Posted by NJD on September 01, 2009 at 07:36:12:
Here is an excerpt from an article posted on Common Dreams. There is such a "convention" planned to be held in Washington,DC, soon, by the Nadar-inspired group, NEW PARTY.
"...Of course the aforementioned reforms are unlikely to be attained by petitioning a Congress frozen, as FDR put it, "in the ice of its own indifference," or by relying upon significant action by a President constrained by the Constitution from acting unilaterally. Only a powerful "outside the beltway" mass movement, well led and highly motivated, can accomplish what needs to be done.
In the United States there are many activist organizations dedicated to noble causes. What is now needed is for the leaders of these associations to come together and reach a consensus on a statement of agreed-upon objectives for reform, as well as a program of strategies and tactics for enacting those objectives into law, followed by a carefully calculated effort to rally a majority of the American people to support such an effort.
A national convention should be held of delegates from all interested progressive organizations, the number of delegates from each one proportional to its total membership, to draw up, as did the delegates in the first Continental Congress in 1776, not only a declaration of basic principles, but also a strong bill of indictment of existing abuses which need to be eliminated.
The convention should establish a mechanism for pursuing the enactment of essential reforms and a timetable for proceeding. Some reforms can best be initially sought at local levels where "greed is good" attitudes can most readily be exposed as inimical to the public good. Other reforms might first be pursued at the state level, in places where receptivity seems most likely. But the enactment of reforms of the greatest importance, comparable to the passage against tremendous opposition of our Social Security, Medicare and civil rights laws, should be pushed at the national level, in the hope that a majority of the members of Congress might be willing, for once, to put aside pursuit of personal political and economic gain, in order to act solely for the public welfare, with the President joining in and perhaps eventually assuming leadership of such a movement.
Absent such an unlikely reorientation of our current governmental institutions, a Populist movement unmatched in American history will be required. Such a movement is feasible. Something like it occurred ten score and thirteen years ago when our forefathers came together to establish a new nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." They, too, initially acted outside the framework of existing government institutions until, eventually, they prevailed upon those same institutions and established new ones to adopt the principles that they had enumerated...."