July 11, 2020
ED FREY, 4630 Soquel Drive, Ste 8, Soquel, CA 95073
Open Letter to: Leon Panetta, Co-Founder, The Panetta Institute for Public Policy, 100 Campus Center, Bldg. 86E, California State University Monterey Bay, Seaside, CA 93955
Dear Mr. Panetta:
I write on behalf of a group of voters and future voters who advocate a plan that aims to break up our political gridlock and reverse the ongoing degradation of democracy in America. We note that The Panetta Institute is also devoted to the search for better government, so we want to introduce our reform proposal and invite your comments and support. It’s a big project, and an auspicious moment, so this is a long letter.
America faces huge challenges in policy issues you have dealt with in your fifty years of government service: Racist abuses, threats to personal health, environmental decay, massive poverty and unemployment, budgetary malfeasance, American exceptionalism and military overreach. We believe that some discussion of recent American history and your involvement can help demonstrate the need for the changes we seek. We will raise a particularly questionable action you took in 1993.
To be clear, our focus is on transforming the political process itself, not on any particular action or policy debate. We are convinced that wise policy changes will come only if our governments, local, state and federal, are required to engage in new processes of open and informed collaboration between the people and the politicians. Although the current challenges concerning the process issue of voter suppression are worthy of all the attention they get, our proposal deals with the suppression of vital information and political discourse. We believe our plan targets the ultimate sources of our dysfunction. If it succeeds, it would transform the roles of citizen and politician, cripple the power of money in politics and create genuine democracy.
The plan is based on the ancient teaching that politicians, like all people, tend to act more honestly when they know they are being watched, and when they know they will be held accountable for their ideas and actions.
We will be intervening between politicians and their bad habits, by taking direct action in all elections, local, state and federal; we will insist that every candidate provide a clear response to the question, “Do you or do you not support open and accountable government?” If they ask, “What do you mean?”, we will describe the reforms and refer them to the text of the proposed 28th Amendment to the Constitution, which can be found at www.voters-intervene.org.
The Amendment would, first, require all officeholders (and all candidates during election season) to wear cameras and microphones on their bodies, just like peace officers, to record every conversation they participate in that’s about public business; the recordings would be posted daily on the internet; the politicians would also have to post all written communications about public business that they send out, as well as those they receive from others and actually read.
Secondly, the Amendment would require all officeholders and all candidates to appear on television every 14 days across the table from a volunteer citizen for a 30-minute conversation. Citizens would be chosen by lottery, and would have the option of appointing a proxy spokesperson to appear instead with the politician. Both participants in every conversation would have the option to demand 15 minutes talking time, so neither side could dominate the conversation.
We have witnessed the ongoing street demonstrations here and all around the world, protests against racism as well as political corruption, looming climate crisis and economic inequities that afflict the people everywhere. As usual under present political arrangements, the protests have not produced much progress on these or other urgent issues. Mass protests are necessary, but not, in and of themselves, sufficient to obtain genuine reform. To get results, the people need to be able to (1) get all relevant information in real time, especially information as to what the politicians are saying and hearing behind closed doors, and (2) have their say in an ongoing public forum in order to confront the politicians, hold their feet to the fire and guide them toward sound policies.
Government, party and corporate corruption cause most of the gridlock and dysfunction, and genuine reform in any realm of public policy can come only if we, the people, can finally manage to get rid of the devious methods of modern political dealing. The corruption occurs in two classic political practices, secrecy and impunity.
First, regarding the secrecy, when a lobbyist has a conversation with a politician, or they communicate in writing, we, the people, rarely even find out they’ve been in contact, let alone what they’re saying to each other; we’re left in the dark, even though whatever they’re privately proposing would likely have an impact on huge numbers of people. The same goes for public-business communications between two or more politicians, or between a politician and a staff member.
Yes, public business is carried out almost exclusively in private. Throughout our nation’s history, we, the people, have silently tolerated this secrecy, treated it as mere routine practice, even though it enables massive concealment and lying. We, the voters, are now breaking out of that trance, and we will no longer put up with closed-door politics. Political secrecy keeps us uninformed, out of the loop, which is obviously dangerous, and journalists are generally unable to learn the inside story and report on it.
President Truman, long after leaving the White House, said “Secrecy and a free democratic government don’t mix.” Private political negotiations and deal-making create unlimited opportunities to serve corporate greed, but if everyone could listen in on these negotiations, the politicians would be forced to honor the public interest and dismiss the lobbyists’ appeals for corporate welfare.
