In reply to Barry Light’s letter "Dems Not Delivering" (Jan. 16), I’d like to remind Mr. Light and everyone else that the Ninth and 10th Amendments to the Constitution reserve ultimate power to the people – not to our politicians. That means we are not powerless against the minority elite who think they run things.

Our biggest problem is that most Americans do not seem to be aware of that fact. We form demonstrations and march in the streets protesting whatever, only to be ignored by those elites. The only time they pay attention to us is during the election cycle when we hand our power over to them in the voting booth.

Yes, the Democratic Party is corrupt. And so is the Republican Party. These two powerful parties control our political system, so it is also corrupted – badly.

But we, the people, are a powerful political force ourselves. All we need to do is to stop letting all the misinformation confuse us and to begin acting in unison.

We can do that peacefully and without marching in the street! To see what I mean, check out the National Initiative for Democracy (www.ni4d.us).

 

DONALD GRBAC

Valencia

I read about how outraged President Obama was with the Supreme Court ruling that allowed corporate money into the election campaigns without limits. I too am outraged. This country, for decades has been run by special interests for special interests, the public be damned. That includes Barack Obama’s Administration and the current Congress.

Former Sen. Mike Gravel will be coming to Ball State University.

The university announced Wednesday that Gravel will be on-campus Feb. 15 to give a lecture on his most recent campaign, the National Initiative for Democracy, and have an open question session.

Graham Watson, Web development specialist for Ball State, said he booked the former senator because he wanted the university and Muncie community to learn about the campaign.

“He will probably talk about the concept of direct democracy, how it would help the U.S.,” he said. “That as an idea has been something lot of people have not though of.”

Watson said booking Gravel was his decision and paid all fees to ensure his visit on campus. Entrance to the event will be free.

Later that night Gravel will be a guest on FM Music Live, which broadcasts from Doc’s Music Hall in downtown Muncie.

Watson said the university and Muncie community can expect to hear more about his campaign, as well as his radical views and plans for the future of the United States.

By ANDREA NEAL

Indiana voters are getting a taste of direct democracy thanks to a 2008 referenda law, and so far so good. The law lets the electorate approve expensive capital projects and certain tax rates at the school and local government level. Early results show voters can and do discriminate between what they think is nice and what they think is necessary — and that’s exactly how public policy should be made.

In Indianapolis, voters overwhelmingly approved the bonding for a new inner-city public hospital complex to replace the old one, which was outdated and laced with asbestos. In Beech Grove, voters OK’d a property-tax-rate increase (about $115 a year for the owner of a $100,000 home) that will allow the local school district to maintain current funding levels for transportation, buses and capital projects, despite state-imposed tax caps. Without the increase, the district said, it would have to cut bus transportation out of the budget completely and reduce its capital projects fund by a fourth.

On the other hand, voters in Perry Township rejected a $98 million project to upgrade and expand its school buildings, and Franklin Township voters nixed a tax-rate increase the school system said was needed to avoid staff and transportation cutbacks.

There’s been no study yet of these specific referenda, but anecdotal evidence points to the practical. Voters wanted to know that the spending was absolutely necessary and that those doing the spending had done all they could to reduce costs. A citizen who opposed the Franklin Township measure said it was a matter of economics. "A lot of people are hurting. … If they have to cut, they have to cut."

School leaders, in particular, argue that the voters’ analysis is simplistic. After all, voters are less informed of education issues than elected school boards and have less at stake, especially if they don’t have school-age children themselves. Another criticism is that these referenda — typically scheduled as special elections rather than during general elections — are hardly exercises in democracy because so few people vote. In Indianapolis, only 11 percent of registered voters cast ballots on the Wishard Hospital issue Nov. 3.

Rather than being a drawback of referenda, low voter turnout may be a good thing if you want thoughtful policy enacted. That’s because people who vote are more knowledgeable of the issues than those who don’t, a self-evident conclusion that has been affirmed by numerous studies of electoral habits. Also, and this favors the school systems spending plans, the higher the turnout the more likely it is that referenda to spend taxpayer money will be defeated. "Turnout and bond referenda have been negatively related for an extremely long time," researcher Mark Bondo said in a 2007 study.

