What does a healthy republic look like?  For all this struggle against Empire, it is foolish to think that the work ends once Empire itself falls.  That's the easy part.  The hard part is to fill that void with something else, something better, and that is what this talk of a republic is all about.  It is important to think about it now, to determine that now, as it gives your efforts a focus and distinction that makes organizing people and entities into a viable coalition much easier. Politics and warfare are both pursuits done to pursue specific objectives, and any struggle against Empire will involve either or both of those things.  Knowing what you are for, and not merely being against Empire, makes you into a credible actor in the situation because it gives you a goal to work towards that is ultimately productive and positive for everyone concerned.  This is vitally important because any successful effort against Empire will take generations to achieve, so possessing a perspective that takes one outside of the very limited perspective of a single lifetime (or less) is required to stand any chance of getting there at all.

So, what does that republic look like?  Let's start with the biggest, yet least obvious, distinction: the utter lack of a dominance hierarchy.  A healthy republic fosters and maintains a culture that focuses itself on achieving goals, not on attaining status or material wealth or any other external trappings of approval.  In short, people do not assume a role of authority in a healthy republic unless they need to use it as a tool to achieve a specific goal; this is due to the way that positions of authority exist in the republic--they exist for specific reasons, have exactly what powers required to achieve that intention, and are abolished when no longer required--and the culture therein which has as a key feature a daily and ongoing discussion by the population on what needs to be done and why it should be so.  Government, therefore, isn't a system for establishing dominance; it exists in the same way that groups form teams to handle specific tasks- when a need arises, you assemble a team and deal with it through that team, which goes away once the team achieves the goal.

The republic understands that the government must be solely responsible for all forms of infrastructure, because only the government has the scope and scale necessary to do so successfully without corrupting the society, and as a result the people of that republic partake in the maintenance of that infrastructure.  In addition to a socialization of the costs through a progressive taxation scheme, a Hamiltonian or List-style national economy and universal social service (which, as a by-product, produces baseline levels of employability that no society currently enjoys)- every citizen puts in time staffing a local institution, so long as they are of sound mind and sufficiently able body (and that latter part is negotiable; if you can answer a phone, you can staff a desk).

The republic understands that economics is amoral, and that it can be used as a weapon of destruction no less devastating than any other, therefore the republic must devise and support economic policies that protect the people from foreign predation as well as domestic corruption.  This means that a healthy republic always eschews so-called "free trade" or "globalism" in favor of building and refining its own national economy, entering into trade with foreign entities only for those things that it either cannot produce on its own (and then only until it can do so) or to intervene to improve the circumstances of a neighboring state.  ("Acting for the advantage not merely for one's self, but for that of the other also- and always.")  Internal commerce, as a matter of national security, must be privileged over foreign trade at all times; the current world economic system is a clear example of Empire in action- massive unemployment leads to poverty, crime and the breakdown of society that leads to barbarism, in that order.

The republic, barring the aforementioned concerns of security internal and external, keeps itself invisible.  People, citizens, organize themselves to pursue specific goals; mining concerns, logging companies, farming cooperatives, what have you.  Religion is disestablished, having seen the effects that such things have upon a society, and thus I say that a healthy republic maintains a certain degree of secularism in its society and more so in government.  We have seen a close approximation of a healthy republic more than once in human history; what we need to do is to identify those approximations, cull the corruption from them, mesh the rest together into a superior model and then make that new model into reality.  It's possible, it's probable and it's not as hard as it seems to make it work- let's get to it.

On Thursday, January 21st 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a decision in the case of Citizens United v. F.E.C. that did not receive the massive media attention that its impact and consequences truly deserved.  Alone out of the mainstream outlets, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC took the time to spell out in a lengthy Special Comment segment. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#34985508)  He correctly compared this decision to the historic mistake that was the Dred Scott decision of the 19th Century, because he correctly perceived the great moral hazard and existential threat that this one Supreme Court decision poses to the American republic to govern itself and thus maintain its freedom.  The utter unfettering of corporate money for use in political affairs is a betrayal of the republic the likes of which no American alive has not seen in this country.  I leave it to Mr. Olbermann to go on about what can, within months or years, go wrong directly as a result of this decision- he is quite thorough about it.

