Defining Web 2.0

The emergence of Web 2.0 has attracted negative commentary by people who do not entirely understand what Web 2.0 is and, consequently, what it entails. Admittedly, there is some truth to the relationship inferred to exist between Web 2.0 and the quantum increases in bandwidth that are primarily being created through the investments of ISP’s. However, the bandwidth improvements are only a requisite for Web 2.0, and they do not constitute one of its defining characteristics. Furthermore, as long as Net Neutrality is maintained, we need not consume ourselves with issues related to the loss of the marginal degree of egalitarianism that current embodies the distribution of bandwidth - which currently provides some measures to ensure that high-speed connections are obtainable to large amounts of the population.

This is not to say that more does not need to be done to improve accessibility of high-speed Internet connections for all segments of the population. Certainly, there exists a gap between the strata in American society who can afford broadband and those who lack private access to this resource. Additionally, and perhaps more pressingly, due to inequalities in education and so forth, there exists vast discrepancies in the distribution of the cultural capital necessary for a social agent to advantageously deploy the communicative technologies engendered by the Information Age and the institutionalization of the Internet. These matters deserve the utmost attention and concern. However, the inequalities stated above do not qualify as potential polemics against Web 2.0, because Web 2.0, itself, certainly does not constitute an antecedent to a present or potential system of stratification, defining the resources available to differing segments of the population.

Web 2.0 is a paradigmatic shift whose inception is rooted in the original innovations of open source software designers who detected patterns emerging in the social activities comprising the software projects in which they were engaged. Communicative inventions, such as the Wiki, which were originally innovated in order to open source programming communities to work more efficiently, were appropriated toward considerations that extended beyond software programming and onto social knowledge production in general.

Web 2.0 involves a flattening of the traditional vertical structures creating a hierarchy of privileges for producing various forms of Truth. Academic knowledge is quickly becoming something not determined by an oligarchy within its respective disciplines. Additionally, technological truth - which can be understood as knowledge that provides a legitimate and marketable product, serviceable to the needs of end-user - is becoming a province not monopolized by dominant corporations. Indeed, the social classifications that have defined the resources available to individuals, assuming various positions in these systems of stratification, are becoming fuzzy, and, in all likelihood, will dissolve and discontinue to inhibit or facilitate Truth-production by individuals and collectivities.

To use the economic sphere of society as an example, the traditional boundaries between manufacturers, distributors, and consumers have blurred. All parties involved in this new configuration of development and distributive practices possess the ability to assume different capacities in the relationships between and among identities within the market. Although, it pains me considerably, there is a semblance of truth to the conditions predicted in the “Army of Davids.”

However, this does not entail – necessarily - the extension of a form of rationalization, hypothesized by early theorists who had detected the changing state of modern societies as they transitioned into a post-industrial state. Increasingly, the type of intellectual work in Technocracy occurs in a state where labors are detached from material conditions, leading to a result where contributions to products are no longer reducible to tangible materials. Consequently, the value of labor defies estimation, according to traditional parameters, which might calculate the value of work according to the labor hours consumed in the production a particular commodity that has value in the market.

Knowledge consumers have been equipped with the necessary serviceable objects needed to transform the informational content provided on servers for all of the public to peruse into forms that reflect their own aesthetics and experiences. Once again, the traditional roles assumed among the many, who have been existentially constrained until now within the social compound of the consumer identity, are no longer as rigid as they were previously. The end-user can now assume the role of a provider, and vice versa. The primary dynamic determining what inventions will take hold is the receptivity to the idea and its manifestation by an inclusionary public of counterparts. I hesitate to use the term, peers, due to its incorporation into the vocabulary of the academy, used by this exclusionary institution to describe its own practices.

The aspects, which Web 2.0 instantiates, are better illuminated through a concrete exemplar, which is provided below. This representation comes from a Webpage belonging to a site currently under development by the Populist Party of America:

