Examining who works for us, the U.S. citizens who pay the taxes and cast the votes, if our Congress doesn't heed our votes.

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        Question: if 2,480 of 2,500 constituents in Washington’s

        2nd District say “No” or “Hell, no!” (that’s 99.92%) and

        barely 1% (.008 percent) say “Yes,” to a $700 billion

        bail-out bill, yet their Congressman votes for it anyway,

        why do our civics texts still describe this nation as a

        representative democracy? 

My Representative [sic] in Congress is Rick Larsen (WA-02).  Rick calls himself a Democrat, although often he votes otherwise.  Rick’s flippant comment to a Mt. Vernon, WA audience not long ago highlighted the critical issue in our democracy today: Who, in the United States, works for whom?

Rick was home in the 2nd District, campaigning and trying to explain his feckless vote for a no-strings-attached $700 billion donation to the investment bankers who caused the sub-prime crisis.  Speaking to the Skagit Round Table, a local economic development association, Rick reported that his staff “has received 2,500 e-mails and phone calls from constituents in the 2nd Congressional District. The majority of them opposed the proposed $700 billion economic recovery package that failed in the House Sept. 29.” (goSkagit.com, 10/08/08)

Rick joked: “Fifty percent of those constituents said ‘No’ and the other fifty percent said ‘Hell, no’ to the proposal.”  His office, he admitted, received only about 20 comments supporting the proposed recovery package, which he nonetheless helped pass with his F**k-you-and-the horse-you-rode-in-on “Yes” vote (goSkagit.com, 10/08/08).  Rick later re-affirmed the facts of that story to the Skagit Valley Herald reporter.

A nice lady in one of Rick’s offices volunteered that Rick’s Congressional colleagues around the country had reported similar overwhelming constituent resistance to the buy-off, yet they, too, defiantly voted in favor of multi-billion dollar blank checks, heavily redacted contracts, and arbitrary determinations by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, himself one of the chief culprits of the securitized mortgage scam.

Who, In Reality, Works for Whom?

In private industry, as in not-for-profits, supervisor and subordinate rôles are generally well-understood.  Consequently, it is usually clear who works for whom.  And when a directive is issued by a supervisor, president, or other boss, subordinates know that failure to comply could lead to disciplinary action or termination.

In employment law a failure to follow a supervisor’s direct order (in the absence of a compelling legal or life-safety issue) is termed “insubordination,” and is considered “just cause” for termination.  What term shall we apply, then, to the insubordinate failure by so many of our Congressional representatives to follow what amounted to a direct and unmistakable order from so many of their constituents?

If my puppy-brained congressional representative on a two-year leash can be so cavalier about his irresponsible vote for a poorly-structured bail-out that will directly cost every American $2,200, yet provide (as we have seen in the subsequent stock market and mortgage foreclosure chaos) little or no protection to middle-class citizen-voters how, then, should thoughtful constituents remind their legislators of their solemn duty to REPRESENT their constituents?

Certainly we could, and should, at the next opportunity vote against the Rick Larsens and their fellow “representatives” who act irresponsibly, first by their failure to insist on firm bail-out guidelines and, second, by their willingness to be bullied into voting for nonsense legislation in order to say they have done something.

Broader Questions about Who, in the United States, works for whom?

On another level, Rick Larsen’s casual dismissal of 99.92% of his constituent-callers meshes oddly with recent stories about the ACLU’s F.O.I.A. request to the Department of Defense for documents about the location and deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team within continental U.S.A. for “crowd control”. 

Why, you ask?  Because whether it is (1) my Congressional Representative refusing to vote in accordance with a substantial majority of his constituents, (2) a Department of Defense official refusing a taxpayer request for information about Abu Ghraib or the domestic location of the 3rd Army, or (3) a U.S. Army soldier facing down fellow citizens with a loaded rifle, the underlying question remains: Who works for whom?

Today, the U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command (jargonistically abbreviated NorthCom to sound pompous and super important), is stationed for duty on U.S. soil for the next twelve months, during which time any one of us could conceivably find a fellow citizen (or their enlisted son or daughter), uniformed and armed, aiming their weapon directly at us under the rubric of “crowd control” after a natural or human-made disaster event, whether a simple flood or a complex terrorist attack.

Is it really hard to believe this scenario?  Ask the unfortunate African-American citizens of New Orleans who, in trying to cross a bridge to the safety of an exclusive all-white neighborhood on higher ground, were driven back at gunpoint into Hurricane Katrina’s dangerous flood conditions by—you guessed it—U.S. Army and National Guard soldiers, some of whom could have been their own neighbors, yours, or mine.