The thoughtful way voters have approached the issues affirms that citizens can be trusted to make hard decisions. The referendum law replaced a cumbersome process that required opponents of spending projects to mount a petition drive and obtain more signatures than supporters. Since the new law took effect, about half of Indiana’s capital projects have been approved. In November 2008, five of six bond issues passed. Last May, four of four were defeated. Around the same time, Center Grove’s school board canceled plans for a $142 million construction referendum, deciding that the support wasn’t there in this economy.

Yet more are in the pipeline in coming days and weeks. As school systems confront the impact of property-tax caps on operating budgets, expect to see a slew of requests for tax-rate hikes to cover operating funds. (Some school districts are also threatening to file lawsuits challenging the equity of Indiana’s funding system).

Larry DeBoer, professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University, said it’s too early to analyze Indiana’s trends, but it appears voters became less willing to approve the referenda when the economy soured.

Direct democracy works. Deciding not to spend money when times are tough is a sign of wisdom, not stinginess. Perhaps more elected officials should take their cues from citizens.

Andrea Neal is a teacher at St. Richard’s School in Indianapolis and adjunct scholar with the Indiana Policy Review Foundation. Contact her at aneal@inpolicy.org.

The American Time magazine article headline asks, "Will Switzerland Vote to Ban Minarets on Mosques?"

Swiss citizens are becoming concerned about the threat that Islam presents to their traditional culture, economy and religious institutions. As an American, I know how I would vote were I Swiss but the decision will be made by the Swiss electorate as they have this referendum right on all issues.

In Switzerland, the people still rule and have the ultimate right to decide decisions above the government or parliament. Through the right of referendum they can cancel legislation and with the initiative they can pass or create legislative action on issues parliament refuses to act upon.

The bias and closed statist views shown in the article is business as usual for the US media elites out to protect the American political establishment and are so evident in this headline and article. It isn’t the question they asked but rather the question they didn’t dare ask is the "700-lb gorilla in the room."

Quoting from the article, "Critics say the SVP, the largest party in Switzerland’s coalition government, has taken advantage of the country’s unique brand of direct democracy to push its populist, anti-immigrant agenda on the Swiss electorate. Citizens have the right to propose new laws in Switzerland – the only thing they need to force a nationwide vote on an initiative is a petition of 100,000 signatures."

The question not asked is why doesn’t the American electorate have oversight over legislation and unpopular government regulations in the United States like in Switzerland? Imagine if 4% of the American voters signed a petition requiring a nationwide vote "yea or nay" on the banking bailouts, going to war in Iraq, auditing the Federal Reserve, nationalized health care or on the trillions in new Washington debt added because of the financial meltdown. The United States would still be a decentralized republic with limited government had we had the political option to hold back Washington and the special interests.

How America would be different if we had Swiss-style political rights to restrain government where the people rule instead of the special interests. Imagine an America where the billions in graft and political influence that control Congress could still buy legislation but not ultimate control if we as a people could overrule their actions.

What if the will of the people still ultimately controlled the political system and direction with true limited government at the federal, state and local level? Imagine the American electorate overriding Congress and demanding a strong dollar backed by real gold reserves, an audit of the Federal Reserve, a rollback of the bailouts, a declaration of war for foreign military intervention, the abolishment of the Patriot Act and a return to banking privacy.

Yes, a Swiss political party (The Swiss Peoples Party) promotes a nationalist agenda to the Swiss voters and they will ultimately decide in referendum yes or no on the issue. This is currently impossible in the United States but Swiss direct democracy and limited confederation government have worked in Switzerland for hundreds of years.

This is far superior to the two-party monopoly in America where the elites controlling both parties can push their self-serving agendas without restraint. Currently, short of the Tenth Amendment movement, state nullification or outright state secession, there is no real effective way to push back against Washington.