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This is a page from a site that remains in the sandbox. Nevertheless, it continues to be useful as an exemplar of Web 2.0 designs. What is of significance are the direct links for entering the URL into social bookmarking services; a form of social knowledge construction, where the contents of the Internet are discovered and indexed according to the collaborative efforts of a Plebeian, inclusionary public, providing for a search application that generates, according to most, more relevant results than traditional syntactically structured search engines. Although social bookmarking sites continue to rely upon keyword searches, one can expect that these services will become more sophisticated as the Semantic Web begins to take hold. Regardless of their current dependence upon conventional search engine mechanics, the tags entered by contributors are more accurate and detailed, creating a social knowledge forum that continues to grow and continues to increase the relevancy of the results generated from searches. Additionally, there is another dynamic operative within these types of forums, people do not enter into the servers data base any site that they happen to run across. Rather, there is a process of selectivity based upon aesthetics and tested utility. Therefore, results generated from queries conduct in the API’s belonging to Web 2.0 services produce results generated from processes entirely different from the syntactical operations deployed by conventional search engines. The selectivity of links directed toward contents - assumed to possess the highest degrees of relevancy - are a result of organic processes.

The processes - collectively forming what is tantamount to a chaotic system – are not reproducible by the syntactically structured operations embedded in the search engines provided by servers such as Google or MSN. Although the engines, such as Google’s search, can index vastly more contents belonging to domains and their pages - an accomplishment achieved through the deployment of spiders that transverse the links directing the spider to additional contents - it is unlikely that these engines will ever acquire the capacity to retrieve results that are as relevant as those produced by social search engines.

Another salient aspect to the Webpage represented above are the RSS links located on the bottom of the page. RSS in another feature of Web 2.0 that allows for the real time update of content modifications. XML meta-tags are fed through a syndication that is often rendered using an Internet browser or, sometimes, standalone applications. These feeds contain citations of links that allow for an end-user to access a page that he or she infers to have content of interest from the descriptions in the meta-tags. It should be pointed out, once again, the functionality engendered by Really Simple Syndication is considered an instance of Web 2.0; a conclusion based upon its role as a Web component. Additionally, RSS is not comprised of static content, which is an attribute associated with most of Internet 1.0. This consideration brings into the forefront a marked difference between the two paradigms: Web 2.0 is comprised of servers displaying content not authored by the service provider in way that allows for only the original form of the media assuming a static state. Instead, Web 2.0 usually designates electronic media that is in a constant state of flux, typically expansion, most often integration with content initially provided by other servers, and collaboration among the members of the inclusionary public that care to contribute to its refinement, augmentation, and extensibility, which translates into magnified functionality.

The open source project known as WordPress presents an embodiment of all of the aforementioned attributes. Wordpress is a weblog programming project that allows for a community of programmers to add to the extent of its extensibility, rendering it, in a sense, limitless. Some of the ethics preemptive in the Wordpress ethos are parsimony, which allows for the easy comprehension of the programming; thus, facilitating its continued expansion by a diversely trained and aesthetically disposed community of peers; (this pretentious textual contrivance is intended to signified the conventional term, peer, with a modified sense that conveys an entirely voluntary and inclusionary public of counterparts); a distinction that has significance when juxtaposed with the sense peer acquires within the context of discourse emanating from the academy. Also, the Wordpress project is keenly aware of aesthetics. This illuminates another thematic quality that is pervasive within the culture of Web 2.0. Utility and aesthetics are not discontinuous properties. Rather, the two competing spheres of considerations find themselves fused into a unified type of praxis that emphasizes functionality and aesthetics through a single modality of expression. The synthetic conglomeration of intellectual considerations is no longer a dichotomy of competing concerns that requires the partial negation of one to accommodate the other. Instead, the product exists as one in the same, where aesthetics fall under the scope of pragmatics; a conceptualization of design that is congruent with definitions put forth by those responsible for the inception of the philosophy.

Social Knowledge Production

When I first stumbled onto the communicative capacities of the Web when engaged in a bizarre circumstance with a corrupt University, which was attempting to conceal its
negligence, so not to lose a tremendously large grant, I made the precipitous prediction that the Internet and the Blogosphere would dislodge the disciplinarian monopoly of knowledge production. Publicity was no longer the sole propriety of the elevated statuses in society who had acquired the necessary prestige symbols to endow their speech-acts with the property of Truth, or, at the very minimum, the privilege to be subjected to the dialogical mechanisms that adjudicated which externalized speech-acts would be accepted as
objectivity. I saw in this very medium of communication a possibility of circumventing the established institutions of gate-keepers who effectively passed judgment on what discursive contributions would enter into the textual domains that embody the stature of the academy. I went so far as to predict the slow demise of the academy altogether; at least in the sense of the Social Sciences.

