the primaries of several states this year, and numerous polls indicate that people will not vote because there are no acceptable choices among the candidates.

The poor have been dropped out of the election process altogether. And who can expect them or, for that matter, even the middle class to participate in a presidential election process when all they can do is vote either for Twiddle Dee or Twiddle Dum? Instead of discussions of issues vital to the future of our lives and the life of our nation, we get strident, blatant, glaring, and obtrusive emotional appeals to prurient information about the personal lives of the candidates.

Who needs this? The Federal Campaign Reform Act had raised some hope that the playing field for presidential elections would be leveled. The law requires small contributions from many citizens to qualify for Federal matching funds, and relatively modest limits were set on the general election. As usual, however, money seeks its own level. Through the cracks and crannies it crept in so that today the Federal campaign funding process has been so completely prostituted that it is farcical to think of the system as fair or honest.

The Federal funds in the general election may be in the range of twenty to thirty, million dollars per candidate. Bush is estimated to have more than ten times that amount in "soft money. Prostitution is the right word. The sacred electoral process of the republic has been prostituted by the profane money grubbers. One of the reasons Ross Perot is an acceptable alternative in this sordid process is that, at the least, we know where the money is coming from and what special privileges it will buy.

Since Perot is buying the presidency for himself he is not beholden to any money grubber but himself. The American people have a special fondness for independent men, whether they are John Wayne on the lone prairie or Bill Gates at Microsoft. This characteric constitutes Perot's folk-appeal: A truly independent man who would be president.

Independence may be a great trait for a president, but the process that goes with it happens to be a lousy way to run a republic. It relegates to the citizens-sovereign passive roles in what should be an active process. There is a basic question we should ask: For whom should the elected representatives of the people work?

We the People are the sovereign. A republic is a government where the supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives: Should the citizens-sovereign, We the People, abdicate our power and authority to money grubbers and magnates that pay for an election?

Should the representatives that we passively approve through a truncated election process share power with the people who pay for elections? Should the definition of our republic be a government where the supreme power is held by the people who pay for elections and their bought-and-paid-for representatives?

That is exactly what we have now, and it flies in the face of everything we hold sacred and feel reverent toward in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. We blaspheme our sacred texts, we prostitute our exalted republic, we profane the hallowed ground trod upon by generations of patriots who fought and died for our liberty.

We have sold out the nation to an immoral, iniquitous, corrupt, monied class whose principles of conduct, said Horace are, "Make money, money by fair means if you can, if not, by any means. Money is of utmost importance in a technological society, but it should not be used to diminish the power of the citizens-sovereign, to arrogate functions of the government to favor one class of the society over other classes of the society, or to inhibit millions of people from voting.

Government should not be the toy, of the magnates. Representatives and Senators should not be property. Elected representatives of the citizens-sovereign should not be able to enrich themselves on unused campaign funds.

Before the advent of PACs the Federal government was thought to be relatively immune from influence either by business, big or small, or the magnates. There, in fact, existed the notion that the Federal Government, since it could not be bullied around like the state and local governments, should collect taxes, then, through revenue sharing, should pass the taxes down through the system to state and local governments read that, cities. Considering the present condition of the government, this concept is mere wishful thinking.

The pitiable condition of our Federal Government came about because of the machinations of the magnates and the special interest PACs. They supported Reaganism, which gushed money from the middle and lower classes to them because of the Federal government's failure to collect taxes from them, because the Federal Government went on a defense spending binge from which the magnates profited, and because the Federal Government incurred a huge debt which allowed unlimited, risk free investment for the magnates who have millions or billions to invest in the debt.

One-person-one-vote took care of the injustices of Jeffersonian democracy. The cities, after centuries of supporting the development of rural America, East and West, finally got some say in their own legislatures and the needs were beginning to be heard in Congress.

Along came the behemoth of the money express, the presidency was captured by the magnates, the government was divided, and we found ourselves in a real mess. Enormous deficits that have significantly inhibited business and industry, a rotting infrastructure which imperils and inhibits economic activity, a defense establishment ready to fight wars on three continents and seven seas in time of peace, and worse than anything yet, a divided, nation.

The nation is divided by race, religion, and class. Our presidency actually intervened with business and industry to inhibit finding an accommodation with labor over the conditions of employment. The only union man we have ever had as president busted a union and poisoned the waters for management labor relations for eight years. There can be no better time to re-examine the basis for our government.

There can be no more appropriate time to examine concepts and theories of government put forth by the Founders and Framers and examine them in the light of our modern condition. We must reform the electoral process or we will cease to exist as a viable entity. We will become the suzerain of our creditors, Japan and Germany. One-person-one-vote solved the problem of the ecological equity of the representational basis of government.

The problem is that money has made one-person-one-vote irrelevant. To restore relevance to one-person-one-vote, private money must be removed from the electoral process. We have privatized the electoral process to the extent that it no longer works for the citizens-sovereign, and while citizens-sovereign's money is not spent on elections, neither are the citizens-sovereign being served by government.

Let's start with the reasons we have our government. The recipe for government in the Declaration is an autecological analysis for the reason for government, that is to secure certain unalienable rights for individual persons. The sacrosanct text is:. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they, are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That when any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such princples and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Since The Articles of Confederation were superseded by the Constitution, they are no longer relevant.

Some future convention following all the niceties of the law could convene and give us a new governing document superseding the Constitution.

On the other hand, the Declaration Of Independence is unalienable. It can not be changed without overthrowing the nation and establishing a new nation. A revolution could overthrow our present government, declare the nation to be in a "State of Nature," and establish a new government on new principles. Or we could be conquered by an outside military force and a new form of government could be imposed upon us. In only these two ways can the Declaration be superseded.

As long as our nation proceeds from the Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Paris, the Declaration is the bedrock upon which the nation rests. Having said that, and having established that the fundamental document of our existence as a nation is the. Declaration of Independence, we note that it is the Constitution that rules our daily existence as a nation. It is the set of rules by which we govern ourselves and conduct our lives and the life of the nation.