LoD

Updated Thursday, October 15, 2009

Background image of painting by Jasper Johns. USA Flag. 1954-55.
Encaustic, oil, and collage on fabric mounted on plywood (three panels)
42 1/4 x 60 5/8 (107.3 x 154 cm).
Original painting on exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY.
What the artist who produced this masterpiece of Contemporary American pop art has done,
"is to at once love and question the US. And perhaps no artist ever did both quite so compactly
as Jasper Johns when he painted an American flag."
Johnathan Jones, The Guardian, London, UK (April 22, 2003).

I.
The New Slave Masters

James A. Colaiaco
Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July
ORATION

America is "a land of inconsistencies and contradiction--aspiring to be honest, and yet a nation of liars" an angry Douglass observed on August 3, 1854 [at 126]. In his prior Oration on July Fourth 1852 at Rochester, New York, Douglass condemned the nation's hypocrisy, in these words:

"Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future." [at 54].

Is the Douglass July Fourth Oration outdated? African Americans are no longer slaves. There are no longer any Southern slave masters. The real issue is not race anymore, "the real issue is class," says Gore Vidal.

We have the greatest divide between the very rich and the very poor of any country on Earth, surpassing even France. And this division gets wider and wider as financial disasters overwhelm us. We were already in pretty bad shape before things began to fall apart a year or two ago. We must acknowledge that our character, never much good in these matters, is now reprehensible ... The days of greed through which we all lived now have not done us much good, nor have they taught us any lessons, but you cannot live long with such divisions, which in my view as an outsider overlooking the scene seems to be a nation of total liars. Everybody is lying. Television lies, candidates lie. And everyone says, "Oh they always have." I love that excuse. Well they haven't always done that. Sometimes lying to the people is a great mistake.

Guided by the Golden Rule of investor driven politics, which has annihilated the democratic voices of the people, we certainly are not fairly represented in the US Congress, or in the White House, or in the Courts. These institutions of Government are (with rare exception) owned and operated by and for Big Money. We are most assuredly, a capitalist slave state. BIG MONEY now owns the US Government.

The New York Times story on The Guys From 'Government Sachs' reported last fall, "Goldman's presence in the [Treasury] department and around the federal response to the financial bailout is so ubiquitous that other bankers and competitors have given the star-studded firm a new nickname: Government Sachs." This raises the obvious question posed by Robert Scheer: "Why was all the money thrown at Wall Street instead of needy homeowners or struggling school systems? Because the federal government works for Goldman and not for us. Indeed, when it comes to the banking bailout, Goldman Sachs is the government." An inventory of the literature available online is provided by Emily Spence, an author living in Massachusetts who has spent many years involved in human rights, environmental and social services efforts reports in Countercurrents, July 11, 2009: The Continued Fleecing Of America And Its Citizens By The Financial Elites.

Who are "We the People," and who are our BIG MONEY masters, if not the new slaves and slave masters, in these days of the interlinked crises? The "New Slave Masters," are chronicled by the masterful Attorney Gerry Spence in his book, Give Me Liberty! (1998), in these words:

We are taught freedom, speak freedom, exercise freedom, and yet it is all a puff in the wind if, at last, no matter how we strive at the invisible chains, we cannot set the course of our own lives. And if our nation has become only an instrument of power for those in power, if no matter how we the people try, we cannot change its course, we are only ants crawling on the deck of a vessel at sea destined for Lord knows what port. [at 108].

Law together with the cultural fictions and presumptions derived from law formed the foundation of the white supremacy African slave system in America, in open defiance of unassailable realities, a study of the lives of Thomas Jefferson and his slave families confirms. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello 82-83 (2008) (2008 National Book Award Winner). Presently, similar legal and cultural conventions provide the foundation of the New Slave Masters, despite unassailable realities, with rare exceptions, marking class divisions and defining the powers of rich and poor driven by a Legal Slave Culture, and constrained by the oppressive territorial political status of Puerto Rico. The exising situation is divorced from truth, disengaged from the dire needs of the time, swinging in the winds, largely oblivious to the commands of the constitution and the promises of democracy, which were predicated upon the pursuit of a genuine Union of the whole people.