The prophecy I was bold enough to render at the time remains in a state of limbo with competing forces vying to shape the communicative possibilities of the Internet in a fashion that either engenders or preserves their vest interests. Undoubtedly, the controversy over the deregulation of Net Neutrality is a part of this conflict. Those who have the material means will be in a position that grants them access to a larger audience, and consumers of the higher strata of services will enjoy content inaccessible to the plebeian class of the
populace. The distribution of the cultural capital will be configured to reflect preexisting inequalities in society, and the hope of democracy once fostered by the Internet will be loss.

We must not lose heart, however, become the verdict is yet to be announced with respect to the future of Information Technology in society. Subversive discourse still finds a home on the Internet, and, indeed, has provided spheres of communication that are robust and argumentative. The Green Party, for instance, and, more particularly, the Green Alliance have formed online chat forums that possess ongoing dialogue covering various concerns, all of which are germane to the Red-Green current of political discourse. What is troubling, however, is the absence of any clear translation from Internet based communication and dialogue and political mobilization. Of course, groups, such as MoveOn.org have built influential advocacy groups with a progressive agenda. Yet, I find this unsatisfactory because it is roughly a top-to-bottom organization, where decisions are rendered by elites in the organization, and, subsequently, the masses who participate in these movements are left with the option of contributing money or signing worthless petitions. A more extreme
example, which is, in fact, laughable, are the Internet mass mailings made by the Democratic Party, conducted under the pretenses of Grass-roots, which only solicit contributions from the members of this robust grass-roots movement.

Other forms of social-knowledge production offer a more penetrating glimpse into the democratic possibilities of the Web. The Wikipedia is the most popular and salient exemplar of this type of deliberative, egalitarian knowledge-building. The are no requisites with
regards to status, which might prohibit one from participating in the generation of contents possessed by the Wikipedia server. In other words, unlike traditional disciplinarian forms of knowledge, there are no status symbols that one must acquire to be considered a legitimate contributor to the particular discourse both forming and emanating from a disciplinary matrix. Knowledge in this sense is democratic and any member of the Demos who possesses the discursive skill need to captivate an audience - regardless of his or her social strata outside of the public sphere of dialogue - can effectively persuade the mob to embrace policies according positions articulated in his sophistries.

For the Athenian form of democracy to persist, civic egalitarianism had to cherished and safe-guarded from potentially corrupting influences. The constant fear of a faction acquiring a disproportionate amount of power was a real concern and precipitated the manifestation of institutions where public servants were selected by lottery as opposed to status symbols that might be conflated with elitism. This is not to say that the Athenians did not have elites, but the term, elite, had a different sense in juxtaposition to the meaning it often acquires during its contemporary usage. An elite, according to the Athenians, was an individual who demonstrated exceptional skills in a variety of contexts. Nonetheless, an elite was not someone who was defined by his or her position of power. In other words, the classification, elite, did not translate into political privilege. Elitism was related to the stylization that defined one’s character, not to a position of power that might be procured by a citizen belonging to the Polis.

Russell Cole

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Sociology of Web 2.0

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Extreme Democracy (ED) is a set of technology- and sociology-bound political concepts being developed in hopes of changing the nature of representation. ED advocates want citizen activists to have a greater role in governance, mostly through digital technologies that can bring together dynamic, ever-changing, issue-driven majorities (as opposed to traditional, rigid, party-line, ideology-driven majorities). They want the representative govt — the repocracy, rule by representatives, new word to take away their false claims to democracy — to become more responsive to citizen consensus.

Unfortunately, the ED advocates don’t want this to be direct democracy (DD), which is rule by the people through constitutionally-defined governance components decided by binding referendums. In various US states, there are eight constitutionally-defined DD governance components. (See this blog’s sidebar essay, “Executive Summary of Direct Democracy”.)

The eight DD governance components are the greatest corruption-fighting package ever devised by ordinary people in the history of humankind. It was secured into the many state constitutions by the greatest democracy movement that has ever occurred: the Reform Era, circa 1898-1918. Many tens of millions of politically sophisticated Americans were directly involved. Their collective level of political sophistication so far exceeded that of today’s national civil society as to be a face-flushing embarrassment for any ethically normal person with sufficient historical information.

The predators’ Reform Era corruption machines promptly ran in unconstitutional controls of citizen-proposed law, taking away much of the corruption-fighting power that the citizens had won. We’ll come back to that.

