Written by Dick Haas   

This is an open letter to my fellow citizens and stakeholders. I am writing to ask for your help and to offer mine.

“We the people” need to pay more careful, calm, and healing attention to what is going on in Washington. Our Federal government needs an intervention.

Our government, famously founded on the premise that all men are created equal with certain inalienable rights, is asserting that it need not honor those rights for citizens of other countries or for U.S. citizens who are overseas. And now it is even saying that it need not necessarily always honor our rights here at home.

Our elected federal officials generally seem increasingly distant and disconnected from the rest of us. They study who we are and what we say we want in their efforts to get elected and re-elected, but they seem less concerned with understanding and considering our interests when they are governing.

The general public has been increasingly effectively excluded from ongoing meaningful participation in influencing Federal planning and decision making.

Instead of working to identify, prioritize and meet public needs, our elected officials in Washington are now increasingly irrationally obsessing with deficits and our national debt. Apparent at-least-periodic working majorities in both of our two major political parties seem determined to unnecessarily and inappropriately impose austerity on the rest of us by denying resources to, and otherwise hamstringing, our government.

While the two parties appear increasingly persuaded that most of us are just going to have to learn to do with less, they seem to agree on little else. Republicans and Democrats in Washington are acting more like the Hatfields and McCoys, the Capulets and Montagues, or the Sharks and Jets than like our fellow Americans. Our Federal government has descended into sustained gridlock.

This is all sadly ironic. We are the richest Nation in the history of the world. We have the most brilliantly designed system of representative self-government ever conceived. We have unprecedented technology and accumulated stores of knowledge, amazingly varied skill sets stunningly refined by experience, an unmatched diversity of cultural perspectives, legendary can-do attitudes, opportunities for specialization, and countless other advantages. We should be striving to improve everyone’s lot, rather than allocating austerity and pain.

Deficits, the debt, and our Federal government’s recent fiscal dysfunction are nowhere near being our most pressing or serious challenge. They are rather symptoms of that challenge.

Our real most serious challenge is that “we the people” are not insisting on applying our system of government as it is designed to be applied. To fix this, we need to insist on ongoing real public interest transparency and accountability.

Real public interest transparency is disclosure full and understandable enough to ensure accountability. Real public interest accountability is an ongoing process in which governments and elected officials publicly and interactively document, explain, justify, and refine what they say they are trying to do and what they are actually doing in such a way as to ensure that they contribute to, rather than detract from, the public interest.

In the absence of ongoing real public interest transparency and accountability, Washington will continue to give us backroom negotiations, secret deals, and premature compromises responsive to the most influential campaign donors and lobbyists, but neglectful of the interests of the rest of us.

Our Founders would not have been surprised at this. Indeed, our system of government was specifically designed to minimize this sort of thing.

Unfortunately, we are generally not taught thoroughly or substantively enough about the design of our system of government in school or anywhere else. We are taught even less about our system-critical responsibilities and opportunities as citizens, and in our various roles as stakeholders more generally, for insisting on real public interest transparency and accountability. We need to change this and, in the meantime, teach and motivate each other.

“We the people” are you and I, our friends, relatives, neighbors, associates, colleagues, and acquaintances. It is urgently important that we assert our sovereign authority to insist on henceforth applying our system of government as it is designed.

If/when we do this, the public interest soundness of our government’s performance will improve dramatically, public confidence in and support for our government and elected officials will rebound, the economy will take off, deficits and the debt will be very much easier to manage, our standard of living and quality of life will soar, and we will lead a global recovery.

For decades now, we have been drifting farther and farther from our Founding ideals and principles. We are in danger of wrecking our great American experiment in representative self-government and squandering the American Dream. We are running out of time; we must act now.

Write to the President, your Senators, and your Congressperson and tell them you insist on ongoing real public interest transparency and accountability. Tell them you will support them if they commit to it, and that you won’t if they don’t. Give them a copy of this letter. Spread the word; encourage others to write. I will help with more information anytime and in any other way I can.

Article by Dick Haas
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