Senator Mike Gravel - The Failure of Representative Government and the Solution: A Legislature of the People

THE FAILURE
of Representative Government and
THE SOLUTION

A Legislature Of The People

SENATOR MIKE GRAVEL

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2020 Senator Mike Gravel. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 12/17/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-3929-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-3930-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019920184

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CONTENTS

To my wife, Whitney,

the love of my life

And to my children,

Lynne and Martin, and his wife Michele

And to my grandchildren,

Renee, Alexander, Madison and Mackenzie

And to my first great grandchild, Axel

With love and hope for the future

There is no shortage of articles, books and documentaries laying out in excruciating detail the many ills that afflict the United Statesan unfair health care system, historic economic inequality, endemic political corruption, racist police violence, illegal mass surveillance, climate degradation and perpetual warfare that bleeds dry the U.S. Treasury and the lives of countless innocent civilians.

The solutions usually offered to an increasingly dystopian society are piecemeal. Yet there is one central function, usually overlooked, which if radically reformed could open the way to solving all of these dire problems in tandem. Since it is the majority of people who suffer the consequences of these crises, it is only the people themselves who can solve them.

That central function is the power to make the laws that dictate how society works. In the hands of the elite, this power perpetuates problems for the people, which the elite see as bonanzas: income inequality, mass surveillance and militarized police keeping the population in check, and profiteering on climate-threatening fossil fuels, health insurance and especially war. Corruption of elected officials greases their schemes.

A very unusual American politician wrote this little book. He offers no empty slogans about taking the country back. Instead he tells you exactly how it is to be done, the only way it can be done, in a way easily understood by any citizen in just a few hours of reading.

Former Senator Mike Gravel has been a genuine maverick his entire career. He risked censure in the Senate and prosecution by the Nixon administration by first reading the highly classified Pentagon Papers (detailing the lies the US government told the people about the war in Vietnam) into the Congressional Record and then by publishing the Papers as a book.

Sen. Gravel opens this book with an obvious point that is overlooked: even representative governments, so-called democracies, run aggressive, imperialistic foreign policies. One need not have an emperor to run an empire. As a republic, France, for instance, maintained its African and Southeast Asian colonies well into the 1960s.

And America, the country that pretends it has no empire, has at least 800 military bases in every corner of the globe, which it has divided into military commands. Our elites try to overthrow every government standing in its way, even if it requires a military invasion. While literally trillions of dollars are squandered on these needless military and covert adventures, the U.S. has no real enemies who could defeat it, as Sen. Gravel explains.

Meanwhile this squandered wealth, the wealth of the taxpayers, should be used to serve the taxpayers with a rescued infrastructure, a national health insurance system like most of the industrial world enjoys, affordable education and housing and a government that doesnt treat its people like the enemies it claims it has abroad. Only the taxpayers can take back their taxes to serve their interests and not those of billionaires who prefer paying lobbyists rather than paying taxes.

The way the people can take back their country as if they ever had itis to take control of making laws for the first time on a national level. The idea is not absurd. It already exists in 22 states in the form of initiative lawmaking and in Switzerland, where citizen lawmaking co-exists with the national parliament.

Sen. Gravel pinpoints the origins of our corrupt system in the Constitution itself, with its compromises over slavery that still impedes us.

Nevertheless, he dug deep into the creation of the Constitution to build a legal argument for how a Legislature of the People can be legally formed. The simple details are in this book. Every American should read them to participate in power, how Cicero defined freedom.

It is a formula that will trouble the elites, wholl no doubt do everything in their power to stop this. But if America truly is a nation of laws and not men, they can be defeated.

One of the first laws the people would have to enact would be to break up the media monopoly, taking the news business out of the hands of powerful corporations and putting it into the hands of the community to hire editors and journalists who will represent the interests of the public and not the powerful. The media now only pretends to do this.

A second peoples law would be to break up the big banks.

A third would be to create a national health insurance program and a network of free public colleges, while canceling student debt. This will be paid for by the people voting to cut defense spending in half.

Five pieces of popular legislation in the Legislature of the People, if fully implemented, that would radically transform the United States to look more like the democracy it says it is and should have been intended to be. America would ignore Sen. Gravel to its peril.

Joe Lauria

Editor-in-chief

Consortium News/

Former Wall Street Journal

correspondent

August 26, 2019

Alexandria, Virginia

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