The eight DD governance components include the election of representatives. There’s nothing mystical about elections that set them apart from referendums. Elections are nothing more than binding referendums, voted by all eligible citizens in a given jurisdiction, as all referendums are. This lack of distinction between elections and referendums becomes very important in breaking down the wall of sophistries and vacuous arguments that predator elitism uses so deftly to help them keep down the sovereign people’s DD.

In fact, in the genesis of DD, in the early 1900s, there was one primary purpose that came through in the DD literature. DD, most often referred to then as Direct Legislation. It was to achieve the genuine representative govt that the sovereign people had been promised in the Constitution — and that political corruption had robbed away.

Strangely enough, that is exactly the intent of the Extreme Democracy political philosophy.

Contrary to predator elitism’s propaganda, sophistries, and vacuous arguments, the purpose of DD was not to set up a “pure democracy” to weaken representative govt, but rather to set up citizen checks and balances on govt to strengthen it against the treasonous corruptors within and without. (See especially, The National Economic League, The Initiative And Referendum: Arguments Pro And Con By A Special Committee Of The National Economic League. � 1912, J.W. Beatson. Published at Cambridge, MA: Caustic-Claflin Co., Printers.)

One of the ED movement’s leaders, Lebkowsky, misstates DD — in distinguishing it from ED — to require that “all people must be involved in every decision in order for the process to be just and democratic.” He then turns this specious falsehood into a straw man, which he handily knocks down to show that the ED political philosophy is vastly superior.

Lebowsky has not done his homework on the legal realities of either American DD or Swiss DD. (He seems not to know that DD is a legal reality in the US, or that it exists as an intrinsic part of the Constitution’s guaranteed “republican form of govt” in 23 active I&R states.) In both nations, DD’s citizen lawmaking — formulation of new law with the initiative, or veto of legislature-made law with the referendum — is not involved with every “decision”.

In the US, thousands of unchallenged, legislature-made laws go quietly into the books every year in the 23 states in which the citizens possess DD’s veto-referendum. In Switzerland, there is a informal 90-day rule. If the sovereign people have not brought a veto-referendum within 90 days of a measure becoming law, it’s understood that they have given tacit approval to the law.

Of course, the sovereign Swiss possess the constitutional amendment initiative (CAI — the most powerful governance component in the nation), which has the power to write law directly into the constitution, indirectly wiping out any law that has become harmful by making a correcting law. There are 17 active CAI states in the US, and here as there, the CAI is the most powerful governance component in the nation..

Most DD advocates, excluding the “half-DD” elitism-fascism shills, but including especially myself, would love to see the Extreme Democracy concepts active in the civil societies of the I&R states. The ED concepts amplify participation in the democratic processes, which would include the DD processes. They also would help activate each I&R state’s civil society to organize the national citizen action groups (CAGs) that we desperately need now to combat the Bush-Cheney Usurpation with our sovereign people’s power. Additionally, the ED concepts would be invaluable aids to future Online Citizen Institutions (OCIs), much more below.

Unfortunately, ED is not a good fit for DD civil societies. It could be beneficial, if its advocates could temporarily limit its leadership analysis, but it’s not clear that the ED political philosophy can function without its full-blown leadership principles.

ED’s leadership analysis is attractive and commonsensical. It accounts for the rise of individual leaders in any horizontal, nonhierarchical organization (NHO), which, of course, ED sees itself generating. ED’s leadership analysis says that individuals who are naturally talented, effectively active, lucid, and cogent will be identified as issue-related leaders in the NHO, and will be followed by others. It says that such leaders will acquire more power than others to affect decision-making in the NHO.

Such NHO, of course, were also the products of any local or state-level DD campaign before the advent of — arrggg — money as free speech. The DD NHOs grew out of the processing needs of individual I&R and recall petitions. People who supported the issue got together and campaigned the petition into the next election/referendum.

Naturally, advocates of a future national DD system want to see DD NHOs become permanent fixtures in and around the needed OCIs, which will protect citizen business against govt intrusions, vote in agendas for their state or regional jurisdictions, develop and process I&R and recall petitions in wikis and other modules, create a deliberative and amendment “floor” for discussion of the petitions, vote amendments up or down, vote finished petitions into the formal state or national govt’s lawmaking process, coordinate most of the petition campaign’s activities, and ensure that state or national govt actively complies with any law passed by the people.

