What's the Preamble Party?

  The Preamble Party is my notion of how elected officials, who take an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic," should guide their conduct while in office (ideally, all the time, for all of us).

   Here's the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution:

   “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

    First off, this brief, 52-word sentence that begins the US Constitution, succinctly establishes the relationship between We the People and our government. Namely, We the people formed it, ordained it, established it--and delegated only some of our power to the government.

    The Federalists noted that only when one held, as a governing philosophy, that the people were supreme, could one countenance a system in which there were federal, state and even local governments. This follows from the Declaration of Independence as well, noting that governments exist only with the consent of the governed. In our case, our federal government was CREATED by "the governed," and our elected minions are instructed, by the six clauses of the Preamble, to exercise  their delegated power to:

  1) form a more perfect Union,  (this one has not been easy, what with the Civil War, women's suffrage, Prohibition's passage and repeal, red-state/blue-state shenanigans, etc.)

  2) establish Justice,  (nor has this been a slam-dunk; I think it's still largely aspirational)

  3) insure domestic Tranquility, (ditto; I rarely have a sense that we're Tranquil in these United States)

  4) provide for the common defense, (if wars were fought by our country's elected leaders--as duels between first the Presidents of feuding powers, then a duel between the survivor of the first duel and the next-in-line (in our case, President, vice-President, Speaker of the House, Senate Majority leader, and so on down the line of succession--then I predict we would have no wars),

  5) promote the general Welfare, (we're good at making the rich and powerful more rich and more powerful, at tending to the needs of the Corporatocracy, the Military-Industrial-Legislative-Intelligence Complex, the Wall Street Casinos, but we can't seem to figure out how to do "the greatest good for the greatest number"), and

  6) secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. (From time to time, we get a little taste of these Blessings of Liberty, but they're by no means "secure" to ourselves. And they are DEFINITELY not secure for our children and grandchildren.  Maybe Lloyd Blankfein's offspring are assured a secure future, as he claims to be "doing God's work," as he stiffs the rest of the country. But this "god" of his is most assuredly named Mammon--the god of cupidity, concupiscence and greed).

     From such men as Blankfein, Summers, all of the Goldman Sachs, Citibank(s), Morgan-Chase, AIG crowd that populate the White House regardless of what party is in office (these chaps are like the Vicar of Bray, who boasted that "Whatsoever king shall reign, I'l be the Vicar of Bray, Sir"—it's a song worth learning) we can only expect to be taken to the cleaners, the wealth of our nation mulcted by these amoral multi-national gamblers.

   No Preamble Party platform would be complete without the concomitant reminders about the People's Power placed in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. These two amendments, the last two in the Bill of Rights, ratified December 15, 1791, notify the government that there are other rights retained by the people, and that powers not prohibited by the Constitution to the states, are reserved by the states and the People.

    And it has been a struggle to enforce the Ninth Amendment particularly: 

       The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

   Most of us can generally agree that We the People did not delegate to the federal or state governments control of our bodies, our privacy, our ability to use, unfettered by government, the best means of communication currently available. Back in 1789, that was speaking and the printing press. And correspondence by US Post.  Then came radio (which got regulated), TV (ditto), cable (not so much--you can swear on cable), the telephone (subject to wiretaps), cellular phones (subject to satellite and other eavesdropping), and now the Internet (the fiber optic cables of which were, according to James Bamford, completely and thoroughly and permanently tapped with "splitter boxes" by early 2002. The splitter boxes essentially make a duplicate of every bit (bit, as in "binary digit") of communications traffic that flows over the trunk lines of all US carriers and foreign lines that pass through the US (which is why nations on the shores of the Indian Ocean and in the Far East are building their own fiber optic undersea trunk lines, to avoid the permanent eavesdropping of the US carriers. Bamford wrote in The Shadow Factory (about the NSA--National Security Agency) that all of this duplicate traffic is routed to a huge, huge "disk farm" somewhere in Tejas.  Our only remaining privacy is the fact that there is so incredibly much data traversing the trunk lines that it can't all be looked at. But the NSA and its contractors are working hard to build new computers & software to blast through this bottleneck, this glut of information.