Beyond the terrifying dimensions of the War on Democracy in Latin America, depicted by John Pilger, elite private wealth holders and the American Government are drowning in an oceanic culture of corruption. We are "Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs," wrires Paul Craig Roberts, in The National Expositor, on 20 August, 2009. "Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system" says The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. These conditions are driving the people en masse to the courts for real justice. The courts, in turn, have been converted into a forum only for rich litigants. Indigent corporate litigants who cannot pay for a lawyer, for example, are not allowed to exercise the democratic right of self-representation, previously sustained by common law doctrine. Compare e.g., Rowland v. California Men's Colony, 506 U.S. 194, 201-02 (January 12, 1993) (rejecting "a few aberrant cases" that have authorized a corporation to appear in court by a non-lawyer officer when conditions warrant an exception to the rule), with Hernandez v. District Court, 15 P.R.R. 251, 255 (1909) (This embodies a principle of justice recognized since the time of the Romans. Without the right of self-representation "a poor person or one who was unable to find an attorney might not be heard in court."); In re Opinion of the Justices, 194 N.E. 313, 317-318 (Mass. 1935) (applied to individuals); A. Victor & Co. v. Sleininger, 9 N.Y.S.2d 323, 326 (N.Y. App. Div., 1939), reh'g denied 11 NYS2d 548, cited as persuasive, Schifrin v. Chenille Mfg. Co. 117 F.2d 92, 95 (2 Cir. 1941); quoted with approval, In re Holliday's Tax Services, Inc., 417 F.Supp. 182, aff'd mem 614 F.2d 1287 (2d Cir. 1979) (applied to corporations). Ironically, Justice David Souter who wrote the opinion of the Supreme Court in Rowland, supra (a 5-4 split decision), retired in 2009. He was replaced by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was formerly a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which has sustained the democratic principle of justice in a long line of those so-called "aberrant cases" In re Holliday's Tax Services supra! One of the last indigent corporate persons to gain access to the court by self-representation was my small business community development corporation, which was so successful the bank-lender decided to deprive us of our ocean-front property by a strategic repudiation of their loan commitments, breach of trust in grabbing one of our tracts, and demand for security in violation of public policy, combined with an attempted takeover in the resulting bankruptcy proceedings. Rendered powerless by their wrongful acts, the lender did not expect this non-lawyer to fight back, and win, supported by the democratic principle of indigent corporate self-representation. Las Colinas, Inc. v. Mason, 377 F.2d 99 (1st Cir. 1967) (Aldrich, Chief Judge, Maris and McEntee, Circuit Judges) (Vigdor Schreibman, president and majority stockholder, "for appellants"), after first remand, sub nom, In re Las Colinas, Inc., 426 F.2d 1005 (1st Cir. 1970) (Aldrich, Chief Judge, McEntee and Coffin, Circuit Judges) (Vigdor Schreibman, "pro se and as attorney-in-fact for appellants"), after second remand, 453 F.2d. 911 (1971) (Coffin, Circuit Judge, Van Oosterhout, Senior Ciricuit Judge, and Stephenson, Circuit Judge) (Vigdor Schreibman "pro se for Las Colinas, Inc. and others"); In re Victor Publishers, Inc., 545 F.2d 285, 286 n.* (1st Cir. Nov 29, 1976) (per curiam) (Coffin, Chief Judge, Aldrich and McEntee, Circuit Judges) (determination by the appellate court that the non-lawyer officer of Las Colinas, Inc. was a person with "extraordinary legal ability"), but cited for the contrary rule, in Rowland, supra, at part III.

Presently, indigent corporations are prevented from securing their "day in court" to protect their fundamental liberty and property interests by a despicable conspiracy between legislators, judges, and lawyers, and their favored Big Money clients designed to impose a corrupt monopoly of lawyers, without any clear and explicit statutory authority, implicitly contrary to antitrust law, without court jurisdiction, and in violation of an artificial person's fundamental constitutional rights: See e.g., Molina v. U.R.H.C., 114 D.P.R. 295 (1983) (equal protection); Lizarribar v. Martinez Gelpi, 121 D.P.R. 770, 786 (1988) (due process), and Defendini Collazo v. E.L.A. 134 D.P.R. 28, 63-68 (1993)(access to court)! Finally when the indigent corporation attempts to petition the government for redress of such grievances the courts hand down their authoritarian rulings that the corporation has no standing to complain, which is an outrageous lie, severing the principle of justice from its roots in the common law going back 15-centuries to the time of the Romans. This is the New Slave Masters in open defiance of law and culture but any system that is "highly irrational" and "highly inefficient," which puts a premium on, "cruelty, ruthlessness, and intellectual slavery," serves ultimately to outrage the sensibilities of all rational human beings and undermines established beliefs of the community. Therefore, willfully adhering to this new slave system, and arbitrary forcing it on others so as to destroy the American democratic rule, must be given up.

