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America must implement a policy on Election Reform that is equitable and fair to everyone. It is something we must do if we are to be a progressive society, a society for everyone, rich or poor. We, the people of the United States of America, must take back control of our lives by taking back control of our government. And the only way we can do that - be a government by the people - is with a logical Election Reform Bill. It is past due because our elected officials are thinking only of their careers and their futures. As our representatives, the only thing they should be thinking about is doing what is right for the American people who are their employers.

America must make radical changes in order to change and move forward, bettering our society.

We must elect a president who is willing to put forth to the American people and Congress a constitutional amendment to lower the voting age to sixteen. Teenage crime has risen over the last four decades because America’s youth feel alienated. They either feel apathetic about their future, or they fear it. Consequently, and sadly for them and society, today’s teenagers enter adulthood with a defeatist attitude. They have no hope because they have no say in their own future. It is time to give them their say; it is time to give them the responsibility of helping shape their future.

With the information highway, and cable television, our children are more intelligent and more worldly than children of similar ages were in any time in history. We need to treat our teenagers as young adults. Our forefathers said that taxation without representation is tyranny. America must abide by its own laws. If an American sixteen or older earns a salary and pays taxes, then he or she must have a say in electing their representatives.

We must also have a president who is willing to put forth to America a constitutional amendment to restructure Congress. All terms of office should be for four years. The U. S. Senate should go from six-year terms to four, and the House of Representatives should go from two-year terms to four. Six years is too long for our senators to go without being accounted for by the people who put them in office. Two-year terms in the House are unfeasible in that representatives must spend most of their time away from Washington raising funds for their next campaign. It is more efficient to have four-year terms for all the people’s representatives, with no term limitations. This includes the most important representative of the people, the president. It is the people’s right to elect whoever they want for as long as they want. A government by the people. If an elected official is doing an exemplary job, we should keep them there to continue that fine work. No one, not even our government, should be able to take away that inalienable right from us.

Implementing a campaign tax in the amount of $20 for every adult and dependent, which would be matched by the federal government, would take away the power of the special interest groups and their lobbyists. A family of four would pay $80 a year. Based on a population of approximately 250 million taxable Americans, it would mean $40 billion every four years for the approximately 2,500 incumbents and challengers who run for president, U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, and governors. No candidate could spend any more than the amount they receive. Equal amounts for each office. The presidential candidates would receive the most, then those running for U.S. Senate, and so forth down the line. Political campaigns have become a contest of who can raise the most money. It has become a contest of who can purchase the most advertising. That is not fair to the American voting public. Wealth should have nothing to do with a political campaign. Equal time is the most equitable way to hear what our candidates have to say about what they will do for America.

Shortly after the end of the election, their accountants would have to make public all monies spent. This plan would stop candidates from outspending their opponent, from spending one week of each month traveling to raise funds for their next campaign, from taking PACs, and from granting favors. Most of all, it would ensure honest voting in Congress; votes that represent the opinions and beliefs of each politician’s constituency.

In return for this free funding by the people and the government, our elected leaders would have to spend a minimum of four days every month in town meetings hearing the peoples’ views on forthcoming bills. The American people must be heard, and they must be represented. That was the philosophy of our forefathers, of a democratic government, a government upon which this nation was built.

To keep campaigns on a respectable level, candidates can only advertise what they will do for the country (if elected) and how. Any negative campaigning should reduce their funding by ten percent. The American people have had enough of the lies and deceit. Negative campaigning is why only 50% of our country votes. It is one of many reasons why America’s politicians are looked upon as demagogues, with one purpose in running for office: To gain as much power as possible.

It is about time our politicians represent us instead of their own interests and pockets. It is about time America’s voice returned to Washington, D.C. Politicians have turned our society aggressive, hostile, angry, and cynical. Taking control of our elected leaders means taking control of society, which means taking control of our lives and our future. Although it means a small amount of money out of our own pockets, America must rally behind it.

Regarding the infamous Electoral College, the president must be elected by the people. We cannot allow what happened in 2000 to happen again. It proves that the American vote is irrelevant, and it will only lessen the amount of people who vote, and make our country more and more distrustful of government. A constitutional amendment abolishing the Electoral College, allowing the popular vote to elect our president is essential in order for the people to legally have their say.

All votes will elect our leaders and they will run an above board campaign and serve the people in an honest, communicative, and dutiful way! This will be our legacy to our children and to America’s future.

Bruce Schwartz is a lifelong political activist. THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY, his novel on politics today, discusses this subject as well as others that affect every American. It is on sale on the Web at http://www.thetwentyfirstcentury.com and at http://www.amazon.com. All of the author’s royalties are being donated to the Alzheimer’s Association.

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In the wake of the Alito confirmation the Left is in shambles, unfocused, unbalanced, and unable to act. They are not alone. As Alito takes up the cause of Presidential Privileges he will at the same time move against the painfully established rights of women, never confirmed by the ratification of the ERA.

Large sections of those who identify themselves as republican or libertarian or independent are living through a deer in the headlights moment; they know that the executive mandate now poised like a sovereign anointing over the head of George W. Bush is the last thing they want. But their tools for organizing political protest, the Republican Party and the Libertarian Party, are lost to them, swallowed up by the NeoCons who so suavely converted their labor and lives to cold hard cash in NeoCon pockets. NeoCons are no more Republican than they are Democrats.