The need to make our politicians’ communications public arises in every realm of government policy, even in the procurement and sales of military weaponry, where the justification for secrecy might seem most compelling. We should all remember that President Eisenhower, in his historic Farewell Address, warned us about more than just the Military-Industrial Complex, per se: He had devoted his life to high-level military service, followed by eight years in the Oval Office, and he concluded that speech by saying: “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.” No matter how “alert” we may try to be in our monitoring of political developments, we can’t be “knowledgeable” until we banish the secrecy.
Three months after Eisenhower’s speech, President Kennedy said: “The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.” Despite these two presidential warnings in 1961, the Pentagon Papers later uncovered a pervasive pattern of government concealment and lying during the 1960’s and early 1970’s that fooled the people and prolonged the disastrous Viet Nam War and massive secret bombing campaigns in Laos and Cambodia. The federal government unsuccessfully sued the New York Times to try to prevent publication of those Papers, but President Nixon’s own Solicitor General in that case, Erwin Griswold, long after the Government lost the case and the Papers were published, made this admission: “I have never seen any trace of a threat to the national security from the publication.”
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan later wrote: “Like vast numbers of other classified materials, the Pentagon Papers were kept secret not so much to prevent harm to national security but to prevent governmental embarrassment of one sort or another.” A current example is set by the White House incumbent, who claims that every conversation he participates in constitutes classified information.
Secrecy, of course, has been used not only to avoid political embarrassment; it is deployed routinely to undermine political adversaries and foreign governments, to corrupt our domestic process of regulating commerce and finance, and to produce obscene corporate profits at the expense of the General Welfare. The two major parties act in concert with corporate agents, corporate media and the emperors of the Internet, suppressing news of the behind-closed-doors political maneuvering and the suffering that flows from the greed and secrecy.
We Americans are rising up to our urgent duty to eliminate the evil of political secrecy. Only when we can routinely learn what’s going on in our politics will we be able to chide and guide our candidates and elected officeholders. At all levels of government, local, state and federal, every public law and every regulation is a covenant between the government and the people. We need to heed the solemn principle put forward by our Government in a different context 100 years ago: “Open Covenants, Openly Arrived At”.
As to the second bedrock political evil, impunity: Since the Reagan presidency this has been called “Teflon covering”: Political arrangements that shield the politicians from being held publicly accountable for their ideas and official acts. They rarely get confronted in a way that forces them to answer up in public. Oh, they voluntarily hold press conferences, town hall meetings or digital conferences now and then, but even a semi-skilled politician can readily manipulate the process and avoid providing any meaningful response to a journalist’s or a citizen’s question or comment. The recent pandemic briefings at the White House demonstrated the problem: In response to most questions, the President routinely insulted the questioner, ignored the issue presented, changed the subject, issued foolish medical advice, uttered fact-free statements that appeal to his admirers, and then cut off the follow-up question by calling on another journalist.
We have no public dialogue between citizen and politician or journalist and politician – the political discourse in our country runs the gamut from incoherent to non-existent. We are forced to consume, but prevented from effectively replying to, the politicians’ constant stream of one-way communications, such as Tweets, press releases and form letters. We are bombarded by a never-ending onslaught of questionable facts, mere opinion and outright speculation from corporate media pundits and thousands of internet theorists and commentators. Televised election “debates” moderated by corporate newscasters produce mostly political mush; they are rarely helpful or informative. With no process available to the people to effectively confront the politicians in a public forum, we are politically powerless.
For example, Mr. Panetta, as a former Secretary of Defense under President Obama, you might understand the profound frustration many people felt following the 2008 presidential campaign, when Senator Barack Obama said: “I want to not only get us out of Iraq: I want to change the mindset that got us into Iraq.” He uttered those very words not once, but over and over again right up to Election Day. Many of us took heart at the time that his vague message of “Hope and Change” included an implied promise to initiate a national dialogue on American militarism.
During the next eight years, though, we got corporate welfare in the form of massive expansion of weapons procurement and sales, and hundreds of new U.S. military bases all around the globe; we got a new “kill list” drawn up in the Oval Office every Tuesday, resulting in innumerable drone killings of huge numbers of innocents labeled “collateral damage”; we even witnessed a presidentially-approved drone execution of a known American citizen who had not received the benefit of a trial. We got an attack upon Libya and continuous American involvement in warfare in many other countries, especially in the Middle East. Further, Mr. Obama’s “pivot” to China set the stage for another Cold War with a new adversary, but we got no sign of any challenge to American militarism. Nor did we see any serious initiatives seeking global reduction of warfare and weaponry, except toward Iran.