Indeed, 20-years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a majority of former East Germans say life was better under communism. Today's Germany is described as a "slave state" and a "dictatorship of capital," in an article published in Spiegel Online, July 3, 2009. Dictatorship, whether of the left or the right, is clearly not consistent with the striving moral spirit of humankind. The very essence of biological life lies in the ability of genes to work together. See e.g., Carl Zimmer, microcosm 32-49 (2008); Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest 171 (2007). The social instinct in human beings was well documented by Darwin. See e.g., David Loye, Darwin's Lost Theory 286-291 (2008). Recognition of the law of interdependencies in the planetary civilization, which systems sciences has discoverd, is now an essential aspect of effective actions in the New Geometry of Languaging in the New Agora. The stark choice between dictatorship of the artificial aristocrats and democracy based on a more perfect Union of the whole people, which is our American birthright, given as the first principle of the Constitution of the United States, simply boggles the mind. The choice between government of aristocracy and democracy is certainly not written in the evolutionary foundation of biological life but arises, in stages, out of the evolutionary superstructure of cultural norms that human beings can find in and through the universe, which we know and experience. See e.g., Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914), reviewed in, Father V.G. Potter, On Norms & Ideals 202-203 (1997); David Loye, Darwin's Lost Theory (2008). This is the astonishing story now told by David Loye, in Darwin and the Battle for 21st Century Mind, in which we shall transform our culture driven by the values of moral sensitivity and love, or go down, the way of extinction.

So let us, all together, play the master game. We must be our own masters, instead of waiting for our false hero to lead us by the nose. Here is the word of the Nobel Laureate, Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the micro-financing system for the poor:

"(T)he financial meltdown has shown that traditional ways of doing business have not worked."

"This economic crisis suddenly awakens us to the fact that this system is not working. When the system is not working that is the best time to undo it and redo it in a new way," he said.

"The financial crisis on top of the food crisis, the energy crisis, the environment crisis, the social crisis -- all these are combined. Isn't it time to wake up and redo things?"

Profit for me and the me generation, driven by the philosophy of greed, inexorably leads toward self-destruction in an interdependent civilization. Breaking from the Slave Masters of the 21st Century to genuine freedom and liberty requires the buildup of a new social business model for human development that turns away from the repeatedly failed finance economy based on greed and profit, to a model that is, "all about others"!

We do not need a White House central command structure with hideous and revolting multitrillion dollar budgets managed by pernicious Big Money, to enrich themselves. We need to deliver the promise of democracy that is the first principle of American Government, in a 21st century participatory network structure managed by genuine dialogue of the whole people that is free from Big Money and Big Government, centralized control.

The central command structure is "We the People" all working together, in a genuine Union. That's the master plan for a better world true to the striving moral spirit of humankind first envisioned by Darwin, and by Jefferson, the American genius of freedom and liberty. .

II.
A genuine
Union of the whole people

I wonder what it would really be like for citizens to engage in direct action by and between ourselves, by establishing our own genuine Union of the whole people, while bypassing the corrupt hierarchy of organizational filters -- the Parties, PACS, the Media Aristocracy, corporate lobbyists, political representatives, who seek power to empower themselves, and Government Agencies & Police Services, that have been coopted by the industries they are supposed to police. We do not need permission from anyone to establish such a Union; this is, indeed, the first principle of a democratic Government guaranteed in the Preamble to the US Constitution.

• With such a genuine Union of the whole people, would we be able to employ the resources of our national government to secure "single payer" health insurance, just like every other developed nation in the world? Polls say this goal is supported by most Americans. Only in America do we have a health system designed to protect the pecuniary profits of the Health Insurance vultures while more than 44,000 Americans die every year -- 122 every day -- due to lack of health insurance. Andrew P. Wilper, MD, MPH, Steffie Woolhandler, MD, MPH, Karen E. Lasser, MD, MPH, Danny McCormick, MD, MPH, David H. Bor, MD, and David U. Himmelstein, MD "Health Insurance and Mortality in US Adults" American Journal of Public Health, December 2009, Vol 99, No. 12.

