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Greenfield is contemplating a charter amendment that will hinder initiative access. Such a decision would be tragic. Why? There has been no confusing flurry of initiatives that I have seen. Placing increased hurdles in front of the peoples voice is clearly wrongheaded.

Humanity stands at the brink of extinction. Survival requires more input from more people. We need to hear and discuss as many good ideas as possible. Creating obstacles that block wisdom gained from ordinary peoples wide ranging experience is a dangerous impediment to survival of life as we know it.

Examine briefly how weve come to be in this insecure national condition. Start with democracy as a concept. What is it? This subject needs to be discussed.

Representative democracy is different from plain democracy. Democracy itself needs no descriptive adjective and grows with human advances. Representative democracy is a form of government that tends to concentrate wealthy people at the top since a major function of representative democracy is to represent capital. Election campaigns compete with plans to grow the economy and jobs, from this capitalists earn a profit. It all seems straight-forward but theres a major hitch: Capitalism is designed to grow faster and faster forever and Earth does not grow.

Believe it or not; Earth has already reached its limit of pollution recycling capacity. The result is human life is facing extinction. Representative democracy alone cannot solve the problem it makes by supporting a compounded capitalist growth rate.

A new form of democracy is needed to be standing in the wings and ready to begin work on survival. The peoples referendum is one part of the model from which future government forms may develop. Representative democracy is not something to discard, it is a functional companion in a dynamic nuanced relationship with popular referenda decided upon by we the people acting on our own initiative.

Americas founding fathers had no models to follow other than royalty, a hint of democracy for rich English businessmen, and the ancient slave-powered democracy of Rome. Women were considered second class citizens, at best; personal property at worst.

The yoke of slavery was removed from white males and placed on women and people with brown skin. Economic wage slavery was a different story; it continues to this day for everyone but the rich. Benefits to wealth from wage slavery remain the underlying reason to limit democracy.

The continuing struggle by wealthy people to limit democracy is not taught in school. If we continue formal education, one required course is economics. There we are indoctrinated into believing unregulated free markets tend toward equilibrium by balancing supply and demand.

Economics is not based on facts or science; It posits people as consuming units possessing all the facts about every product and choosing what to buy rationally based on a price tending toward equilibrium set by supply and demand. This entire economic picture taught to millions of students is management propaganda.

In reality, privatized resources are extracted from our planet, a small bubble of life zooming through space nestled inside our galaxy. Commercial and public waste is dumped into oceans and air and onto lands of spaceship Earth.

We are taught that somehow an unregulated free market will magically settle into equilibrium that grants maximum health and happiness to our species. Really? All we need to do is think of Hans Christian Andersons naked king seen through the untrained eyes of a child to see equilibrium is not even possible. Imagine driving on an unregulated freeway and one is fairly close to understanding global unregulated free market economics.

We approach the abyss of extinction and need to honestly examine representative democracy as what has governed to this point. None of us but the truly weird want to continue on the path of war with a long list of fictional enemies. Eternal war, chemical pollution, plastic molecules mixed in with our protein molecules and global climate collapse are happening now during governance by representative democracies that mostly represent capital.

In closing, so you may know me, I was one of those who tried to save the people of Greenfield from todays curse of plastic molecules in our bodies, by using an initiative. Response was fun and heartening. But rules were changed by town hall midstream. That kept your health off the ballot and you now have plastic molecules floating around inside you with your protein molecules.

Explore constituentassembly.org to learn and think about modern ideas of democracy. The peoples initiative is one option for avoiding disaster but it cannot govern without representative deliberations. We need both. Reject unnecessary schemes to make popular initiatives more difficult.

Garrett Connelly is a resident of Greenfield.

The rest is here:
My Turn: Start with democracy as a concept - The Recorder