politics – Voters Intervene

VOTERS’ 2025 DECLARATION OF INTERVENTION

We, the American voters and future voters, watching the final stage of our slide into dictatorial rule-by-billionaires, will not wait for the next election. Here and now, we intervene with the President, all Members of Congress, and all potential candidates for Congress. We challenge the bad habits of all three branches of our federal Government that degrade our democracy and threaten the future of humankind. The problem did not start on January 20, 2025: The quality of our politics has been declining for decades; We offer here a new blueprint for governing.

Our first instinct is to attack the President, given his cruel and outrageous actions disrupting the lives and livelihoods of billions of people all across America and throughout the world. Our path to reform, however, begins with self-examination; we have to face up to the undeniable fact that We, The People, ever since July 4^th, 1776, have committed an ongoing and historic mistake, a sin of omission that is the ultimate cause of our crisis: Our failure to demand and obtain an established process for holding our politicians accountable in public.

They get away with political murder, day-after-day, with no end in sight. The need is especially urgent now that our billionaires control the outcome of every important election, and our officeholders act like their slaves.

The Declaration of Independence laid out the basic requirement of democracy: Our original revolutionaries expressed it well – they said that Government must act only with the “CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED”. But We, the People, have never established a way to express that consent. Elections in America have never produced a genuine expression of consent; our first elections more than 200 years ago allowed only white male property owners to vote, and now that the Supreme Court has given billionaires the power to control election results, we are further from fair elections than we’ve ever been.

Worse yet, the Constitution grants all federal law-making powers to Congress, but we have no way to hold our illegitimately elected Congress Members accountable, no way to force them to provide direct responses to challenging questions the citizens need to ask in a public setting. Most Congress Members employ diversionary tactics and routinely ignore the general welfare; instead, they act to enhance the private interests of their money-soaked campaign contributors, all in order to maximize their prospects for clinging to the power of public office.

The current Speaker of the House advises his Members to not hold Town Hall meetings, and such events that do happen are tightly manipulated and controlled; they fail to provide a process that allows the people to effectively hold the politician publicly accountable.

The best way we, THE GOVERNED, can begin to express our CONSENT is by demanding a congressionally established public broadcast process for holding every Congress Member accountable in regular monthly broadcast, one-on-one conversations between each Congress Member and a constituent citizen who is at least twelve years of age and chosen by lottery from among all names volunteered. The chosen citizen would have the option to appoint a proxy – a friend, a teacher, a journalist, a scholar, a podcaster, anyone from anywhere, whoever would best express that citizen’s views. Imagine the quality of such public dialogue and the political education and reform it would provide.

Holding these conversations every month for every congressional district would be the best way to produce evidence of CONSENSUS among the people on issues of public policy. Those points of CONSENSUS, in turn, would provide our Congress Members with the most authentic expression of the CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.

Further, in order to find out what’s happening day-to-day and decide how best to challenge our Congress Members, we need a law that allows us to hear and read every communication, oral and written, between a Congress Member (or the Member’s staff) and a paid lobbyist – this will fulfill our RIGHT TO RECEIVE INFORMATION, the right that an earlier and wiser Supreme Court recognized as the heart of the First Amendment:. For every single speaker or single writer, thousands of listeners or thousands of readers need to get the message.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision says that the billionaires’ money equals “speech”. Okay then, We the People have the right to (1) hear their actual speech, their pitch to our Congress Members and staff, and what our Congress Members and staff say in response, and (2) read all their back-and-forth written communications, so that we can protect ourselves against the corruption and greed that now rules the roost. The text of every such communication, oral and written, should be posted daily on the internet. Body microphones would be required for every Congress Member and staff member.

As President Eisenhower warned us in 1961: only an “alert and informed citizenry” can protect us against the Military-Industrial Complex and other evils.

Further, in order to ensure that the President is fulfilling the constitutional duty to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed”, Congress should pass a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would impose a duty on Congress to summon the President to appear in public before a select committee that would include an equal number of Members of both houses; The President should be required to testify under oath for a minimum of eight hours per month. That would be the best way to hold the President accountable in public.