• With such a genuine Union of the whole people, what influential threat would "Big Money" be able to make against political leaders, with a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers, who it is claimed by The Washington Post, do not like the democratic party's "harsh rhetoric about big business" (but see Media Matters for America who describe the Post story as a ( dubious report)? One person's influence produces another's counterinfluence. In the United Kingdom, PM Gordon Brown promised that British legislation against bankers will be the toughest in the world. A discussion of mutual strategic boycotts might be fascinating. Could a genuine Union of the whole people, raise countervailing power to put an end to the "Big Money" strangelhold over the American political system? Would we still have to pay the multitrillion dollar bailout of the Wall Street crooks, so they can continue their obscene life-style, while Main Street, is lined up for millions of foreclosures? Would we still have to pay the usury money interest -- like my Chase account -- now fixed unilaterally at 21.99% above the Prime Rate! -- on our credit cards, home mortgages, and business loans? "Under our constitutional assumptions," the Supreme Court has ruled, "all power derives from the people." So who is the real master of this show?

• With such a genuine Union of the whole people, would we be able to convert, in a timely way, to the most sustainable sources of climate change and energy: nuclear and solar thermal? That is the opinion expressed by two environmental authors: Thomas L. Friedman, in Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - And How it Can Renew America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008); and James Lovelock, in The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning, Table 4.2 (Basic Books, 2009).

• With such a genuine Union of the whole people, would we be able to assert the collective moral will to halt the Return to Barbarity, promoting endless wars of aggression, and instead, in the spirit of Thomas Paine exercise our power, To Begin the World Over Again? Just how difficult would this have been, for example, before we elected George W. Bush, Worst. Present. Ever., to a second term?; or before our beautiful Black President, Barack Obama, decides to continue past barbarities driven by the Military-industrial complex, with the same old horror story: Iraq the Sequel: Now Playing in Afghanistan? US military expenditures in 2008 dwarfed the world. Without a good and sufficient kick from the whole people, will reform of the Military-industrial complex ever start?

  The war policy strategy in Iran, awaiting the development of atomic bombs from a civilian energy program authorized by international law and open to inspection, and A War of Absurdity in Afghanistan, aimed at an ememy who has already fled the field. The USA is now caught in a struggle between American Generals and civilian war leaders who are trying to rescue Afghan society governed by a dysfunctional and corrupt Administration of President Hamid Karzai. These conditions are unlikely to yield an effective outcome unless policy makers first turn their minds from a war psychology toward a peace psychology as the absolutely essential driving value for a sustainable foreign policy strategy in the Middle East.

  This struggle will require, Exorcising America's Diplomatic Demons, as Robert Scheer suggests.

  This week the Chinese Communists celebrate their 60th year in power, an event that the make war not peace crowd, now bloviating over Iran and Afghanistan, might benefit from contemplating. They might also recall a time when the mere suggestion of peaceful coexistence with the Red Menace of China was a career-ender for high school teachers and State Department officials alike. Now the danger from the Chinese Reds is that, being more prudent capitalists than Americans, they might be unwilling to continue carrying our rapidly growing debt.

The idea that we are all just helpless slaves of the governing global systems, with American Generals demanding overwhelming military power to control the whole world, without any evidence Americans can or ought to be in control of the world, indicates we are a mighty fearful nation driven by self-destructive demons of our own making that gravely distorts our domestic and foreign policy priorities, I believe. The sorry existing situation is a bad joke, on us, but this situation certainly cannot be the end of the story. We are not all just plain crazy. In the US Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson with the first American Founders, worked their way out of a similar situation in these words:

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 whenever 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 principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, August 28, 1963. (AP/WWP)

Of course, it is not necessary to transform the entire Government, all at once. At first, we can address the four paramount issues -- Equal Health Care, Ecological Sustainability, Social Equity & Economic Prosperity for All, and Peaceful Coexistence -- briefly mentioned above.

The expression of Individual intelligence about such fundamental matters is not enough. "Our amazing achievements come from the additional ability of our brains to communicate and persuade," writes James Lovelock, "This synchronization of will ... empowers us far beyond the possibilities of a single isolated intelligence." Continuing, Lovelock wtrites:

This massive amplification of thought and its conversion to action resembles the mechanism of a laser. In this, atoms or molecules, normally bouncing aimlessly around are lifted to a higher and singular state from which, given the appropriate signal, they can discharge their accumulated energy in a directed beam. Think of how a mob made of otherwise inoffensive people will when lifted by an orator act coherently as if they were a single animal. Almost all of our achievements come from single acts of genius or leadership amplified coherently by the many. Lovelock, infra, at 240-241.