Until the American people can find a way to restrain the Federal government, the bureaucracy and the judiciary, the best place for Americans to secure and safeguard their wealth is outside their own country. Switzerland is one of the best jurisdictions to consider because their political system has preserved the rights and freedoms we once had as Americans. Still the ultimate problem for Americans is the necessity to restore our liberties at home because history has shown that wealth without liberty is only a temporary condition at best.

I say, it is time to take a real look at direct democracy in the United States or else Americans who value their property and liberties will have little choice but to first transfer their wealth to safety outside the US as it will be lost in the coming crash of treasury debt and the dollar. Next we must stand and fight the Washington leviathan through the political tools of the 10^th amendment and John C. Calhoun’s political ideal of nullification both of which the Feds will probably just ignore. Our final democratic political tool is to exercise the political right of state-by-state secession with all the political and historical baggage this entails.

Trust me, Swiss style direct democracy in the United States would be an easier way to control Washington and the special interests but we only have a few years before the Washington debt and dollar collapse is upon us. Therefore I’ll close with a question. Is anybody here for secession?

November 12, 2009

Ron Holland [send him mail] works in Zurich and is a co-editor of the Swiss Mountain Vision Newsletter.

WASHINGTON — In her maiden Supreme Court appearance last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a provocative comment that probed the foundations of corporate law.

During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court’s majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong — and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court’s error to start with…[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

After a confirmation process that revealed little of her legal philosophy, the remark offered an early hint of the direction Justice Sotomayor might want to take the court.

"Progressives who think that corporations already have an unduly large influence on policy in the United States have to feel reassured that this was one of [her] first questions," said Douglas Kendall, president of the liberal Constitutional Accountability Center.

"I don’t want to draw too much from one comment," says Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation. But it "doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that she respects the corporate form and the type of rights that it should be afforded."

For centuries, corporations have been considered beings apart from their human owners, yet sharing with them some attributes, such as the right to make contracts and own property. Originally, corporations were a relatively rare form of organization. The government granted charters to corporations, delineating their specific functions. Their powers were presumed limited to those their charter spelled out.

"A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible," Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in an 1819 case. "It possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it."

But as the Industrial Revolution took hold, corporations proliferated and views of their functions began to evolve.

In an 1886 tax dispute between the Southern Pacific Railroad and the state of California, the court reporter quoted Chief Justice Morrison Waite telling attorneys to skip arguments over whether the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause applied to corporations, because "we are all of opinion that it does."

That seemingly off-hand comment reflected an "impulse to shield business activity from certain government regulation," says David Millon, a law professor at Washington and Lee University.

"A positive way to put it is that the economy is booming, American production is leading the world and the courts want to promote that," Mr. Millon says. Less charitably, "it’s all about protecting corporate wealth" from taxes, regulations or other legislative initiatives.

Subsequent opinions expanded corporate rights. In 1928, the court struck down a Pennsylvania tax on transportation corporations because individual taxicab drivers were exempt. Corporations get "the same protection of equal laws that natural persons" have, Justice Pierce Butler wrote.

From the mid-20th century, though, the court has vacillated on how far corporate rights extend. In a 1973 case before a more liberal court, Justice William O. Douglas rejected the Butler opinion as "a relic" that overstepped "the narrow confines of judicial review" by second-guessing the legislature’s decision to tax corporations differently than individuals.

Today, it’s "just complete confusion" over which rights corporations can claim, says Prof. William Simon of Columbia Law School.

Even conservatives sometimes have been skeptical of corporate rights. Then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist dissented in 1979 from a decision voiding Massachusetts’s restriction of corporate political spending on referendums. Since corporations receive special legal and tax benefits, "it might reasonably be concluded that those properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose special dangers in the political sphere," he wrote.

On today’s court, the direction Justice Sotomayor suggested is unlikely to prevail. During arguments, the court’s conservative justices seem to view corporate political spending as beneficial to the democratic process. "Corporations have lots of knowledge about environment, transportation issues, and you are silencing them during the election," Justice Anthony Kennedy said during arguments last week.

But Justice Sotomayor may have found a like mind in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "A corporation, after all, is not endowed by its creator with inalienable rights," Justice Ginsburg said, evoking the Declaration of Independence.

