Just handed out almost 1000 stickers and talked to many wonderful and committed citizens. Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge peacefully. What a great country and people. We will fix this democracy problem and soar together!

I was asked “well what about the senate?”

The simple answer is that chaging the form of our government might be a good idea, but it will take either a Constitutional Convention or Constitutional Ammendments. Neither is easy.

But we don’t need to do anything structural to get fair representation. Congress passed it’s own law setting the size of the House of Representatives so all we need to do is put pressure on them to change the law.

Imagine, in two years we could have a real representative democracy. And you could run for office – it will not be limited to either the rich or their proxies (it is very expensive to run for office under these rules!)

We need your help. This will only work if we are focused and single-minded.

If you have web design experience we need your help.

If you know how to draft legislation, we need your help.

If you have experience at the grassroots level, we need your help.

I would love to get a map on this site with every Representative’s district and recruit volunteers in each district to press for change. Make no mistake, congress will not give this up easily. They have had 100 years of power and security and we are demanding that they go back to being citizen legislators, not career politicians. Please log on to the blog and volunteer!

I listened for a while to the Occupy Brooklyn General Assembly meeting before I knew that this Occupy(fill-in-the-blank) movement needed us.

At the end of the meeting there were so many working groups dealing with things like people of color issues, housing, outreach, media, and on and on. It is not that these issues are not important, they are, but they are policy questions. It struck me that here was a democratic meeting of citizens trying to discuss policy – that is great. But, we already are supposed to have a place where this happens called the legislature, local, state and federal. THE ISSUE IS NOT A POLICY PROBLEM IS IS A DEMOCRACY PROBLEM.

It is very clear that this energy should not be wasted discussing policy. We should only be discussing principals. How do we want to structure the democracy in which we live so that we are heard on these important policy issues. If these occupiers would organize themselves into a single-issue voting block with one demand – representation (30,000:1) we would be unstoppable. Then we could debate policy in an effective way!

I am going to dedicate myself to getting this single message out but I need your help. Please join the blog and send this link everyone you know!

So there is a new declaration about what is needed by the “99%” of us not in power. This is all fine except that all of these movements (on the Left & Right) are mistaking their politics with the structural problem.

Most of the stuff in the 99% declaration is policy – and reasonable people in a democracy will always disagree about policy, so why are they confusing their issues with what they should really be asking for? The same is true for the tea party folks and libertarians and all of the other people complaining about policy problems. I love their energy and enthusiasm but I am frustrated by their solutions

The problem is not policy, it is STRUCTURAL.

We need only to agree on the structure we want to use to come to policy agreements. Let’s not confuse our own morality or issues with what a democracy should be. We are not going to agree on the issues but we can agree on how we will STUCTURE our system of comming to a compromise and living together. Right now there is no point talking about policy because we are stymied in congress by monied interests. There is a bottleneck of democracy in congress and we need to unblock it. 310,000,000 opinions get passed through 435 people – so who cares what the 310,000,000 think just buy off the 435!

This structural problem is out first priority. The we can argue forever about what to do about taxes, the environment, abortion, the scope of government etc…

NOW IS THE TIME FOR 30,000:1

• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had 5,835 Oscar voters in 2007. That means more people vote for Best Picture than vote on whether or not we go to WAR — a lot more!

We support the people who are occupying Wall Street, and we think part of our mission should be to occupy Congress!

Think of an issue, anything you care about. We believe that if we had a robust democracy, your issue, along with so many others, including corporate corruption (which is what the Wall Street problem really is) would be solved with a strong legislative branch. One that is responsive to only their constituents!

30,000:1

Imagine if you could just walk over to your representative’s house or office and chat with him or her. Imagine if you could run for congress simply by walking around your neighborhood. This is how it used to be. Most of the issues in our country right now are not a problem with the size of our government, or bad regulation, or bad government workers, they are a problem of representation — that we are not represented in our own government.

When our democracy was founded, the ratio of citizens to representatives in the House of Representatives was 30,000:1. We want to return to that ratio.

WHY?

Our system of the bicameral legislature is designed to let the population have its voice (the House) and the more entrenched, powerful minorities have theirs (the Senate.) It was not designed to have a straight majority rule, but a more tempered form of representation. We think that was a smart idea — mob rule can be pretty frightening if you are not part of the mob! The House was supposed to be the place where the people could exercise their power, and that has been taken from us by the arbitrary limiting of the size of the House of Representatives to 435 members. Why? Control — it is easier to bribe and control 435 people than 12,000 people.

The House now has the ratio that the Senate use to have. That is why your representatives don’t work for you. They work for the people with money and access.

WHAT DO WE WANT?

We want two simple rules:

1. The ratio of citizens to representatives in the House will be set at 30,000 to One.
2. These districts will be based on a neutral geographic assessment every census —think zip codes.