Accepting failure with Occupy, and being unemployed at the time, I applied to join the Reform Party and was accepted as a candidate for the presidential nomination. I ran for six weeks, long enough to create a website (We the People Reform Coalition) with the best ideas I could aggregate from others -- and to write to every other small party presidential candidate -- and one myself -- inviting them to join together to push the two-party tyranny aside and open ballot access for all. Without exception they refused. This is when I realized that it is not just the Democrats and Republicans that accept the status quo, but also the Greens and Libertarians and Reforms! What I learned during this campaign -- including the fact that there are eight accredited national parties that could be put on every state ballot for federal officer tomorrow if Congress were willing to make this a law -- is told in my Reality Sandwich article, How I Tested the Boundaries of the Two-Party Tyranny.
That was 2012. Since then I have watched in horror as a so-called "progressive" Administration has become the most fascist in modern US history. I have read a great deal more, absorbing hundreds of books on "democracy lost" and what to do about it. That book list, freely available online as Worth a Look: Democracy Lost & Found Essay, Book Review Blurbs and Links [Updated 3 MAR 2015] is what got me to thinking in 2014 when I noticed the Economics of Happiness Conference coming up in Portland OR in February 2015 did not have a workshop focused on restoring public power over our government.
From the Conference Web Site:
Open Power: Electoral Reform & the Open Source Toolkit The progressive world is fragmented across thousands of issues and even when agreed on a major issue, such as climate change, fragmented in behavior and consequently ineffective. There are two remedies for our public impotence, and both are converging in 2015. The first is Electoral Reform. The second is Public Empowerment with a free open source toolkit that makes possible information sharing and sense-making across all boundaries. The workshop will outline the specifics of the 2015 electoral reform campaign and the specifics of the new initiative to create a proactive public intelligence network. Recommended reading before attending: http://tinyurl.com/Steele-Reform.
Robert David Steele is a former spy, honorary hacker, #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction (reading in 98 categories), and a former candidate for president (Reform Party). He is the author of The Open- Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth and Trust. His recent profile in The Guardian has received 58,000 likes and put Open Source Everything into the meme pool. Learn more: www.robertdavidsteele.com
Below I am going to outline the fundamentals on the first half only, Electoral Reform. If you prefer learning about this stuff via video, here are four YouTubes:
- Steele in Portland on Electoral Reform (14 Minutes)
- Steele on Alex Jones (12 Minutes, distillation from 59 Minutes)
- Steele on Alex Jones without Commercials (59 Minutes)
- Steele on Max Kaiser (13 Minutes, Start at 12:26)
Let's start with what we have now: a two-party tyranny that has sold us all out to include eliminating any chance of our Senators and Representatives every actually representing the public interest. As the story is told in The Ambition and the Power: The Fall of Jim Wright: A True Story of Washington, Newt Gingrich not only destroyed Speaker Wright to achieve personal power himself; he destroyed bi-partisanship and stopped Congress from abiding by Article 1 of the Constitution (Congress as a balance of power against the Executive). Instead, he consolidated the control of the two political parties over their Members, and started the practice of selling all Member votes as a bloc to the highest bidders. Today we know that 42 specific billionaires "own" Congress, and that our so-called legislators neither write nor read the bills they ostensibly vote for -- lobbyists do the writing, and money does the voting.
Now let's move on to what I learned from my engagement with Occupy, my run for President, and the flood of information I received from electoral reform activists once I made Electoral Reform central to my presidential campaign -- these are just the highlights:
01 As long as the two-party tyranny controls Congress and the state legislatures, no Independent, Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Reform, Justice, or Working Families Party candidate can expect to gain access to the ballot, be elected, or be effective.
02 Breaking the two-party tyranny is easier than most might imagine. We simply have to come together and make it the ONE THING that we all demand. Set aside all issues, however important. Whatever your issue is, you will not make progress on it until we first retire the two-party tyranny and restore integrity to our electoral process.
Just to drive home the point that we are in desperate straits (and I agree wit the cited opening article that places us worse off than Greece in many respects), here I show a chart of all of the pre-conditions of revolution that exist today in the USA (and for that matter in the UK and many other European countries). The situation is BAD. Allowing our current dishonest government to continue will make matters WORSE.
This graphic, which I have seen in various forms, captures the essence of what others have written about, for example Vaclav Havel in The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe and Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress. We are insane to not recognize that we have the populist power to stop the two-party tyranny -- and in so stopping the two-party tyranny also stop the banking and corporate and other criminal abuses that the two-party tyranny has enabled.
If you have any doubts at all on this point, spend seventeen minutes watching Eric Liu, a high school civics teacher, on the topic of why ordinary people need to understand power.
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