Strangely enough, all of that is on a par with, but a step up from, ED political philosophy. It’s a step up because it carries with it the sovereign people’s power that precludes govt from using its arbitrary rulings and corruption machines to block legal citizen action.

However, the deep-pockets corporate funding now possible in I&R petition campaigns — since the 1988 SCOTUS decision deemed money as free speech — has made DD organizations very different from what they were previously. The presence of big money, to buy petition signatures and to run expensive PR campaigns, automatically requires and brings managers, giving the organization an hierarchical structure.

Obviously, the ED leadership analysis cannot apply to individuals within hierarchical political organizations (HPOs). The hierarchy provides the leaders, not the grassroots group. So DD loses the ED leadership analysis that was once its reality. It loses that reality to elitist-fascist encroachment — for now. It’s about when grassroots are not grassroots. ED would also suffer in such supposedly grassroots HPOs. ED’s natural leaders could easily become disheartened. In the end, ED leaders will probably eliminate HPOs from any ED operations.

Many of us who advocate an optimum, fully independent, DD system melded to the national repocracy believe that money is not legal free speech. (Bribery is done with money, and bribery is illegal. If money were actually free speech, then bribery would have to be legal.) We insist that the misuse of money as free speech in political affairs is nothing more than the legalization of bribery for the benefit of the elites. We generally agree that the 1988 SCOTUS ruling should be reversed with a Constitutional amendment and that the political uses of money should be heavily regulated, along with all other corporate and political party intrusions into politics.

If we can make those things happen, the Extreme Democracy leadership analysis for NHOs will be applicable. Well — as long as the NHOs are truly and fully independent of govt controls.

And here we both, DD and ED, run into the teeth of repocracy’s corruption machines.

Clearly, a DD system that is underhandedly controlled by govt cannot be a nonhierarchical organization. Govt, in its intrusive controls, makes itself a hierarchy for the DD system. Citizen leaders may think that they are leaders, and they may be seen as leaders by their followers initially, but govt control denies them independent leader status and diminishes any related powers considerably.

You cannot effect decision-making within the NHO if the decision-making is severely limited or taken away from you by govt. If the Secretary of State says that your initiative petition’s ballot language is unacceptable and that he has (unconstitutionally) re-written it in accord with some (unconstitutional) statute, you, as the leader who carefully crafted the original ballot language, have been cut off at the knees. The Secretary of State’s (unconstitutional) action may have adverse effects on your continuing leadership among the NHO’s individuals, and your status reduction might disorient and adversely effect the entire NHO and its objectives.

Fact is, such unconstitutional actions are open to every I&R state govt. The rabble are kept down and the profits and power of the elites remain unlimited. So it has always been. So it must always be, according to the predator elites. Constitutions and statutes have always been, and will always be, subordinate to the natural law of wealth and power. Well — as long as the sovereign people let them have it their way.

Beginning immediately after the passage of constitutional DD provisions, most of which happened in the early 1900s, the constitutional criminals in the legislatures began writing and passing statutes directing many different types of unconstitutional and arbitrary controls for citizen-proposed law. Constitutional criminals in the executive branch, especially Secretaries of State and Attornies General, have unconstitutionally acted in accord with those unconstitutional statutes. Constitutional criminals in the judicial branch have joined in with their own, uniquely judicial unconstitutionalities, in accord with the state’s unconstitutional statutes.

It’s a gauntlet of unconstitutional and arbitrary contols that applies to every citizen-proposed law in every I&R state. However it is only selectively applied so that civil society doesn’t connect the dots.

Citizen-proposed law that is offensive to money-power is stopped — or worse, passed and turned into a nightmare of anti-DD, anti-people, and anti-public-education machinations, as was the case with California’s Prop 13, limiting property taxes, in 1978.

Citizen-proposed law that is NOT offensive to money-power sails right on through, demonstrating that the system works.

It’s been a successful strategy, helping to keep the people from noticing the unconstitutionalities, for over a hundred years.

There are many variations on the theme, but the two most common groups of unconstitutional acts against citizen-proposed law are separation of powers violations and binding judicial review of proposed law.

The separation of powers violations occur when executive branch officials perform legislative or judicial branch functions that are NOT specified in the state constitution. The Secretary of State may be directed to write or re-write the ballot language provided for the proposal by the citizens submitting the petition. Writing the ballot language is a legislative function, not an executive function. What the ballot language says is important legislatively. It may very well be a factor in any subsequent court action that must interpret the citizen-proposed law’s meaning — and subtle, misleading language written by an executive branch official could easily result in an unfavorable court ruling.

