The Peoples' Charter: A Program to Save American Democracy

If it wasn't crystal clear before January 6, it should be now. To save American democracy it will not be enough to reverse the damage Trump and his enablers have done. That is necessary but not sufficient. If the USA merely restores the status quo ante-Trump, it will face more anti-democratic governments in future. 

If a few thousand votes had gone the other way in several states, Trump would have won the election, even though Biden got almost 7 million more votes. How is this possible? Because democracy in the US is not firmly rooted, and never has been.

The Trump regime did not start its assault on democracy and sanity from square one. It built on anti-democratic policies and machinations dating back decades or more. Many of them exist at the state rather than federal level. A root and branch strategy is needed to eliminate these dangers. 

Many people will say the changes I suggest are impossible. And it will be a huge struggle to achieve any of them. But many people said that all men, and later all women, could never get the vote. Many people said slavery could never be eliminated. Britain was the greatest slave trading nation in history, but after massive grass roots campaigns, Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in the British colonies in 1833.

The Chartist Movement in Britain in the 1830s and 1840s took its name from "The People's Charter." Its goal was to establish a working democracy. The rulers of the day dismissed Chartism as utopian. But of its six demands ("The Peoples' Charter"), all but one is now law. That one was a demand for annual Parliamentary elections. Few people would support that idea now. Moreover, this was accomplished without a revolution, and only minor violence. (Image: photo of Chartist Demonstration, London, 1848)

The Chartists did not include women in their vision of democracy but that demand surfaced almost immediately, and women got the vote in two stages, in 1918 and 1928.

I have drawn up a People's Charter for the USA: 

• 1.       Abolish the Electoral College, the gift that has empowered American reactionaries since slavery times. Replace it with the National Popular Vote. 
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• 2.       End gerrymandering. Create an independent, non-partisan commission to draw up boundaries of congressional constituencies. This is done in the UK and other countries.
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• 3.       Overturn the obscene Citizens United decision to reduce the influence of big money in elections. Nothing like this exists in other democracies.
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• 4.       Prohibit political ads. They are virtually useless as information, misleading or untrue, insulting, and damned annoying. 
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• 5.       Introduce proportional representation or ranked voting to end the stranglehold of the two-party system. Some people will argue that this would make efficient government impossible. Ask yourself, is what have now efficient? 
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• 6.     Make the Senate representative of the country. It gives the less populated states collectively far more power than the most populated. California with 40 million people and Wyoming with only half a million have the same number of senators. This is both absurd and grossly undemocratic.
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• 7.       Make voting simple, safe, and convenient. Voting is an obligation. It should not be a survival test, torture, or a danger. Eliminate voter suppression of all kinds. 
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• 8.      Fund public education adequately and fairly. Public college and university education should be free or cheap, as it was when I went to college and university in the late 60s and early 70s. Why are we shortchanging our children and dumbing down our voters?
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• 9.      Establish a national, affordable health care plan that covers everyone. The present for profit system is a disgrace and an international laughingstock. The system costs the US twice as much as in other developed nations, and the results are worse in terms of mortality and morbidity. Scores of millions are uncovered, or poorly covered. Health insurance must be separated from employment, which turns workers into virtual serfs.
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• 10.       Require the payment of a living (not minimum) wage for all adult workers. This should vary according to local living costs. It costs a lot more to live in California than in North Dakota.
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• 11.     Reduce the period between the election of the president and the inauguration to two weeks at most. This would have minimized Trump's ability to create havoc. In the UK and many countries, a new government generally takes over immediately after the election. This can be done because the parties have already selected the members of the cabinet and other ministers. Proceeding this way also gives voters some sense of what they are going to get. 
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