By the People, For the People

Open minded folks around the country are trying to get their heads around the incredible instability of the economy. History will report that the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of 8 years of Bush and Cheney. The Iraq War and deregulation in the financial sector were at the root of our collapse. 


But I am past the anger of how we got here, and attempting to join a positive movement seeking a path out of this maze. The most important question is: "What do we do about it now?"


Two good friends have offered up 2 significant ideas. The first proposal is "by the people." When the collective focus of spirit and intention by hundreds of thousands of people is brought to a crescendo on a given day, it will raise the consciousness of all 7 billion humans. This concept is rooted in the beliefs of authors and national speakers suggesting that if enough people pray and meditate on world peace, their combined energy will heal and inspire humanity.


The second idea is that the only path to real change in Washington DC is to add a terms limits amendment to our Constitution. In addition to limiting length of service, this amendment would reduce the financial benefits awarded to public servants, thereby turning over our Capital offices to citizens governing "for the people."


Will enough people get behind this movement? If you read through the following simple list of ideas for change, you probably will agree that this would alter the landscape and we would find a completely different kind of person wanting to serve. Holding a political position would be a privilege, not a career:


1. A two term limit - 2 years each


2. The salary is limited to basic housing and living expenses.


3. While in office, you get medical benefits and when you leave office you are eligible for nothing more than standard Social Security and Medicare


There are a number of non-profit organizations on the Web promoting a term limits amendment. I am researching their roots, and if I find one that I believe is worthy of your support, I will pass it forward.


In the meantime, a growing threat to the stability of our government is the Tea Party. Take a few minutes to read the following article. It will fuel you belief that this movement is ill advised.

The Right's delusions of world-historical grandeur

By Greg Sargent

Is the Tea Party movement comparable to the abolitionist, civil rights and women's suffrage movements?

As I've noted here before, it often seems like some on the right are suffering from what you might call a world-historical inferiority complex. They're so desperate to imagine themselves as actors in an ongoing drama that rivals the most momentous struggles in human history that they simply play-act the part, pumping up their own situation into something comically out of proportion with historical reality.

Here's another perfect example of this. "Tea Party Review," the first national magazine for Tea Partyers, is making its debut this week, and one of its founders explained the idea driving it by comparing the Tea Party to the most important movements in American history:

"People are weary of the distorted version of the Tea Party movement that we see in most of the media," said Katrina Pierson, a member of the Dallas Tea Party and the "national grassroots director" for the new magazine.

"Throughout American history, successful movements -- abolitionists, women's suffragists, the civil rights movement, the conservative movement, et cetera -- all had their own print publications."

I think it's a bit too soon to say whether the Tea Party deserves a place alongside those movements. Abolitionism and the civil rights movement, taken together, spanned more than a century, beginning with the founding of abolitionist societies in the early 1800s and culminating in the 1960s with the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. The abolitionists helped liberate millions of people who had been held captive under a deeply entrenched economic system -- the Slave Power -- that could only be overturned by decades of committed political activism, superhuman perseverance, and untold amounts of bloodshed.

Publishers of abolitionist newspapers routinely had their printing presses broken up by angry white mobs, a fate that is unlikely to meet the publishers of the new Tea Party magazine. Yet despite the fact that the threat and reality of violence against them was ubiquitous, the abolitionists envisioned and helped put the nation on a path to the first interracial democracy in human history, and the civil rights movement took major steps to codify that vision into federal law, one of the greatest historical feats of all time.

By contrast, the Tea Party can't boast that level of accomplishment yet. Federal cash from the stimulus, which originally sparked the Tea Party uprising, continues to flow. And the jury is out on whether the Tea Party movement will even accomplish what has become its primary goal: Liberating millions of Americans from the tyranny of Obamacare and the individual mandate. It's true that the Tea Party has elected a few dozen representatives to Congress. But Tea Party leaders -- Michele Bachmann, Steve King, Rand Paul, etc. -- have yet to attain the historical stature of great abolitionists and civil rights figures like Senator Charles Sumner, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, or great suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony.

But, hey, we can play make believe!