This is not a hypothetical argument. It is known fact, documented in every worthwhile media outlet around (and most notably so at Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now!), that we've already suffered greatly due to the influence of corporate funds being used to fuel the political campaigns of candidates that--once in office--return that campaign contribution with privileged access to the political process and the advocacy of policies that do nothing for the general welfare and everything for those same corporate donors.  Furthermore, it is also well known now that many of the individuals and entities that own those same corporations are not American citizens; they are foreign nationals or trans-national entities, and that means that by corrupting our political process in this way they make our elected and appointed officials into agents of foreign powers.  They bribe our officials to betray their oaths of office for their benefit.  It's the same policy used to corrupt the elites of Third World countries to betray their people, and it leads to the same results over time.  Action must be done now to prevent the worst and mitigate the rest.

That said, it's not time to panic.  Unlike Mr. Olbermann, I do not think this to be so horrible that it's time to freak out and scream "Game over, man! GAME OVER!"  This has happened before.  It can be dealt with and defeated.  It won't be easy, but it can be done because it has been done.  The reason it won't be easy is because it involves doing something which hasn't been done in American society as a widespread social norm for about two generations, and it begins with changing our relationship to our various media outlets.  We would be better served by ceasing to think of media outlets as being private businesses and instead conceiving them as being part of our civic infrastructure, and then changing our policies and behaviors accordingly.

One of the reasons for why Pacifica Radio is as potent as it is comes from its policy of deriving its support directly from the listeners; other truly public stations that follow this paradigm come to evolve into truly independent community institutions and assets that reflect and serve their communities in a way that commercial radio never can and that the more dominant form of public radio in the United States--National Public Radio--doesn't do very well.  I say that we take a page from this listener-supported paradigm; I say that, as with roads and power plants, we socialize the costs behind their construction and maintenance and in return we allow individuals and groups to make use of these media resources.  Instead of a radio station, newspaper, TV station or internet service provider having to buy and maintain the hardware themselves we instead organize around the shared use of a necessary civic asset.  Both the spectrum and the technology necessary to access it would be public assets; businesses and other private users would share the use and access of it, in the manner of sharing use and access of roads.

The second change is easier to do because it's entirely personal, and that is to change how you use the media.  The generations previous to use spent more time talking to our neighbors, our friends and our relatives when not doing our necessary work.  We are known to be a people that now eschews such things, and part of fixing our problems with corporate power comes from our own collective fault in shirking our obligations to be good neighbors and citizens.  This means that we have to change our behavior away from the childish insistence upon the false and fraudulent entitlement to keeping up with ephemeral entertainments (we can do that after meeting our obligations as citizens) and instead doing what healthy adults and citizens in a republic or democracy must do: spend our time away from our work keeping up with what our local, regional and national government does in our name and intervening as necessary to ensure that it actually does so.  Civic engagement is a personal duty that all citizens bear, and we are in the sad state that currently exists in large part because we've turned away from it.

The third change is to demand, and continue organizing until the pressure compels it, changes in the law that kill corporate personhood, end the presence of private funding for election campaigns and place strict controls on the flow of capital.  The Glass-Steegal Act of 1933 must be fully reinstated, and the Federal Reserve system brought to an end by repealing the 1913 Federal Reserve Act and instead replacing it with a Third National Bank of the United States (following the model of the charters for the First and Second banks) so that control of credit and currency returns to the Congress where it belongs- and then fully restoring the American System of Political Economy.  This is the work of a generation, work that will not only produce a nation of citizens but also work that will bring a revived agro-industrial economy (and all of the gainful, useful and productive employment therein) back to our republic and thus restore the practical, material basis for our freedoms.

So, while worrisome and dangerous, this is not the end.  It cannot be the end until and unless we, the people, do nothing.  It is entirely within our control.  Let's get to work. 

A free people, by necessity, has to use their government to guarantee their freedoms.  This is because a free people must make use of the greater power that comes with highly-organized government assets to defend attacks upon the sovereignty which is their natural right.  It is not enough to be free to do things; you must also possess freedom from things, or the freedom to do things quickly becomes the obligation to do what your masters command of you.  This is the justification for establishing intelligence, law enforcement and military assets- and there is no successful republic that did not, or does not, keep and maintain such institutions.