An expression of the collective will of the people is necessary to exercise the democratic power of the people, but one must exercise particular care about the means to obtain this "synchronization of will." The pursuit of coherence of the aimless mob sparked by the genius of one or the few, seeks the manipulation of persons in a state of abnormal suggestibility in which the controlling act of the will is absent. This pursuit of "synchronizationm of will" by a scheme of control in which "the will is absent" is a resort to relations based on power alone, in evolutionary terms, "the survival of the fittest" as described by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, from which the theory of "Social Darwinism" was derived. These ideas are certainly not any part of the promise of democracy.

According to Adolph Hitler (1889-1945), "democracy undermined the natural selection of ruling elites and was 'nothing other than the systematic cultivation of human failure." Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), who was Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda for the German Third Reich under Adolph Hitler, "maintained that the people never rule themselves and claimed that every history-making epoch had been created by aristocrats." However, Jefferson properly described these rulers as an "Artificial Aristocracy" in his 1813 letter to John Adams. The natural result of this ideology is The Frankenstein Civilization. There is wisdom to be gained by the many through democratic Union. Creative intelligence that promotes democratic development, wisely supports the inherent motivation of all human beings to actively exercise their own powers in shaping their society in some profound way, and thus become masters of the technological civilization. See Ernest Becker, The Structure of Evil 140-42 (1968).

Every American is a natural leader, equal in authenticity and sovereign powers under our constitution. What is needed to realize the democratic leadership quality of the individuals in society, while strengthening social capital, is the discipline of norms and networks that can guide the integration of collective efforts into a coherent Union of the whole people. We must become true democrats, in short.

The powerful weapons of the corporate state and their police forces are deeply impressive, yet they are puny compared with the most powerful instrument of all: the creative intelligence of individual human beings amplified by shared purposes and coherent actions of the many. "We the People" are many. When our purposes are shared we possess psychic powers that are unvanquishable by the few.

Citizens are called upon by these conditions to assert the independent responsibilities of a civil society with the full power and fury of the people, acting in solidarity. The great lesson of "people power" last used to liberate Eastern Europe, which Americans need to assert at this time, was described by Australian John Keane in his 2003 biography of Tom Paine. Keane writes:

The power to shape the world does not derive ultimately from rulers or their monopoly of the means of violence. Rulers surrounded by spies, police, jurists, tax collectors, generals, and administrators cannot rule for very long. Power ultimately emanates from below. Rulers can rule only insofar as they have the tacit or active support of the ruled. Without it, they become impotent in the face of citizens acting together in solidarity for the achievement of their own common goals.

The difficulty of obtaining democratic Union makes almost every revolution appear improbable at its outset, but those who led them found a way to beat the incumbent system-and usually with fewer resources than those available to the system they beat. The American Revolution, was a good example. Russell L. Ackoff, Re-Creating The Corporation: A Design of Organizations for the 21st Century 285 (1999). This momentous event was galvanized by the 46-page pamphlet called "Common Sense" first published anonymously on January 10, 1776, by Thomas Paine. Amazingly, we learn, Paine was "poorly educated, unskilled, beset by marital and job failures and by bankruptcy ... the least likely candidate for the role he was to take in the destiny of the American colonies of the 1770s." Common Sense v (Dover Publications, 1997). The pamphlet was a persuasive argument for the colonies' political and economic separation from Britain, credited by George Washington as having changed the minds of many of his countrymen. Paine was the literary trigger, but the collective will of the American colonies was the real stuff of democratic revolution. There are many other examples of these truths.

Our worthy ancestors have overthrown the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Church of heavenly Earth, the Feudal Lords and Monarchs of Europe, the slave plantations of America, Global Colonialists, Fascist Dictators of Western Europe, Latin America, South Africa, the Philippine Islands, Indonesia, and Japan, and the Communist Dictators of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. All fell by the unvanquishable power of the People! Now we await the transformation of savage Capitalism, which is written in its self-destructive structure. At the United Nations, Wednesday, September 23, 2009, President Barack Obama's Speech to the General Assembly sounded the call for transformative change, in these words:

As an African American, I will never forget that I would not be here today without the steady pursuit of a more perfect union in my country. And that guides my belief that no matter how dark the day may seem, transformative change can be forged by those who choose to side with justice. And I pledge that America will always stand with those who stand up for their dignity and their rights -- for the student who seeks to learn; the voter who demands to be heard; the innocent who longs to be free; the oppressed who yearns to be equal.