How far Justice Sotomayor pursues the theme could become clearer when the campaign-finance decision is delivered, probably by year’s end.

Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Perhaps the biggest big idea that gathered speed during the last millennium was that we humans might govern ourselves. But no one really meant it.

What was really meant in most places was that we would elect people to govern us and sporadically renew or revoke their contracts. It was enough. There was no practicable way to involve all of us, all the time.

The headlines from Washington today blare of bailouts, stimulus, clunkers, Afpak, health care. But it is possible that future historians, looking back, will fixate on a quieter project of Barack Obama’s White House: its exploration of how government might be opened to greater public participation in the digital age, of how to make self-government more than a metaphor.

President Obama declared during the campaign that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” That messianic phrase held the promise of a new style of politics in this time of tweets and pokes. But it was vague, a paradigm slipped casually into our drinks. To date, the taste has proven bittersweet.

Federal agencies have been directed to release online information that was once sealed; reporters from Web-only publications have been called on at press conferences; the new portal Data.gov is asking citizens to create their own applications using government datasets. But the most revealing efforts have been in “crowdsourcing” — in soliciting citizens’ policy ideas on the Internet and allowing them to vote on one another’s proposals.

During the transition, the administration created an online “Citizens’ Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas to the president. “The best-rated ones will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, we’ll print them out and gather them into a binder like the ones the President receives every day from experts and advisors,” Valerie Jarrett, Mr. Obama’s friend and adviser, wrote to supporters.

They received 44,000 proposals and 1.4 million votes for those proposals. The results were quietly published, but they were embarrassing — not so much to the administration as to us, the ones we’ve been waiting for.

In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. Legalizing online poker topped the technology ideas, twice as popular as nationwide Wi-Fi. Revoking the Church of Scientology’s tax-exempt status garnered three times more votes than raising funding for childhood cancer.

Once in power, the White House crowdsourced again. In March, its Office of Science and Technology Policy hosted an online brainstorm about making government more transparent. Good ideas came, but a stunning number had no connection to transparency, with many calls for marijuana legalization and a raging (and groundless) debate about the authenticity of Mr. Obama’s birth certificate.

If the Internet needed a further nudge from its pedestal, the health care debate obliged. From the administration’s point of view, the Web arguably proved better at spreading deceptions about “death panels” than at spreading truth, and at turning town halls into brawls than at nurturing the unfettered deliberation that some imagine to be the hallmark of the Internet.

There is a lively debate in progress about what some call Gov 2.0. One camp sees in the Internet an unprecedented opportunity to bring back Athenian-style direct democracy. The vision is captured in a recent British documentary, “Us Now,” which paints a future in which every citizen is connected to the state as easily as to Facebook, choosing policies, questioning politicians, collaborating with neighbors.

“Can we all govern?” the movie asks at the outset. (It can, of course, be viewed on the Web.)

The people in this camp point to information technology’s aid to grassroots movements from Moldova to Iran. They look at India, where voters can now access, via text message, information on the criminal records of parliamentary candidates, and Africa, where cellphones are improving election monitoring. They note the new ease of extending reliable scientific and scholarly knowledge to a broad audience. They observe how the Internet, in democratizing access to facts and figures, encourages politician and citizen alike to base decisions on more than hunches.

But their vision of Internet democracy is part of a larger cultural evolution toward the expectation that we be consulted about everything, all the time. Increasingly, the best articles to read are the most e-mailed ones, the music worth buying belongs to singers we have just text-voted into stardom, the next book to read is one bought by other people who bought the last book you did, and media that once reported to us now publish whatever we tweet.

In this new age, our consent is gathered every few minutes, not every few years.

Another camp sees the Internet less rosily. Its members tend to be enthusiastic about the Web and enthusiastic about civic participation; they are skeptical of the Internet as a panacea for politics. They worry that it creates a falsely reassuring illusion of equality, openness, universality.

“We live in an age of democratic experimentation — both in our official institutions and in the many informal ways in which the public is consulted,” James Fishkin, a Stanford political scientist, writes in his new book, “When the People Speak.” “Many methods and technologies can be used to give voice to the public will. But some give a picture of public opinion as if through a fun house mirror.”

