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THE President is giving us a dressing-down for flagging his statements that favored a Con Ass over a Con Con for the drafting of a new Constitution. He says that this distrust towards our senators and congressmen in Congress is too much. And he says nobody has a monopoly on good wisdom.
We understand the President's concern about the huge resources that would be needed for a Con Con. However, the President must indulge us our continuing distrust of these people in Congress along with their wisdom. We might like to note that they mostly derive from the wealthy class of our Republic, as do their wisdom (or wisdom absent from their knowledge).
As a self-described Socialist, the President might understand where people's distrust is coming from. In fact, he might recall that his campaign leaned on this very distrust towards the wealthy political class. He used this distrust to push for a more trustworthy alternative, and in fact continues to use it as a rationale for many of his freshly-launched new or rehashed policies, the anti-illegal drugs drive being one of them. After all, this is the same wealthy political class that would never give up its access to the pork barrel (of whatever name) and rid us of a pork-barrel-run system of executive-legislative governance. This is the same wealthy political class that would like to continue to use the "epal" tradition of putting their names on every government project or vehicle or structure that they can appropriate as products of their generosity. Therefore, it is this very same wealthy political class that would likely avoid a furtherance of power-sharing areas with the people through stronger direct democracy instruments such as the initiative, the right to call for referenda, the right to recall elections, among others. Thus our fear that this Con Ass could very well decide to get rid of the people's initiative clause in the 1987 Constitution (instead of strengthening it).
Sure, it's possible that delegates to a Con Con might be just as suspect to our nation's eyes. There would be the gamble. But the President must understand that our fears in relation to most politicians in Congress are not totally without grounds. The President might remember that most, if not all, of his new policies, and the people's support of them, all come from fears. So that if he can trust that our larger fears against the proliferation of illegal drugs in our neighborhoods are what is keeping us from fearing his police state methods against illegal drugs more, then he must trust our expression of fears in other areas.
Who knows: he who rules by fear just might be able to help this nation further in exploiting and defeating one other fear: the fear of reinvigorated old privileges among wealthy political class elements when they go unchecked by the people who may have just been further excluded from their government via a more fake democracy in a new Constitution. [S / -I]
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