Another popular trick in the separation of powers variation is to empower the Attorney General to deem that a particular citizen-proposed law is not clearly written or conflicts with the standing laws of the state, and must therefore be rejected. The rejection action is unconstitutional on two counts. First, no executive branch official is permitted to reject a bill of law proposed in accord with constitutional provisions, regardless of whether that proposed law comes from the legislature or from civil society. Second, such an executive branch official’s binding judicial review of a proposed law would be unconstitutional even if done by a judge. No constitution, state or federal, defines the judicial power to include binding judicial review of proposed law. Binding judicial review can only be applied after the measure has been signed into finished law.

The only way for such cross-branch acts to be constitutional is for them to be specifically ordered in the state constitution, as exceptions to the separation of powers provisions. The Nebraska constitution’s separation of powers provision is typical –

The powers of the government of this state are divided into three distinct departments, the legislative, executive and judicial, and no person or collection of persons being one of these departments, shall exercise any power properly belonging to either of the others, except as hereinafter expressly directed or permitted.

With regard to citizen-proposed law, there are no cross-branch acts specifically permitted in any of the I&R state constitutions — with the sole exception of Massachusetts. I&R constitutional provisions there so heavily contradict other constitutional provisions — in their creation of arbitrary elite controls of citizen proposed law — that all Massachusetts I&R, since its inception in 1918, has been, and will continue to be, unconstitutional. Only a statewide constitutional convention will have the comprehensive power needed to sort it all out and eliminate the contradictions.

The most common unconstitutional stunt outside of the separation of powers violations is the binding judicial review of proposed law — done by judges who absolutely, positively know exactly how unconstitutional their binding review is. Nonetheless, this unconstitutional stunt accounts for most of the delays and rejections of citizen-proposed law.

If state officials or judges pulled either of those stunts — separation of powers violations or binding judicial review — on legislature-proposed law, they would be impeached and removed before dinner. But the unconstitutional stunts are SOP for citizen-proposed law. It’s how the people are kept down and the corruption machines kept well-lubricated.

And, please, no more specious arguments, claiming that there is some sort of viable distinction between legislature-proposed law and the citizen I&R petition. Both are proposed law, pure and simple.

The I&R petition proposes that a law be passed, not that an executive agency policy or judicial ruling be passed. The I&R petition, once approved by the sovereign people, becomes law, not anything else. The law that the approved I&R petition becomes is open to binding judicial review as law, just as is any law passed by the legislature. The I&R petition is a legislative function within the legislative power of govt and, purely, proposed law.

When the constitutional criminals reach outside the state’s constitution to delay, alter, and/or reject citizen-proposed law, the dollar and human costs are incalculable. The harm that the constitutional criminals do is far beyond the delays, alterations, and/or rejections of a potential better governance for their sovereign civil society. They also further the people-abusive and costly corruptions that the citizen-proposed law would have ended. They give those corruptions more time to run before the corruptions can possibly be ended. They cripple I&R rights by deterring citizens who have good ideas from coming forward in the future. They betray, defile, and violate the rule of law, which is probably the single most important founding principle of our nation.

Additionally in violating the state and national constitutions to do their political evil, they both violate citizen rights and their oaths to protect the rights of citizens. The two together are an act of treason, as defined for the secessionist state legislators in the 1860s.

As things stand now, the unconstitutional and arbitrary controls of DD in the I&R states are the predator elites’ first line of defense against any state or national limiting of their corruption machines or their illicitly-gained profits and power.

Predator blocking of state-level good governance policies that are offensive to money-power turns out to be an excellent way to prevent those same policies from gaining national traction. Citizens in many I&R states have tried to pass initiatives ending regressive personal income taxes, and replacing them with progressive sales taxes. Of course, sales taxes to support state services would cost the luxury-item-buying elites a lot more money. State govts have unconstitutionally and arbitrarily thrown out all such attempts, one way or another, over decades of time.

It is very important for this simple fact to register in your brain. Compute this. The hundred years of lawlessness in violation of their sovereign’s fundamental-law constitutions by officials and judges in roughly half of our state repocracies have been knowingly participated in by the leadership of both major political parties. Both majors have been increasingly involved in creating the new unconstitutional statutes that provide variation on the theme of controlling citizen-proposed law, keeping the unsuspecting people down and the predators’ profits and power unlimited.