Our new President has made a distinctive voice for his country and for the world, strong, positive, and of a unique dignity not seen since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. Even so, we cannot obtain a democracy from a fine speech by our good President Obama. There is no simple trigger for democrcy, certainly not in a capitalist state that worships the philosophy of greed, and selfish individualism. It is the Union of the whole people that constitutes a democracy. This Union is derived not from individualism but from the collective will that capitalism is designed to annihilate. Let's be clear about this horrible pathology, which must be squarely confronted and transformed!

The philospher of democracy, Mary Parker Follett, offered these definitions of democracy:

Democracy is … a genuine union of true individuals.

Democracy means the will of the whole, but the will of the whole is not necessarily represented by the majority, nor by a two-thirds or three-quarters vote, nor even by a unanimous vote; majority rule is democratic when it is approaching not a unanimous but an integrated will … All talk of majority and minority is futile. It is evident that we must not consider majority versus minority, but only the methods by which unity is attained.

(D)emocracy transcends time and space, it can never be understood except as a spiritual force. Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations. Democracy is not worked out at the polling-booths; it is the bringing forth of a genuine collective will, one to which every single being must contribute the whole of his [or her] complex life, as one which every single being must express the whole of at one point. Thus the essence of democracy is creating. The technique of democracy is group organization.

Representation is not the main fact of political life; the main concern of politics is modes of association. We do not want the rule of the many or the few; we must find that method of political procedure by which majority and minority ideas may be so closely interwoven that we are truly ruled by the will of the whole. We shall have democracy only when we learn to produce this will through group association -- when young men [and women] are no longer lectured to on democracy, but when they are made into the stuff of democracy.

Tragically, there is a critical lack of understanding amomg Americans, and others, of what a democracy really is. The Indian commentator, Arundhati Roy, raises the question: Is Democracy Melting?

This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the tsars of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language to voice their critique and dismiss them as being "anti-progress," "anti-development," "anti-reform," and of course "anti-national" -- negativists of the worst sort.

In the United States we have the pernicious example of the Library of Congress. A companion book to its bicentennial celebration, Thomas Jefferson: Genius of Liberty (2000), commented that one must split apart the twin ideals of freedom and liberty, which are the core tenets of America's promise to itself and the world. An explanation given in the book asserts that the ideals of freedom and liberty are "logically incompatible" because the ideal of "freedom" necessarily leads to "social and economic inequality." On the contrary, as I explain in my review of the book, there can be no "freedom" without liberty, when "freedom" is conceived as a self-destructive ideology promising life "free as a bird" -- the obsurdity of which we are now living!

A formal shift in political perspective at the White House was offered when President and Mrs. Bush held a reception at the White House on April 14, 2008, to remember Thomas Jefferson at 265. It was a long overdue step away from the Library of Congress bicentennial book that sought to put in doubt the unique Jeffersonian contribution to the history of the world.

Democracy is predicated upon a genuine Union of the whole people that is possible only with the wisdom that comes from an integration of shared ideas and shared responsibilities, but this reality is not within the worldview of the lovers of irresponsible "freedom" moving like a glacial meltdown across the world. In the age of Internet, connecting everyone everywhere means amplifying the spread of perspectives all over the map, so that chaos may be the dominant law of telecommunications, giving rise to the growing pathologies (e.g., "Spreadthink" "Groupthink" and political extemism, etc.) that have accompanied Internet. A more purposeful use of Internet is also posible, however. The ability to collaborate and produce coherently shared ideas may also be dramatically enhanced via Internet; indeed, that was the primary [unfulfilled] purpose of the original NREN Program. The National Research and Education Network Program, "A Report to Congress," ¶ 1.1 (Dec. 1992). This purpose can most likely be facilitated not by mob leadership of the single genius nor by the mere speed of telecommunications but by the driving values of democratic sustainability, including a moral code that contains the scientific and spiritual guidelines for evolution of humankind.

We can most effectively realize the "synchronization of will" of the many, which is the hallmark of democratic Union, by collective planning and action, in the New Agora, which can be successfully managed in small groups, by Boundary-spanning Democratic E-mail Dialogue, scalable to district, state, national, and global levels. This planning is not simply to produce a plan but is the basis for the kind of deep citizen engagement that is the source of genuine community wisdom. Discovering the wisdom of the people is necessary if the people are expected to exercise their democratic power. Without democratic power, fascist tyranny is inevitable. We will become true democrats or condemn our future and that of our children and the Planet, itself, to the damnation of slavery and the culture of unceasing corruption.

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Cornelia P. Atchley, artist,
Portrait of Vigdor in blue 2001.