Now, if a free people have the right to defend themselves from criminal or military attacks upon their freedom why would they not possess the right to defend themselves against economic threats?  The freedom to act, to speak, to work and so on mean nothing if hostile entities or foreign powers dominate your ability to participate in the other vital aspect of human life: economic activity.  Yet today most of the world is so dominated, to varying degrees, by such entities and the governments that they've corrupted with their influence and monetary assets.  The empires of today are not built on the model of Rome, but on the model of the East India Company; it's not based in the offices of the Prime Minister or President, but in the offices of the world's central banks and the salons of the world's elite- the goal being to transform the planet into a giant plantation or company town, with subservient governments used to enforce their will (in association with various mercenary companies).  John Perkins's Confessions of an Economic Hitman exposes the entire scheme; I strongly urge you to find it and read it.

Far from being crackpot theory, this was foremost on the minds of the American Founding Fathers during and after the American Revolution.  They knew that military success against England meant nothing if they could buy up the former Colonies after the fact and reassert power through economic means; this was not unknown, as it led to the movement to eschew the import of finished goods from abroad in favor of domestic manufacturing.  Alexander Hamilton, along with Issac Roosevelt, would go on to formulate the answer to the central bank system that seized control of Europe: the American School of Political Economy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_School_%28economics%29)

The key components of the American School directly confront, deny and refute the economic imperialism that the so-called "Free Trade" school championed then by England and imposed by means mostly foul upon Europe over the years.  It rejects free trade by imposing a system of duties, tariffs and other measures designed to defend the nation against economic threats by foreign predators.  It uses government-directed spending projects meant to provide the infrastructure necessary for individuals to develop into the highly-educated and highly-trained people capable of being the ambitious and enterprising productive people we are famous for being.  It chartered a national bank, owned wholly by the government, that administered the lines of credit necessary to get all of this done and otherwise oversaw the monetary policy of the state- and thus remained utterly accountable to the people by way of Congress and the Presidency. 

It is acknowledged that, when the United States adhered to the American System (as it came to be known), the United States thrived; when it instead turned towards the "Free Trade" alternative, the United States degenerated and declined.  Seeking to replicate that same success back in Europe, Friedrick List brought the American School to Europe wherein he found audiences with Tsar Alexander II and Otto von Bismark; they adopted some of the school's tenants, as they deemed a best fit for their nation-states, and to the extent that they did so their aims met with success.  In every nation where the American School took root, similar success occurred; in every nation that instead went with "Free Trade", a slide back into serfdom occurred and the people degenerated into slaves to the new feudal lords. This is known; the records are available for review.

(Aside: The American School is a market system.  In our parlance, it is increasingly a Fair Trade system because of its emphasis on using practical economic policy to create desired economic effects in pursuit of political goals and objectives.  This is why it's called "Political Economy"; as the overall goal is to ensure the freedom of all the people, ensuring that there are well-regulated markets wherein individuals can engage in economic activity is quite obvious.  The American history of economic regulation in favor of the population and its general welfare comes from this school.)

The United States all but utterly abandoned the American System during the Nixon Administration, and like a junkie whose habit had yet to ruin him, the United States slowly ate itself from within.  This is the current face of Empire, and it is the most cunning ruse yet employed.  Since the imposition of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, we've seen the erosion of economic sovereignty over generations through a creeping incrementalism.  Control of the currency is now in private hands, hands that have no real oversight (as demonstrated this past year) and over which the people of the United States have no power.  (No, the President's appointing of the Chairman does not count; the power disparity is such that, by now, the appointment is a rubber stamp.)  Again, documented by John Perkins in the aforementioned book.

If the American people are to return themselves to greatness, then the Federal Reserve Act must be repealed and a new National Bank chartered to take its place so that power over the American Dollar (and through it, the entirety of the American economy) returned to where it belongs: the Federal Government of the United States.  Then we've got to abrogate all free trade agreements, and go on to make any future attempt to impose "Free Trade" an act of treason.  Trade with any foreign power or entity must be kept to a strict standard of reciprocity, with the U.S. keen to ensure that the people of the foreign power benefit in a manner consistent with and equal to the benefit that we'd enjoy from such trade.  (This is the key that prevents the Race to the Bottom that "Free Trade" always produces as a system of control over its enslaved populations, as a gang/countergang scheme of Divide & Conquer.)  Internally, we need to reassert a system that rewards and encourages the development of commerce (which is local) and used trade only as necessary to achieve the development of strategic national objectives (one of which is commerce).

You want a practical path to the destruction of Empire?  There you are, readers: a proven, practical example of an alternative that not only works, but works better than any other system ever attempted.  Return it to practice today and you will swiftly see that Empire Must Fall.