Where are the People?

We the People: Is the Constitution Relevant Anymore?

When each state made the irrevocable choice to join the United States of America, they agreed that the law of their land would be governed by the supreme law of The Constitution of the United States. Political disputes arise as to the meaning of a word, phrase and provision of the Constitution — but the deal is that the citizen of every state becomes a citizen of the United States, subject to the Constitution. A loosely aligned group of states had been tried. It didn’t work. So they got together again — all sides of the political spectrum and wrote the Constitution “in Order to form a more perfect Union.”

The “preamble” to the Constitution says it all about why it was written and what purposes were to be served by writing it. Ben Franklin told a woman when exiting Constitutional Hall” that we had “A Republic, if we can keep it.” We are not doing a very good job of keeping it. The preamble says it is for the “general welfare” and yet our  country, from the beginning has veered sharply away from this essential element that is mentioned in the Preamble stating the purposes of the Constitution. If they had said that it was for big business and big banks, nobody would have joined.

General welfare has been replaced in large measure by corporate welfare, and welfare of the rich and powerful. The boss of this political enterprise (our Republic), the citizens, have failed to keep tabs on their representatives in government and give them the boot when necessary. The reason the Republic is not being maintained, is that the bosses (voters) are not on the job expressing their views in public assembly and the ballot box.

The writers of the Constitution, contrary to popular myth were “we the people,” whose thoughts were put into writing by the scholars of the day. So the boss starts off as the people and ends with the people. Being a citizen of the U.S. makes you the author of the Constitution, and once it is written it can only be changed by amendment according to the terms written into the Constitution.

It can’t be changed by by one person, a local government, state government or even the Federal government. But using the code words “regulation”, “interpretation” and “states rights” we are regulating citizens rights out of existence despite protections guaranteed in the Constitution. If those purposes and rights were not in the document, nobody would have signed on. So now, with great political force some people are electing to stay a citizen and deny the same rights to other citizens. They open one door without realizing that they are opening all doors.

The first purpose of the Union after stating the desire of forming a more perfect one, is to “establish justice.” Between the Bill of RIghts and some “amendments” that never should have been required in the first place, everyone without exception qualifies as a citizen if they were naturally born on U.S. soil or if they are otherwise allowed to become a citizen through immigration rules.

Establishing justice, I submit, has been the trickiest part of executing this prime directive of the constitution. Justice has turned out to be more a matter of convenience, power and money. It’s the first order of business in the Constitution and the last order of business in our everyday reality. Justice is later defined as the absolute right of every citizen to keep their liberty, privacy, property and lives unless it is taken from them through “Due process.”

So for example, you could no longer come in with a “witness” and accuse someone of a heinous crime and if the Judge agrees they probably did it, they hang or go to jail. That is the way things were before the Constitution. You couldn’t require a person to shower in public or have sex in public or otherwise share their thoughts in public because of privacy. As long as you are not hurting someone else, what you do with your body or your time is your own business. Oops. We screwed that one up too in a hundred ways that I won’t elaborate on here. But just as a teaser, I would say that if a law or regulation can be passed that requires the use of your genitals in a certain way, then laws and regulations could be passed about how you treat or use other parts of your party within the privacy of your dwelling, office or other private place.

As for life, we made sure that nobody could simply kill someone else without going through due process of law. Killing someone means of course shooting them but it also means not giving them the water they need when it is three feet away and they can’t reach it, when your intent was for them to die. And your intent according to scholars and jurists across centuries is to be determined by the obvious outcome of your action or inaction.

The protection of private property is essential which is why it too was added along with life and liberty. You could hardly establish a credible economy or ensure freedom and life or liberty without allowing people to continue to own what they own.

In a world where this right was not preserved any person could be deprived of their property, life or liberty through bullying by people with more power and money; so it was put in the Constitution to make sure we didn’t allow that. But we do. Everyday we have a variety of ways in which the rich and powerful pass laws that redistribute the meager wealth of each average citizen, collect it up into one big mass of money and property, and take it for their own.

Ask anyone if it is OK for someone to stick their hand in your pocket, take your money and then claim it as their own and be backed up by the government. I don’t care which end of the political spectrum they are on, you will agree that is wrong. And we do know right from wrong, but we are easily deceived when the thief uses indirect means to pick your pocket.

If a thief hires another thief to steal your money, then we can all agree they are both wrong and should be punished and the money returned to you, if it is still there. And they will be punished, the money disgorged and given back to you as the victim. But the longer the chain gets from one thief to another, the more difficult it gets to prove what happened, but we certainly can get the person who actually stuck his hand in your pocket. As the chain becomes more complex, it is possible for the crime lord ordering thousands of pickpockets to ply their trade to escape punishment even though it was his order that caused the theft and his pocket that received the proceeds.

It becomes even worse when our perceptions are distorted through the passage of badly worded legislation and the crime lord attains the status of being called an institution. LIke a bank or servicer. You can call it what you want but the fact is that if they stole money and if they reaped a reward or part of it, they should be punished, and the money should be disgorged and repaid to the victim of the theft.

With the advent of “big business” and “big banks” the concept of justice, right and wrong has been warped by our devotion to the accumulation of “money” which upon close inspection is absurd. The definitions and forms of money have been changing constantly, sometimes daily, for thousands of years. While many people, especially in the U.S., profess their faith in a higher power, almost everyone professes faith in money and yet none of them can really tell you what it is. All we know is that it is a substitute for something we value or want and that if we have money it will most likely be accepted by someone else in exchange for the things we want. “Money” unfortunately seems to have a much larger following than God does.

We have allowed mega banks with hundreds of subsidiaries all over the world, to steal money from honest investors that include retirees and others who paid for the funds that are under management. We have allowed them to create massive profits using the money of those investors and keep the money in the bank as if it were in the bank’s portfolio. That is theft.

And then we are allowing the banks and servicers to initiate foreclosures on loans they neither funded nor purchased, and take the property too. The result has been worldwide mayhem and central bankers around the world no longer trust the Untied States to live up to its Constitution, which means that a change of reserve currency is coming and our world domination will be coming to close, like all empires before us.

My objection to world domination as a goal is that we already know the ending — eventually it is over. My worry is that nobody is asking the right questions or even thinking out the possible answers for what happens when our 15 minutes is up. In this case kicking the can down the road, should mean taking the lead and dismantling the thieving banks and thieving businesses that suck all the sustenance from the general welfare. That would restore confidence in U.S. leadership.

We are a house of cards waiting to fall. The foundation has become soggy and weak as pretend that the water is not rising. Most of the house of cards is under water and it appears from the rising oceans that most of the city centers of commerce will literally be under water within one or two generations. Will we re-write a new constitution learning from our experience or simply enforce the old one, which appears to have all the necessary ingredients?

Under the Constitution you cannot legislate, regulate or otherwise take any action that abridges the basic rights enunciated in the preamble of the constitution and the rest of the constitution. But our Supreme Court justices regularly ignore that even though they consider themselves fundamentalists or originalists. Legislatures and city councils ignore it, and the courts regularly ignore the requirements of due process which incorporates strict rules of evidence.

I remember a time when on Motion Calendar, in the Judges’ chambers lawyers would ask for a final Default Judgment setting a sale date would be turned down simply because the Judge looked a the paperwork and deemed it incomplete. The borrower didn’t even need to be there. Now we have essentially lost that judicial function and replaced it with speed tracking to get it over with, whether the taking of the house is right or wrong. What are we doing? And where is the elusive voter who could change things?

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