If the citizen-politician conversations described above had been in place during his term in office, the people themselves, or their proxy spokespersons, could have effectively confronted President Obama on television and provided strategic pressure to avoid many of these and other unwise policies. We could have questioned him about our militaristic mindset, and whether he is familiar with Martin Luther King’s thoughts on the ancient advice to love one’s enemies.
We should also remember that in late January of 2011, when one of America’s most favored dictators, Hosni Mubarek of Egypt, was teetering on the edge of personal and political doom in the face of a massive citizen uprising, President Obama hesitated for a long time to make any public statement on the situation; when he finally stepped forward on global television, he said: “Mr. Mubarek, what you should do is establish a dialogue between the people and the government of Egypt.” It is pitiful that no one was able to confront him on nation-wide television with the question: “Sir, if you think that it’s wise for a country to deal with its serious troubles by engaging in such dialogue, why do you not advocate that process for our own country?”
Perhaps it’s not too late to ask him that question. We intervenors believe it would lend dramatic support for our project if past officeholders such as you and Mr. Obama stepped forward prior to this November’s election to demonstrate the citizen-officeholder conversation process by participating in such conversations. For example, one such conversation could address the fact that during the Obama presidency our country experienced a worsening of the mysterious disappearance of trillions of dollars from the Defense Department budget, and the fact that there has never been any official explanation or news of any investigation of this matter. The amount of missing funds has now grown from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s September 10, 2001 televised announcement of $2.2 trillion, to today’s estimate (according to a former federal government whistle-blowing executive and scholars at Michigan State University) of $21 trillion or more. In other words, the total of those unaccounted-for Defense Department funds is now roughly equal to an entire year’s gross national product, or the present total of the national debt. Where did that money go? How is it being used? Thus far no incumbent federal official has made any visible attempt to address the issue. Instead, the federal government recently instituted what is referred to as “FASB 56”, the new fiscal regulation that allows the government to escape any duty to account for missing funds whenever it chooses to do so.
Given your experience over the past 50 years in the Defense Department’s Office of the Judge Advocate General, the House of Representatives and Chairman of its Budget Committee, the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, Chief of Staff in the White House, Director of the C.I.A. and Secretary of Defense, we are hoping that you’ll be willing to offer an explanation of the problematic policies and the fiscal mystery discussed above, and how we might have avoided them if we had had the benefit of open and accountable government when they arose.
Further, it would be of great help in the search for a “more perfect union” if you would publicly address the pitfalls of party politics in America. The manipulations of the two major parties enable most of the bad habits and foul public policy choices we continue to suffer from. Party membership itself often serves mainly as a means to maintain or enhance personal power, whether as an elected officeholder or a party insider, but party strategy often prejudices the public interest.
For example, it appears that in 1993 you served Democratic Party needs in a way that enhanced corporate profits at great expense to the General Welfare. You initiated federal action that brought on foreseeable disaster on many fronts: First, your action imposed environmental racism and widespread tragic health consequences in your own congressional district that will continue to afflict the health of huge numbers of victims on into the indefinite future. Secondly, your action constituted an attack upon the sovereignty and well-being of the people of every country around the world.
It started in early 1993 when President-Elect Clinton announced he was appointing you to be Director of the Bureau of the Budget, which required you to resign from the House of Representatives. At that same moment you were being lobbied by corporate agri-business forces to obtain a special favor that would allow them to resume their practice of injecting Methyl Bromide into the soil of their strawberry fields.
The corporate growers’ dilemma had arisen in the late 1980’s, when the United States joined together with every one of the 199 other nations world-wide in the Montreal Protocol, the most widely ratified treaty in history. It prohibited all use of Methyl Bromide because, in addition to its extreme toxicity to all living things, it is an aggressive destroyer of the Ozone Layer, which protects most forms of earthly life from excessive solar radiation. Moreover, it is a greenhouse gas that exacerbates the global climate crisis.
The growers must have promised you privately that they would provide large ongoing campaign contributions to the Democratic Party in exchange for Party action that would get them a special exemption from the treaty: It’s hard to imagine that you would have acted on the growers’ behalf without some quid pro quo. They might have also offered you a transparently false assurance that the plastic sheets they would cover the soil with would prevent outgassing and migration of the deadly substance out to the surrounding homes and schools.