When Neighbors are Soldiers, Who Works for Whom?

I recall leading anti-Viet Nam war demonstrators at Ohio State University (OSU) in the 1960s.  My fellow students were understandably bitter that Lyndon Johnson, and later Richard Nixon, perpetuated a pointless intervention in south-east Asia, then lied about it, and stubbornly resisted the unmistakable popular mandate to withdraw our troops from Viet Nam. 

Given broad national consensus at the time that troops should be withdrawn without delay, Johnson’s refusal to act amounted to insubordination and led directly to his “termination of employment” by the American people.  Nixon resorted to trickery and deceit to delay his termination for insubordination, only to be hoisted by his own petard and forced to resign in yet another disgraceful scandal in his dubious career.  (BTW, Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, an accomplished liar even then, consults today on Iraq with George Bush, despite Kissinger’s record of being 100% wrong about Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia!)

In response to massive nationwide popular demonstrations in the late 1960s against U.S. support of Vietnamese military dictators, the OSU campus was invaded and occupied by the Ohio National Guard.  For a week, as I walked about the Oval observing my fellow protesters and moving groups of them around to maintain our defensive perimeter, I would see among the citizen-soldiers facing us several young men from my home town of Minerva, Ohio.  Most of the Guardsmen were about the same age as the students and faculty demonstrating against the war—but they had delayed college or taken local jobs soon after high school and joined the Guard for extra income and job training.

Once, in a shadowy haze of pepper gas, I saw a National Guardsman I knew fairly well.  I was tempted to call out, “Hey, Denny [Price], why are you doing this?  John [Helms] & Hutch [Al Hutchinson] are here on the Oval with me.  Would you really shoot us if we moved toward the Student Union?”  (Denny Price, unfortunately, was later killed in action in Viet Nam.)  That day I refrained from calling out to Denny, but only because of the difficulty it would have caused him had his Commanding Officer heard me.

Though I did not know her at the time, my wife was formerly a student at Kent State University, and was present on May 4, 1970, when members of another Ohio National Guard unit fired their rifles at her fellow Kent State students after Nixon’s announcement of the invasion of Cambodia.  These young National Guardsmen who failed to ask themselves “Whom do I really work for?”  were drawn into the needless tragedy of four innocent student fatalities and nine other gunshot injuries—one resulting in permanent paralysis—because they mistakenly placed the legitimacy of their commanding officers’ orders above those of their true “bosses,” the citizens of Kent, Ohio who sponsored and paid them through their votes and taxes.

At the time when Los Angeles (Watts), Detroit, and many other U.S. cities experienced severe racial tensions, Cleveland, Ohio, was also occupied militarily. Army tanks and jeeps with mounted machine guns blocked me from driving down Carnegie Avenue to pick up my girlfriend after her night shift at the Cleveland Clinic.  That morning I looked closely at the soldiers who faced me, but saw no one I knew.  Would they have seen me as a neighbor or as an enemy if I had insisted on driving past their tanks on my innocent errand at the Clinic?

Before this kind of scenario happens again—whether in response to economic conditions, terrorist attack, or natural disaster—we must ask ourselves what we should do if the NorthCom soldiers who are now deployed among us roll down our streets in their tanks, and stop us from getting our groceries or picking up our children at school, or, put another way….

Who Really Works for Whom?

Cindy Sheehan has said it so succinctly: “You [elected representative] do not work for Halliburton; you work for US!” (to paraphrase the sound clip often replayed on my local Air America station, AM 1090, Seattle, WA).

These are auspicious times for patriotic, Constitution-supporting, law-abiding U.S. citizens to prepare mentally for the possibility that friends and neighbors who are in the armed services could some day be ordered to prevent us, their friends and neighbors, from moving freely about our cities and neighborhoods.  How would the Second Amendment apply (“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed….”) if U.S. civilians must someday confront an armed occupying force, albeit one comprised of fellow U.S. citizens?

What shall we expect, that hypothetical day, perhaps after an earthquake or a human-caused event—when we, citizens, tax-payers, voters, order our Army, National Guard, or local police officers, to heed our command and defy their military commanders?

If we can’t convince our Congressional employee-Representatives today to vote as the majority wishes, how will we persuade Corporal So-and-so, deployed from Iowa or Nevada, to put down his or her rifle and join the majority of us on the streets to reassert that we don’t work for them; THEY, our soldiers and our locally-elected officials, work for us?

Authors Bio:
I am a progressive activist. After 28 years in health care management I left in disgust at the mess that commercial health insurance companies have created.

I must work to live (self-employed) and enjoy performing with several classical & jazz groups.