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The New American Declaration of Independence
by Mark E. Smith
Our Declaration of Independence set out some of our inalienable rights and stated that governments are instituted to ensure these rights. Yet when our government was formed and a Constitution adopted, it did not ensure these rights, with the consequence that today we have lost many of them while there are others that many of us never or only recently enjoyed.
Now there is a new American Declaration of Independence which can right these wrongs and ensure to us and to our posterity the inalienable rights that our Constitution neglected. It is called The Creekside Declaration and reads in full:
March 22, 2008. Our mission is to encourage citizen ownership of transparent participatory democracy.
That's a lot fewer words that the old Declaration of Independence, but it actually says a lot more and can accomplish a lot more.
Unfortunately, it was not fully understood by all of the signatories. Here's Bob Koehler's Tribune column:
http://commonwonders.com/archives/col439.htm
Koehler say that citizen ownership of transparent participatory democracy means “...a nation full of election monitors, demanding answers, standing tough when they are rebuffed or told, no, this information is not public (computer voting-machine source codes, exit poll data); or no, the public isn’t allowed here (vote-count premises); or sorry, we didn’t anticipate such a large turnout (not enough voting machines, not enough ballots). ...” He signed it, but he didn't get it. Transparent doesn't mean allowing secret vote counts and attempting to observe the unobservable and complaining about it when it isn't allowed or isn't possible. It means not allowing secret vote counts and not participating in elections with secret vote counts. They aren't democratic and we should not encourage them.
Here's signer Brad Friedman's story on the Creekside Declaration:
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5846
Brad asks, “Will our current crop of Presidential candidates, D and R and anything else, pledge to support the mission inherent in the Creekside Declaration? If so, will they then stand up for a paper ballot --- one that is actually counted --- for every vote cast in America?”
Brad gets the part about transparency, a tangible vote that is actually publicly and visibly counted, but he misses the part about participatory democracy. Here are some simple definitions:
Democracy: Government by the people.
A direct or participatory democracy is where the people govern directly. If there is an issue such as war or taxes that requires a decision, the people vote on it directly.
An indirect democracy or republic is where the people govern through representatives.
But a republic can only be called a form of democracy if it is the people and not the representatives who actually govern. Unless the representatives can be held accountable to the people, they are not obligated to govern on behalf of the people and, in fact, could govern on behalf of big corporations or on behalf of themselves if they wished. And here is where our Constitution failed to give us either a democracy or a republic. It did not provide us with a way to hold our representatives accountable. Rather than ensuring that we the people would govern through our representatives, it allowed our representatives to govern us.
Our Constitution does not allow us to even choose our leaders. The Supreme Court, the highest law of our land from which there is no appeal, is not elected by the people but appointed by a President. And we the people do not have the privilege of voting directly for a President or Vice-President. The popular vote may or may not be taken into consideration by the political parties, the Electoral College, and Congress, and even if they chose a President and Vice-President who corresponded with the ones chosen by the people in the popular vote, the loser could appeal to the Supreme Court and, if five justices happened to prefer that person, that would decide our next President. There is no appeal from a Supreme Court decision no matter how illegal and unconstitutional it may be, nor can we directly impeach, recall, or remove officials and representatives who refuse to allow us to govern and who carry out the will of multinational corporations instead of the will of the American people. Does that sound like government by the people to you?
In a participatory democracy decisions are not made by any unelected body but directly by the people. The need for transparency is so that there can be no doubt about how the people voted.
As I wrote in a comment below Brad's story:
Transparent participatory democracy is the only real democracy. Anything else is a sham.
In a government of, by, and for the people, the people have to govern. Trusting representatives to vote for us is like trusting somebody else to eat and sleep for us. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't --- there are some things that only we can do for ourselves and self-governance is one of them.
Whether or not it was a result of The Creekside Declaration there was some remarkable testimony from election reform activists to the federal Election Assistance Commission. For many years this community has been wrangling over DREs, optical scans, Voter Verified Paper Ballots, paper trails, audits, and other nonsense. This time they spoke with one voice and said clearly, “No secret vote count!”
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=5920
Brad's own statement is published in full at the above link, and you can see the statements from other activists by going to the EAC link he provides. Somebody commented that they ranked Brad's statement up with the Declaration of Independence, although they said they were exaggerating. My response was that Brad's statement, along with the Creekside Declaration, will, if we should ever attain the goal of citizen ownership of transparent participatory democracy, rank higher in history than the Declaration of Independence. The D of I, in a typical example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, led to our present fascist state, but citizen ownership of transparent participatory democracy would ensure our inalienable rights as set out in the D of I.
That must be our mission, if we choose to accept it.