In service to your Party and the corporate growers, you endorsed the project and sent a secret memo to your political protégé, the new specially-elected Congressman, Sam Farr, instructing him to take the necessary steps to obtain the exemption. Farr himself later referred to this memo when he was challenged about the poisoning at a town hall meeting in the late 1990’s. Loyal Party member Farr complied; he obtained the exemption in 1993 by stating, as the official rationale, that the corporate strawberry growers needed to use Methyl Bromide in order to maximize their quarterly profits. For the next 27 years the strawberry growers showed their gratitude to the Party in the form of huge, well-camouflaged campaign contributions.
As Democratic Party planning apparently played out, it was considered obvious that Sam Farr would be easily re-elected in this heavily Democratic district every two years (which in fact occurred until his retirement in 2017), so most of those campaign funds were likely passed on to powerful Party players (Nancy Pelosi? Rahm Emanuel?) and distributed across the country for the purpose of enhancing Party control through the financing of party-chosen candidates in other races, often in disregard of the sentiments and preferred choices of local voters and party members in those locations.
As local events unfolded here since the mid-1990’s, dogs have romped across the plastic sheeting, leaving big holes; winds have lifted the sheeting and blown it away; these and other natural factors inevitably caused the gas to escape and migrate into the surrounding neighborhoods. No knowledgeable and unbiased observer of this practice of injecting a volatile gas into the soil would believe that merely placing plastic sheeting over the soil surface could effectively prevent escape of the gas.
This poison gas caused poor migrant farm workers and others to suffer a myriad of health problems. The University of California Berkeley School of Public Health conducted field studies that detected a clear pattern among pregnant farmworkers, and farmworkers’ wives, giving birth to low birth-weight babies; the closer they lived or the more they worked in the Methyl Bromide strawberry fields, the lower the average birth-weight, which is a predictor of life-long health issues.
Meanwhile, other neighborhood residents, teachers, students and staff members at schools close to the fields started experiencing unusual, recurring and irrefutable symptoms of pesticide poisoning: headaches, nausea, numbness of extremities, burning and tearing eyes, blurred vision, difficulty breathing, sore throats, joint pain, auto-immune disorders, inner-ear complaints, nosebleeds, itching and burning skin, changes in the taste of food, behavioral abnormalities such as lethargy, agitation, panic attacks, hallucinations and disorientation; cognitive impairment, miscarriages, seizures and cancer.
When teachers started to speak out against the poisoning, the school districts issued edicts prohibiting all discussion of the issue, including even teacher-parent communications. For over twenty years, public complaints about the poisoning raised at Sam Farr’s town hall meetings were shouted down by the Friends of Sam Farr. Farr himself repeatedly dismissed the issue for more than two decades with the cynical assurance that Methyl Bromide use was being “phased out”. So tight and powerful was the control exercised by the combined forces of corporate agribusiness and the Democratic Party that local journalists, county health officers and agriculture commissioners, as well as state and local elected officeholders, hardly ever dared to utter a word on the issue. This tragedy is described by one of the teachers, Mary Flodin, in her recently published novel, “Fruit of the Devil”.
Mr. Panetta, you had to have been aware of this devastation while it was happening in your own home district for over two decades, but you, too, remained silent. Do you not owe the people a public explanation, particularly now, while we are all experiencing, first, a world-wide pandemic that makes it undeniably clear that government’s first priority is to protect, not attack, the people’s health, and secondly, a national uprising against racism.
In the spirit of our proposed constitutional amendment, shouldn’t you at least publish the text of your secret memo to Sam Farr that initiated this disaster, and offer us your present thinking as to whether you would have even sent that memo if, in 1993, the law had required you to make it public? Are you willing to state publicly that the cause of protecting corporate profits must never again be allowed to undermine the General Welfare? Do you have any regrets about causing the poisoning of migrant laborers and other residents in our region? How do you feel now about your attack upon the sovereignty of the governments and people of every nation, and your disregard for the treaty that had contained the dangers of Methyl Bromide to the Ozone Layer, to the environment and to the public health?
Would you devote a Panetta Institute event to the proposed Amendment, well before Election Day? We believe that most candidates on most ballots across the country will wake up to the people’s demand for open and accountable government if we can manage to confront them in time. Given your status as a respected party elder, you might well be able to convince Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel and others to discuss the party system and its policy consequences.