And finally, to help fix our justice system, Congress should challenge the wisdom of allowing a single judge to issue a binding decision on any question of fact or law: It is a common affliction among homo sapiens to harbor many different forms of personal bias. A modest estimate of any litigant’s chance of appearing before a judge who is prejudiced against their cause is at least one in three.

Justice would be better served if the awesome power of judicial decision-making at the trial-court level were exercised by three judges instead of one. The deliberation among the three would offer the best prospect for fair, just and unbiased decisions, and bring us ever closer to genuine Due Process of Law. It would also reduce the number of appeals to higher courts. This change, in turn, would be a challenge to the states to require three-judge panels in state courts, and act as a reminder to all present sitting judges to examine their own biases.

These reforms offer realistic prospects for establishing a genuine democracy, so starting today we will confront every potential 2026 candidate for Congress (House and Senate) to take a stand on these proposed changes to our current, disgraceful system of governing.

Please help spread the word by (1) confronting every present Member of Congress and every potential congressional candidate on these demands, (2) insisting upon immediate, genuine, unfiltered Town Hall meetings open to everyone equally, and (3) directing attention to this website: www.Voters-Intervene.org. Thank you.

Letter to my Congress Member, Jimmy Panetta, February 9, 2024

Dear Mr. Panetta,

A large group of voters and future voters have a modest proposal for fixing the many dysfunctions in our political process; we describe the proposal in detail at www.Voters-Intervene.org.

Our basic criticisms are that the People have no voice; the Congress, the President, the parties, the corporate media and the elections are all effectively controlled by the moneyed interests; the People are systematically deprived of vital political information; and, there is no process available to hold our politicians accountable in public, i.e., to embarrass them into doing the right thing.

In other words, although the Declaration of Independence demands that our government operate only with the “CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED”, our corporate-controlled elections and corporate-controlled policymaking deprive us of any meaningful method for expressing that consent. The solution is to establish (a) an ongoing process of public dialogue between citizens and politicians, and (b) a foolproof method of providing reliable political information. Only then will we be able to undermine the power of money in politics and arrive at legitimate expressions of consensus.

Let me give a local example of how our current style of national politics was working as long ago as 1993: Bill Clinton had just been elected President in November 1992: He was recruiting a particular Congressman, who had become an expert on the federal budget process, to be Director of the Bureau of the Budget: Your father, Leon Panetta. At that very moment, though, a high-powered lobbyist from strawberry agribusiness, the dominant industry in our congressional district, was putting the arm on Congressman Panetta to get the industry a huge favor that would enhance their quarterly profits.

A few years earlier, back in the mid-80’s, the nations of the world, all 200 of them, had come together to protect the Ozone Layer, the Earth’s only effective defense against the mortal dangers of excessive solar radiation. If that vital protective system were to get weakened much more than it had been already, all life forms on Earth would be threatened with extinction. The nations met in Canada and signed the Montreal Protocol, a global treaty that required all nations to abolish the use of Methyl Bromide, a gas that (1) is among the World’s most toxic substances, and (2) (along with other gases), was attacking and slowly destroying the Ozone Layer. In addition to these two dangers presented by Methyl Bromide, it is also a powerful greenhouse gas that exacerbates the global warming crisis.

Strawberries can be profitably grown using organic or other non-toxic methods, but Methyl Bromide users were getting the highest profit levels. However, they were also poisoning the migrant farm-workers, other local residents, the school children and the teachers, all of whom were close by the Methyl Bromide fields every day. The long scientifically-established list of health effects from exposure ranges from skin rash to asthma attacks to low birth-weight newborns to cancer, and many others in-between.

Despite all these facts, Mr. Panetta carried out his duty as loyal party member, because it was going to produce handsome campaign contributions from strawberry agribusiness: He recruited his successor, Congressman Sam Farr, to get the corporate strawberry growers exempted from the Montreal Protocol. Everyone, including the teachers, were intimidated into silence on the subject. All of this skullduggery was conducted in absolute secrecy: Here was routine American politics at work, and it’s worse now than it was then, as our fat cats and their operatives gleefully poison the air, the rivers, the oceans, the earth, the plants and the animals, including all of us, all in pursuit of maximum quarterly profits. Quite a system.

