Democracy and Civil Liberties

By Carol L. (Shepard) Brouillet

Congress has a duty to defend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Both have been under severe attack by both the Republican and Democratic administrations

Major American political parties are private organizations. They are controlled top-down by powerful officeholders and top contributors. Because the national parties respond only to the most wealthy, most influential, and most powerful, the vast majority of Americans are essentially left out of the political system. A minority of eligible voters participate in non-presidential elections, and more identify as independent voters than ever before. The two-party system has fallen short of the needs of the American people. We need to establish viable national third parties that are responsive to ordinary people rather than corporatist agendas. Public policy needs to be discussed in sunlit community gatherings, not connived in smoke-filled rooms. Political candidates and parties need to involve every interested household in national governance. Politicians shouldn't divide and isolate voters, leaving them with no choice but to submit to a narrowly-defined menu of political options that are celebrated as democratic in the evening news, 30-second political ads, and direct mail advertising. A culture of participation and empowerment should be grown bottom-up, not forced top-down.

Supreme Court

Our unelected Supreme Court has taken upon itself unprecedented powers to legislate from the bench. This gives the federal courts, and the President who appoints judges, excessive, undue, unaccountable power over our nation's laws. The power to legislate must be reserved solely for Congress and the American people.

Media

Our national media is dominated by a handful of powerful corporate conglomerations. Infotainment is passed off as news. Those who challenge the status quo are ridiculed or ignored. We need to break the corporate control over our media. Persons and organizations that hold public airwave licenses should be prevented from spreading lies and misleading propaganda. News coverage should hold strictly to journalistic standards of unbiased investigative journalism, not bottom-line corporate agendas. Net neutrality must be safeguarded.

Campaign Finance

Money is not speech. PACs are not people. Speech by non-media corporations is not protected by the 1st Amendment. Political campaigns and political parties are dominated by money, not people. Political campaigns must be publicly funded. Television networks must grant candidates ad time free of charge. PACs must be banned. A 50% tax should be levied on corporate-funded political ads, with proceeds allocated candidates and groups with contrasting views who are not receiving corporate funding.

Integrity of Language

When most politicians say "peace" they mean war. We need to restore integrity and humanity to our language, not resort to Orwellian deceit and lies.

Women's Rights

Women should receive equal pay for equal work. Motherhood is a full-time job of crucial economic importance, yet it is discounted as economically worthless. Women, sometimes men, should be given a fully paid maternity leave so that they can adequately raise their children, especially during the first years of an infant's life. Communities should protect and provide shelters to women who find themselves in dire circumstances, often as victims of domestic violence, and feel that their children are at risk.

Having a child is a huge responsibility and, for me, it was the most transformative experience of my life. I personally believe that women should be able to get a legal abortion, yet that is a state issue in which the federal government has no role. The decision of whether we can take on the responsibility of being a parent can be a very difficult one to make, but we should not make it a crime or that endangers the life of a woman. Instead, we should make America a place where women would want to raise their children. We should have a working environment that allows anybody to raise and support a child without falling into poverty or sacrificing a career. We should encourage parent education for new parents.

Civil Rights

Under the veil of equality under the law, American opportunity remains unevenly distributed along race and class lines. Neighborhoods and schools are segregated apartheid-style. Our jails and prisons are filled with poor whites, Blacks, and Hispanics. Wages, education levels, and accumulated assets remain far higher for white families than their black and Hispanic counterparts. Blue-collar jobs have been disappearing, forcing the most vulnerable into unemployment first. Mexican laborers continue to be imported and employed in slave labor conditions at exploitative wages to tend our crops. Our rights have been overshadowed by those of powerful corporations, who have attorneys and politicians to defend them and money to exercise them. Rhetoric lauding our "comprehensive" legal civil rights rings hollow in a country stricken by poverty and inequality. We need to have an Economic Bill of Rights, to ensure that everybody can meet their human needs. Our legal system has to meet the needs of ordinary people, not just the people who can afford the best lawyers.

Guns

The 2nd Amendment assures us the right to bear arms. Granted proper license people should be able to defend their families and their communities. I personally loathe guns and would never hunt and kill animals, yet I respect others' rights to do so. At the same time, we should not be sending foreign aid to other countries in the form of bombs and guns that dictators use to kill and maim their own people. The small arms trade is one of our largest export industries because it sells weapons to "friendly" dictators, mercenaries, and corrupt police forces. These guns fall into the hands of the world's most brutal rebels, criminals, and terrorists who kill millions of people. Many guns return to the United States for sale on the black market to the highest bidder. We need to ban the export of arms and military hardware.

The Constitution & Government Accountability

We must hold our public officials to their oaths to defend the Constitution and serve the people. We must impeach them if they break their oath of office and perpetuate high crimes against America and the world. The federal government must limit its involvement to its stated powers and responsibilities, as required by the Tenth Amendment. Congress cannot delegate war-making authority to the President, nor can it delegate the power to create money to the privately-owned Federal Reserve. The checks and balances of the Constitution were not designed to be superseded by an unprecedented concentration of financial power in the hands of a few. We need to restore the Constitution and the protections granted by the Bill of Rights.

Department of Defense

We need to downsize the Department of Defense, the black hole of government wasteful spending, whose budget for this fiscal year is $662 billion. The US House Committee on Oversight and Reform has been transformed from a government watchdog into a partisan vehicle for advancing the interests of the wealthy and powerful. The national security agencies continue to operate in excessive, unaccountable secrecy that prevents the American people from evaluating their policies. Our highest public officials must be held accountable and/or impeached for breaking their oath of office to defend the Constitution and protect the American people. We must demand transparency and hold all agencies and officials accountable to the people, and prosecute those who perpetuate high crimes against America and the world.

Corporate Accountability

Corporate officers must be held fully accountable for their actions, and their stockholders should be liable for decisions for which they are responsible. Corporations must be made to bear the full social and environmental costs of their operations, products, and services. States must be empowered to alter or strip corporate charters and public licenses granted to criminally convicted corporations. Attorney generals must be provided with sufficient funding to prosecute and to enforce the law with regard to well-defended corporations.

Crime and Corruption

America is caught in an epidemic of white collar crime. The FBI white collar crime units need to be fully funded. Anti-trust laws need to be strengthened and reinforced by full funding of FTC enforcement against companies that force monopoly prices on customers. Consumer litigants and state attorney generals need federal funding to be able to compete with the well-heeled corporations in court. Financial institutions and other large corporations should be subjected to regular, open, transparent government audits. Corporate investors must be disallowed from public office; large campaign contributors must be disallowed from public office. A 50% tax should be levied on industry lobbyists to provide lobbying funds for their citizen and consumer group counterparts.

Death Penalty

Innocent people have been sentenced to capital punishment. Poor Blacks and Hispanics are far more likely to be sent to Death Row than whites for identical crimes. Corporate executives who defraud the public for billions of dollars, presidents who trick the public into unnecessary wars of aggression, and media executives who cover up crimes against the nation are rarely imprisoned and are never subject to capital punishment. The price of seeking capital punishment and appealing Death Row defendants dwarf the price of life imprisonment. Capital punishment is a barbaric practice that must be outlawed.

Drug Policy & Prisons

Because of our strict drug possession laws, we hold a quarter of the world's prison population in America. We should allow doctors to prescribe and control recreational drugs. We should treat addiction as a public health problem, not a criminal act. We must end the illegal importation of narcotics by our intelligence agencies. We must shrink the highly profitable American illegal drug market that funds many of the global organized crime syndicates. We must provide brighter economic opportunities to lower class America than the drug trade and prison life.