You should be able to convince Joe Biden to provide his thinking about how he might have acted differently in the past if we had enjoyed open and accountable government when he (a) voted for the Iraq War in 2003, arguably the worst foreign policy initiative in American history; (b) led the charge in the 1990’s to expand the private prison industry and incarcerate millions of poor people with long prison sentences for relatively minor drug and other offenses; (c) supported the bankers whenever they asked, including his blocking of student borrowers and other poor people’s access to bankruptcy protection; and (d) suppressed the privacy and other civil rights of all Americans in the name of national security.
The Democratic Party is trying to conceal Biden’s ignoble history so that he can unseat President Trump, but if the American people just support Biden as the lesser of two evils, and disregard the need for systemic change, we will still be stuck with a government corrupted by cowardly and cynical party manipulations, no matter who is in the Oval Office for the next four years.
Both major parties have long ignored the authentic source of political power in the American experiment. As the Preamble to the Constitution expresses it clearly, it was “WE, THE PEOPLE” who did “ORDAIN AND ESTABLISH THIS CONSTITUTION FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.”
Throughout our history we have gotten reminders of the people’s proper role in our governance, particularly by statesmen from Illinois: in 1863, as our republic faced its greatest threat, President Lincoln called ours “a government of the People, by the People and for the People”. A hundred years later or so, Governor Adlai Stevenson said that in a democracy the People are the “Law-Givers”. In 2007, an Illinois state Senator, a close political ally of Barack Obama, urged his Congressman, Rahm Emanuel, to consider a federal requirement for all officeholders to engage in regularly recurring televised dialogue with citizens, just as we are proposing. Finally, in a personal conversation I had with Illinois Senator Dick Durbin about four years ago, he told me that such dialogue was a good idea. When I pressed him to introduce the idea in Congress, though, he suggested I try to get the process started as an experiment at the state or local level. As I explained to him, I’ve tried that tack with local officeholders for many years, and always gotten the same response: A pat on the back and nothing more.
We can’t afford the time it would take to conduct local experiments—the need for honest and ethical government after decades of gridlock is too obvious and too urgent; potentially disastrous social, economic and ecological degradation threaten us in every location across our country. The voters and future voters, those who seek to fully participate in our democracy, will do their utmost to seize the day and demand federal action to establish open and accountable government at all levels, local, state and federal. Our constitutional inheritance requires nothing less.
We have to remember, though, that according to the Constitution, only the Congress (or a convention formally demanded by two-thirds of the state legislatures) is authorized to formally propose amendments, so the people’s only realistic prospect for obtaining the reforms we need is through intense political pressure applied to every candidate for public office to support this constitutional reform, especially congressional candidates, coming at them from every direction, well before Election Day, all across the land.
There is no need for us to form organizations and hold meetings — we’ll all be choosing our own individual ways to challenge all candidates on all ballots in all locations, and confront them publicly and in writing. We’ll spread the news by word-of-mouth, by internet pathways and postings, by displaying the website title www.Voters-Intervene.org on home-made labels for clothes and hats, bumper stickers, signs, political flyers and a thousand other varieties of publicity. We’ll conduct public dramatizations portraying typical back-room manipulations, and we’ll hold dramatic readings of honestly-imagined texts of corrupt memos and other writings that have brought us to our degraded state of affairs. Some of us will call ourselves the Serf City Players, no matter where we’re located, because in all parts of the world most people can fairly be categorized as political and economic serfs, metaphorical refugees confined inside massive nation-wide government encampments, kept silent and uninformed, ever-vulnerable to incumbent demagogues and violent political repression.
We will deliver the message to every person who wants to represent the people in public office, that from now on we will cast our votes only for candidates who make a sincere commitment to (1) share all political communications with the people; and (2) appear in regularly scheduled public conversation with a citizen or the citizen’s proxy. What an effective platform these public conversations would be for concerned citizens and public commentators of all stripes. Everyone’s viewpoints would eventually be heard in civil dialogue, and we would all get a bit wiser by listening.
With these two new processes in place we would be able to build mutual respect and a healthier sense of local and national community. We would get educated and motivated to play our proper role in setting the public agenda; we could put the oppressive gridlock and most of our ugly divisions behind us. We will be conducting challenges like this one in every congressional district across the country. Here locally, we’ll also be challenging Sam Farr and your son, Congressman Jimmy Panetta, who constantly emphasizes the importance of farmworker health and welfare. Please let me know whether you are willing to publicly discuss these reforms and the other matters referred to above.
Yours truly,
Ed Frey
[UPDATE 7/29/2020]
Mr. Panetta replied.
Voters Intervene 