Because it is so easy to filter one’s reading online, extreme views dominate the discussion. Moderates are underrepresented, so citizens seeking better health care may seem less numerous than poker fans. The Internet’s image of openness and equality belies its inequities of race, geography and age.

Lies spread like wildfire on the Web; Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, no Luddite, warned last October that if the great brands of trusted journalism died, the Internet would become a “cesspool” of bad information. Wikipedia has added a layer of editing — remember editing? — for articles on living people.

Perhaps most menacingly, the Internet’s openness allows well-organized groups to simulate support, to “capture and impersonate the public voice,” as Mr. Fishkin said in an e-mail exchange.

There is no turning back the clock. We now have more public opinion exerting pressure on politics than ever before. The question is how it may be channeled and filtered to create freer, more successful societies, because simply putting things online is no cure-all.

“At this moment, the conversation is not whether the Internet is important and is going to be widespread,” said Clay Shirky, an Internet theorist and the author of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.” He added, in a telephone interview: “Now that it is so important, it’s actually too important not to think through the constitutional and governance issues involved.”

A search is on for the right metaphor. What is the new role for government: A platform? A vending machine, into which we put money to extract services? A facilitator? And what, indeed, is the new role for us — the ones we’ve been waiting for?

Albany’s corruption and incompetence have reached epic proportions this year. The only real hope of fixing things is if voters in New York State elect a new, truly reform-minded generation of politicians.

Right now, the rules — on campaign finance, redistricting, even ballot access — overwhelmingly discourage competition. The good news is that New Yorkers are fed up.

If legislators and Gov. David Paterson want to hold on to their seats, they must prove their commitment to reform by making elections truly competitive.

OPEN THE BALLOT TO MORE CANDIDATES The rules for getting on a ballot in New York are absurd. Petitions must be signed in a very short time. A voter can sign only one candidate’s petition. There are too many names required. The state’s Board of Elections, which sets and enforces many of these rules, is filled with party hacks.

Last month, Bill de Blasio, a Brooklyn Democrat trying to run for New York City’s public advocate job, was briefly removed by the city’s Board of Elections from the Sept. 15 ballot for a typo on the cover sheet. City Councilman Alan Gerson, who is running for re-election from Lower Manhattan, has so far lost his place on the ballot because he tried to correct his own address on a cover sheet for his petitions.

Candidates who can demonstrate genuine public support by paying a modest fee [Ed: Bold added for emphasis] or collecting a modest number of signatures should be allowed to compete. Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh has offered a constitutional amendment that would allow the Legislature to set real qualifications for members of the elections boards. In the meantime, current members can demonstrate their fitness by letting all qualified candidates on to the ballot rather than trying their hardest to keep them off.

REFORM CAMPAIGN FINANCE RULES New York also has one of the most unfair campaign finance systems in the country. Contribution limits barely limit anybody from giving exorbitant amounts to their favorite compliant politician. And there are no limits at all on contributions of so-called housekeeping funds for political parties. Disclosure is poor, and enforcement is lax — all an invitation for Albany politicians to do their worst.

State Senator Joseph Addabbo Jr., a Queens Democrat who chairs the elections committee, said that he and his committee had been putting together “a pretty good” campaign finance reform until the Senate disintegrated into a monthlong leadership stalemate. Mr. Addabbo and his colleagues in the Assembly need to quickly approve real reforms, including public financing of campaigns.

REDISTRICT HONESTLY Every 10 years, legislators in effect create their own voting districts. So it is no surprise that the maps make it difficult-to-impossible for challengers to dislodge a sitting legislator. The only sure way to fix this problem is by moving now to create a nonpartisan redistricting commission — before the 2010 census and the next round of redistricting. The commission would draw lines based on such factors as population, not party affiliation.

This fundamental reform has little hope unless business and public leaders push hard for it. Tom Golisano, the wealthy meddler and occasional candidate from Buffalo who helped orchestrate the June Senate melee claims that he truly wants reform in Albany. He can prove it by financing a public campaign demanding the creation of an independent redistricting commission.