To abolish this corruption, the voters and future voters are conducting an intervention to deal with all the horrendous political habits our politicians routinely engage in. We are intervening to demand a straight answer out of every 2024 ballot candidate: “Will you or will you not support the creation of Open and Accountable Government?” When they ask what that means we will refer them to www.Voters-Intervene.org, and explain that it means, first, that all officeholders (and all ballot candidates during election season) will be required to publish daily the text of every written communication concerning the public’s business that they send out or receive-and-read, AND, every day, electronically record and publish every conversation (and every public statement) they engage in concerning the public’s business, all posted daily on the internet.

Secondly, Open and Accountable Government also means that every ballot candidate during election season, and every officeholder, once a month during the entire year, will be required to engage in a 30-minute, televised conversation with a citizen 12 years old or older, who is chosen by lottery from among all volunteers who sign up. The chosen volunteer shall have the option to appoint any proxy spokesperson, 12 years of age or older, who has registered on a new federal registry of proxies.

The body politic dies without a reliable source of information and without ongoing public dialogue.

Finally, we will have a reliable source of current political information, and perhaps most important, an effective method for embarrassing our politicians into carrying out their duties to serve the People instead of the fat cats. For example, during a televised conversation we can ask our Congress Member: “How does it feel to be protected by full medical insurance provided to you because you are a Member of Congress, while millions of your fellow Americans go without such protection, suffering and dying and getting bankrupted in massive numbers from the deprivation?” Maybe then we’ll get what 80%+ of the American people want: Medicare for Everybody.

So, Mr. Jimmy Panetta, please answer our question: Will you or will you not support the creation of Open and Accountable Government? Please answer this question well before Election Day, to the address shown below, so that everyone can learn of your response before they vote. When I asked Leon Panetta that question, his answer was No. (See my exchange of letters with him at www.Voters-Intervene.org). Although he is a founding member of the Panetta Institute (for better government), he appears to be satisfied with the status quo. Is that your position as well, or will you help us fix our pathetic, corrupt and dying political system?

Yours truly,

Ed Frey, 4630 Soquel Drive, Ste. 8, Soquel, CA 95073

I have not received any response to this letter as of 9,16,2024

Another Try: This Holiday Season’s Open Letter of Hope to All Voters and Future Voters

Oh, Dear Reader, some of us voters and future voters will not just sit in the bleachers until the final count. Instead, we’re going to confront the politicians with two defects in our American political process that don’t get much attention: The lack of any national dialogue worthy of the name, and an excess of secrecy. The body politic cries out, first, for civilized conversation between citizens and politicians that provides political education and makes it possible to hold the politicians accountable in public, and secondly, for reliable political information, especially about what our politicians are hearing from paid lobbyists behind closed doors and in private written messages. Our politics are gridlocked by the powerful players and full of lies and evasions. The overwhelming majority of our incumbents and wannabe incumbents are paralyzed by vulture capitalist campaign money, by prancing would-be autocrats, by party deviousness, by witch-hunting book-burners, by feckless foreign policy operatives, by biased journalists, and by a judiciary corrupt from the Supreme Court on down. These forces cause our politicians to stay busy (1) cooking up a new Cold War, (2) making empty gestures toward dealing with fat-cat domination and the desperate needs of our people and the environment, (3) ignoring the routine gruesome global deprivations and mass slaughter of helpless civilians, and (4) pretending there is no global slide into mob rule and dictatorship. We voters and future voters say it’s time to wrestle capitalism to the mat and take popular control of our own governance for the first time in our history. We plan to conduct a robust intervention against all the bad habits of our politicians, starting right now.

First, though, we should take a moment to re-examine the American Revolution. It was the world’s first mass attempt to establish a democratic form of government that still trudges on today, so an intervention focused on this long-term experience might inspire people around the world to ask themselves whether they, too, suffer from the same political weaknesses we do around dialogue and secrecy. The American revolutionary movement got stunted by two key developments that set up a way of governing that, to this day, gives overwhelming political power to moneyed interests who get routinely supported by our justice systems and government monopoly over the use of force. In the 15 years following July 4, 1776, the bold drive for democratic home-rule took a couple of tragic detours.

