Forum Post: No Direction = No Change!!!

What would have been the result of the Civil Rights Movement if it lacked the unified and pinpoint goal of ending discrimination and increasing access for minorities? Simply put, nothing! I fully support empowering the 99% but there is yet to be a - to use David Graeber's article focus - consensus on what the specific goal is. I visited Zuccotti, marched up Broadway, convened at Wash Sqr, occupied Times Square, and was inundated with complaints from every walk of "left" one can imagine! Everything from eliminating the fed, to Marxist Revolution, to freeing the Palestinians! All with virtually NO suggested remedy. Our dissatisfaction can only be resolved, like it or not, by working within the constitutional system in which we live. Consider the following: Four reasons for an amendment to let the citizen’s vote in National Referendums on major issues.

1. It’s our lives and we have the right to participate in the decision making process when policies and laws are being created that we all must live with. Elected officials are at best unfairly influenced by re-election, party loyalty, and concentrated interests, into making decisions on our behalf that with greater frequency are not in our best interest.

2. Those people elected to serve us have failed in their responsibility to do so and our democracy demands that we get involved. The most effective and “non-institutional” way to do this is to afford the citizens a fraction of the decision authority to accept or reject government’s major policy proposals on issues of vital national importance.

3. The potential for National Referendums on major issues would minimize the political game playing that the two major parties tend to engage in at our expense for political gain. National Referendums would act as a political antiseptic for the partisan bacteria that is taking over our democracy.

4. We are more than capable of weighing in on major decisions that affect our lives. This is proven by the fact that millions of Americans make difficult decisions on a regular basis in managing businesses, their family’s future, their finances, (consistently much better in this regard than the government ever has) career choices, healthcare issues, and a host of other challenges that are no more difficult to think through than just about anything our representatives are confronted with.

This is not a proposal to replace our present representative system. It is offered in addition to and on the invitation of Congress to invite the citizens to share in a portion of the responsibility in major decisions addressing issues of vital national importance.