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[occupy] Article V to the Rescue!
Nov. 27th, 2011 04:45 amI've been thinking about the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall, the passing of the STOCK Act and the likely consequences of halting Congressional insider trading, and whether addressing these individual concerns is enough to stop this cycle of failure from happening again in 70 years when America has forgotten to be watchful and the lobbyist buy the legislation back to its current regulatory laxity. We put Glass-Steagall in place in 1933 and it was weakened in 1980, again in 1982, and repealed in 1999. It only took 50 years to forget and 20 to slowly get rid of the protections we had against large-scale gambling with the homes and savings of anyone using a bank. We Americans will forget again, because that is human nature. We need something more permanent than a bill that can be repealed by enough consecutive financial lobbying. In fact, we need to put our democracy out of reach of being bought with money. Americans know that we can't trust lobbyists and that lobbying is the reason we don't trust Congressmen to be honest.
With a deeply entrenched for-profit culture, Congressmen will likely be unwilling to hamstring their own ability to turn a larger profit from civil service. But the framers of the Constitution left us a route to navigate past such a top-down threat to Democracy: we can demand a new Constitutional Convention. Other protest movements have used the threat of an Article V Constitutional Convention to force concessions out of Congress, including four Constitutional Amendments. But whether we can or should trust them to write legislation that targets their own behavior is uncertain due to the current problems our country is having with the loosening of interpretation of its laws and the lack of clear language in many bills. What could be worth the risk of letting this happen again? If it is so important for Congress to save face, why have they not proposed and moved forward their own solutions? Can it be that the system is so gridlocked with competing financial and legislative concerns that public intervention is the only clear path?
Next year is the 225th anniversary of our first and only constitutional convention. Don't you think it's time for a new one?
With a deeply entrenched for-profit culture, Congressmen will likely be unwilling to hamstring their own ability to turn a larger profit from civil service. But the framers of the Constitution left us a route to navigate past such a top-down threat to Democracy: we can demand a new Constitutional Convention. Other protest movements have used the threat of an Article V Constitutional Convention to force concessions out of Congress, including four Constitutional Amendments. But whether we can or should trust them to write legislation that targets their own behavior is uncertain due to the current problems our country is having with the loosening of interpretation of its laws and the lack of clear language in many bills. What could be worth the risk of letting this happen again? If it is so important for Congress to save face, why have they not proposed and moved forward their own solutions? Can it be that the system is so gridlocked with competing financial and legislative concerns that public intervention is the only clear path?
Next year is the 225th anniversary of our first and only constitutional convention. Don't you think it's time for a new one?