The ‘game’ of politics has turned into a reality as frightening as Godzilla arising from the Hudson River to eat New York.

That is the bad news. The good news is that the means are within our grasp to drive a wedge in the machinery of tyranny now poised to roll over the rights and lives of Americans. It is time to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and to get serious about a common understanding of our rights, where they originate and who has them.

That will surprise most people in the republican-libertarian camp. It surprised me when I realized three years ago I had been sold a bill of goods by my own movement. I had spent all of my life as a libertarian and a republican. I had been told that the ERA was about privileges for women, in effect, about entitlements. Wrong. It is about nothing more than recognizing for women the original package of rights envisioned by our founders for everyone.
When, after many generations of struggle women were unable to secure the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment most women settled for privileges and hoped it would work. They were wrong to have done that. Never settle when it is your rights that are at issue.

Ironically, it was Republican women and the Republican Party who had originally championed the battle for rights for women as an extension of their right to vote.

That long history had forged the largest political organization in the world, and arguably the most effective for most of its history, the National Federation of Republican Women. In 1980, when the ERA was struck from the platform of the Republican Party a generation of women who had poured their lives into the Republican Party went through the same deer in the headlights moment now being experienced by so many non-NeoCon libertarian-republicans. In one moment they had been betrayed, losing their political home and the investment of their time and money made over long life times.

That was one in a series of actions that converted the Republican Party into the NeoCon tool it is today.

The NeoCons are a minority, a small powerful minority, we need to remember that.

96% of all Americans from all ethnic groups, both genders, and all parts of the country have already affirmed in their hearts equality for all and the equality of women under law. (see link at ERACampaign.net, Newlstter No. 6)

Most us want to do the right thing. We have been divided and confused by a highly sophisticated campaign of disinformation designed and implemented by those we know now as NeoCons.

The mission statement of America has always been clear. Our rights are not granted by government; they preexist any government we choose and cannot be altered. But instead of securing those rights to everyone our Founders made a profound mistake. All too human, they failed to sunset slavery, leaving blacks in servitude. They failed to secure to women their right to control their own lives and property.

It was a failure that has haunted us ever since.
That failure is the basis of the conversion of all rights to privileges to be granted or withheld by government. This is why libertarian-republicans should sit up and take notice.

If our Constitution affirms the original Mission Statement then we have ground on which to stand and reverse the conversion of basic rights to privileges controlled by government. And by so doing a common ground will have been created for cooperation, right and left, so that the unceasing attrition of our liberties can be opposed successfully.

It is the right thing to do, and it is time for Progressives, Democratic moderates, and Liberals to deliver. Women have been the heart and power of the Democratic Party for generations. That party has failed over and over again when it had the control of state legislatures and the Congress to secure to women their proper rights under the Constitution.

They, too, preferred to grant privileges instead of the absolute security of rights. It is time to put aside other issues and do what should have been done generations ago. The leadership of the Democratic Party has ignored and compromised away the essential acknowledgment of rights for women that would have provided exactly the protection we now so desperately need.

But it is not too late.

The ERA today stands just three states short of ratification. There is no time limit on the need for the amendment; securing those rights are as relevant today as they were in 1776. Active campaigns exist in most of those states and together the non-NeoCon segments of the republican-libertarian wing of American politics and the Left possess enough clout and money to do the job if they choose to do so.

Women from all parties and persuasions should keep watch.

The outline of the campaign is simple.

We need a website to apply to the legislators in each of the unratified states the scrutiny and encouragement they need to ensure ratification. We need money to lobby them. We need to communicate and to network, watching for the ugly tactics that will come from the NeoCon camps.

The NeoCons think they have won. They set up this scenario in 1980 with the removal of the ERA from the Republican Platform. They set out Phyllis Schlafly to tell women that the ERA would diminish their womanhood. Today the idea promoted by Schlafly that women had a ‘right’ in the “Christian tradition of chivalry to be supported and protected by men” sounds like text from a harlequin romance.

Women dying for their country in Iraq, raped while serving there, or left homeless by no-fault divorce law understand the reality that Schlafly, who profited so richly from her work, was really selling.

Allowing government to convert rights to privileges is making slaves of all of us.

Business and Professional Women, a major leader in the earlier efforts for the ERA, is once again putting ERA high on its action priority list. Now, every day, women are working and organizing.

It is time for all of us to come together, right, left, libertarian and independent.

If freedom is not for everyone then none of us are truly free.

With the ERA in place Alito can could still damage our freedoms, but the ERA will built a buttress against the predators he represents.

Ratify now.

Melinda Pillsbury-Foster is the author of GREED: The NeoConning of America and A Tour of Old Yosemite. The former is a novel about the lives of the NeoCons with a strong autobiographical component. The latter is a non-fiction book about her father and grandfather.

Ms. Pillsbury-Foster has been active in politics since the Goldwater Campaign. She left the Republican Party to join and become active in the Libertarian Party in 1973, working as an activist and party officer until she left the Libertarian Party in 1988. She received 5% of the vote in a four way race in 1982 for California’s 20th State Senate Race while also serving as Southern Vice-Chairman for the California Libertarian Party. She was elected to six terms as a state officer, eventually serving on National Committee.

In 1988 she rejoined the Republican Party and became a member and country officer for the National Federation of Republican Women and also served as a Regent for several years.

She is also the the founder of the Arthur C. Pillsbury Foundation

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