No rebuilding of either political party will save us from the predators. Both political parties are front-rank predators.

To make things worse, to grab we the sovereign people with another come-along that drags us past dealing with the unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous state govt interference, we now have Extreme Democracy advocates painting this pretty picture of how leadership develops in a nonhierarchical civil society. All we have to do is to put that leadership notion to work at the grassroots, they say, and we’ll have civil society’s best and brightest showing us how to overcome the bad guys.

Intentional or not, ED is a string-’em-along, jerk-’em-around. It glosses over, covers up, and looks past the unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous actions by state govts in their control of citizen-proposed law.

We need to see the truth and reality of the current unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous state govt system first. We need to understand the progression of constitutional amendments that will be required to clean up I&R law in each state. (For an in-depth discussion of this topic, see the SOTR, Chapter 4, “Violating Constitutions” — all of it. It’s on the DDL site at http://ddleague-usa.net/SOTR4.html ) We need to find ways to criminally prosecute and bring civil lawsuits against any public official or judge who uses the old unconstitutional statutes to block our clean-up.

The national Constitution guarantees a republican form of govt in the states. In the I&R states, the republican form of govt is constitutionally defined as the combination of DD’s citizen lawmaking and representative govt. That definition is completely legal and constitutional, per a 1912 SCOTUS ruling.

When state officials or judges unconstitutionally interfere with citizen-proposed law, they violate their citizens’ rights to the federally-guaranteed republican form of govt. Such acts violate the federal statute, 18 USC 241 — felony conspiracy against rights. Felony forfeits all immunities. Co-conspirators can be criminally prosecuted in federal court, regardless of being incumbents or sitting judges.

The unconstitutional acts that control citizen-lawmaking also violate the federal statute, 42 USC 1983 — civil deprivation of federal rights by state officials or judges. Co-conspirators can be sued in federal court.

Each constitutional violation by I&R state officials and judges to control citizen-proposed law also violates various state laws.

In the upramp to every general election, state officials and judges somewhere use the gauntlet of unconstitutionalites to keep down the civil society’s attempts at good governance. Election 2006 is no exception. This has been going on since the early 1900s. We the sovereign people are still collectively ignorant of what has been done to our constitutionally defined lawmaking. We need to collectively understand. We need to correct the situation.

However, if the 1-party, 3-branch, fascist despotism in Washington DC has its way, we are already too late. Their tentative locks on our privatized and easily hacked electoral system, the US District Attorneys and many of the US District Courts, and the Department of Justice and its central role in the obstruction of justice for all of the despotism’s players may mean that the state govt constitutional criminals in all three branches are as untouchable as are the national govt’s constitutional criminals in all three branches. It’s all tentative now, but it will become permanent if we allow it to continue much longer.

This is the repocratic system that ED wants its toothless political philosophy to alter into a governance of cooperation between representatives and civil society.

“The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.” Frederick Douglass said that about his people regaining their freedom in the 1860s.

Citizens in the 23 active I&R states won their political equality and freedom with the passage of their constitutional DD provisions in the early 1900s. They promptly lost that equality and freedom as quickly as their state legislatures could pass statutes that instructed officials and judges to unconstitutionally and arbitrarily control citizen-proposed law.

It’s way past time to regain our equality and freedom. The DD toolkit of eight governance components can be used in many ways to force the issue. It can’t be done in the present climate of political unsophistication, but if small groups get started working with the toolkit, the civics lessons will flow like water. (See especially, “Open Letter To Susan–Making Bush-Cheney Null & Void”, 12 September 2006, on DD Revival — The Blog. )

When we’ve got the DD systems fully independent of reprocratic interference, then the Extreme Democracy political philosophy and analysis of NHO leadership will be useful.

© by Stephen Neitzke, 2006

Stephen Neitzke [send him email] is the founder of the Direct Democracy League. He is the author of “The State of the Republic, 1776-2004″ as well as a number of other works, which can be found at www.ddleague-usa.net and on his blog, DD Revival, at http://ddrevival.blogspot.com/

Tags: citizen legislation, democracy, direct democracy, extreme democracy, politics, populist party, referendum, repocracy, representation
Categories: Commentary, Populist Party, Democracy, liberty, constitution, government, Decentralization, self-governance, Politics, Legislation, Direct Democracy, Extreme Democracy, Referendum
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