The cynics are right that the dominant motive among the founding fathers was to protect their wealth and gain control over the flow of commerce. That helps us understand how the values of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” set out in the Declaration of Independence shortly got reduced to “Life, Liberty or Property” in the 1791 Bill of Rights. That step-down in declared values eventually hardened into a worship of property rights and chronic suppression of human rights. The second detour was complete when the Declaration’s “all men are created equal” got corrupted by state legislators into “all white men who own property.”

However, the revolutionaries’ bedrock principle defining a new political process is still sound: The Declaration of Independence states it as a “self-evident” truth that no government can protect the people’s rights unless it “DERIVES ITS JUST POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED.” Alas, for the past 247 years, we have failed to establish any process that can achieve such consent.

Consent of the governed can not be developed through the mere election of a particular candidate or slate of candidates – once they get seated in office, it’s too easy for politicians to change their colors on any given issue. Consent of the governed can’t even be expressed through ballot proposals for new laws (“initiatives”): Corporate money dominates and corrupts the process by sowing doubt and confusion among the voters.

‘’CONSENT” of the governed can only be developed through a nation-wide, legally established process of dialogue: Ongoing, mandatory, publicly broadcast, one-on-one conversations between citizens and politicians, once every month for every officeholder (once a week for every ballot candidate during election season). The citizen would be chosen each time by lottery and would have the option to appoint a volunteer proxy spokesperson to appear across the table from the politician. Think of the thousands of potential proxies: friends, neighbors, teachers, journalists, scholars, podcasters and others to choose from – we’d finally be marshalling our nation’s intellectual resources and providing first-class political education for concerned citizens. Best of all, these conversations would hold the politicians accountable in front of everyone, and lead to a national ”CONSENSUS”, i.e., a common opinion, wide agreement on an important issue that emerges after extended public discussion, a new understanding that is adhered to by the largest proportion of interested citizens, amounting to a clear expression of the CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED as impetus for genuine reform. Take health care, for example: Public polls consistently report a minimum of 75 to 80 percent of Americans favor Medicare-for-All, but for decades we’ve gotten nothing but pathetic half-measures. Imagine: A televised citizen’s question to Senator So-and-So: “How do you live with yourself using your free, comprehensive Senate-provided health insurance, while you vote against Medicare-for-All and support the Medicare Advantage scam?” We’ll get real results only when we make our politicians sit up straight in public and answer for their actions.

Oh yes, we have corporatized newspapers, letters to editors and congress members, talk radio, news broadcasts, podcasts, digital platforms, websites and so on, but it’s all splintered and diversionary, so we can never even hope to see such hard-hitting public confrontations that everyone can witness at the same time. Our hundreds of thousands of internet, broadcast and print sources produce a wide variety of divisive opinions and attitudes leading to cruel and crack-brained policies. Town Hall meetings and televised “debates” provide little more than shouting matches, and the people are bereft of any chance to take part in or learn from a common conversation that could reach an identifiable consensus.

And finally, we must abolish the routine secrecy that keeps us in the dark: Yes, we will also have to establish it as a further duty of office (and candidacy) to publish every paid lobbyist’s oral or written communications with an incumbent or ballot candidate, requiring that every such communication be recorded and posted on the internet daily. The Supreme Court sees corporate campaign contributions as freedom of speech, so we have to assert our right to hear or read the actual speech that inevitably follows the filthy dollars. Freedom to listen or read is at least as important as freedom to speak.

This 2024 voters’ and future voters’ intervention will only succeed if we shift away from the current focus on voters’ rights, and focus instead on voters’ powers; we’ll rise up well before Election Day and overwhelm the candidates with an irrepressible demand for a genuine pledge: “Will you or will you not support the creation of open and accountable government?” We can refer them to www.Voters-Intervene.org to explain the innovation. For guidance along this path toward new constitutional standards, we can invoke some of the inspiring but unfulfilled words of leaders who’ve emerged since the Revolution: “Government of the people, by the people and for the People” (President Lincoln); “Open covenants, openly arrived at” (President Wilson); Our “Four Freedoms” – speech, religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear (President Franklin Roosevelt); “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” can successfully confront the Military-Industrial Complex (President Eisenhower); “I want to change the mindset that got us into Iraq.” (President Obama). This intervention is a spontaneous, do-it-yourself project: Use all your resources, starting with your limitless imagination. Yours truly, Ed Frey