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    I, the Citizen Declare…: How the American Citizen Can Take Back His Country
    I, the Citizen Declare…: How the American Citizen Can Take Back His Country
    I, the Citizen Declare…: How the American Citizen Can Take Back His Country
    Ebook139 pages1 hour

    I, the Citizen Declare…: How the American Citizen Can Take Back His Country

    By Carmine G. Barba

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    About this ebook

    Author Carmine Barba considers himself to be an average citizen, albeit one who struggles to keep his head above water. He is dissatisfied with the fiscal quagmire this nation is in, wondering how it will find its way into solvency again. He wonders too if the country and its people are losing their grip on reality and whether they truly believe that we will ever stand tall again and be the masters of our own destinies.

    In I, the Citizen, Declare Barba examines how this can happenbut he cautions that it will only work if we, the people, decide that we want control of the governing reins. The power that lies with the Congress to legislate and spend must be taken out of their hands and given to the people directly.

    Barba states that Congress has become inefficient and too self-serving and should no longer retain the power it has to pass legislation into law and spend good taxpayers money. The citizens of this country need to take the power away from them by limiting their ability to deliberate, discuss, and debate issues and expendituresbut not to ultimately vote on their passage.

    I, the Citizen, Declare calls upon all citizens of this good country to make their voices heard.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTrafford Publishing
    Release dateFeb 16, 2011
    ISBN9781426948640
    I, the Citizen Declare…: How the American Citizen Can Take Back His Country

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      Book preview

      I, the Citizen Declare… - Carmine G. Barba

      I, the Citizen Declare…

      How the American Citizen

      Can Take Back His Country

      By

      Carmine G. Barba

      Order this book online at www.trafford.com

      or email orders@trafford.com

      Most Trafford titles are also available at major online book retailers.

      © Copyright 2011 Carmine G. Barba.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

      Printed in the United States of America.

      isbn: 978-1-4269-4862-6 (sc)

      isbn: 978-1-4269-4863-3 (hc)

      isbn: 978-1-4269-4864-0 (e)

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2010917309

      Trafford rev. 02/04/2011

      missing image file www.trafford.com

      North America & international

      toll-free: 1 888 232 4444 (USA & Canada)

      phone: 250 383 6864 fax: 812 355 4082

      Contents

      Dedication

      Preface

      Chapter I

      Declaration

      Chapter II

      The Power of the Citizen

      Chapter III

      Choosing A Government

      Chapter IV

      The Abuses of Congress

      Chapter V

      The Social Contract

      Chapter VI

      State Rights VS National Government

      Chapter VII

      Amending the Constitution

      Chapter VIII

      Revolution, Anyone?

      Chapter IX

      One Nation Under God

      Chapter X

      Progressivism

      Chapter XI

      Property and Due Process

      Chapter XII

      Deliberative Democracy; Direct Democracy

      Afterword

      Appendix A

      Dedication

      Dedicated to the idea of direct democracy; the Empowerment of the common citizen to self-govern.

      Preface

      Six months ago, I had no idea that I’d be writing this book – nor any other book for that matter.

      But I think the germ was planted when I wrote a letter to Glenn Beck in November 2009, telling him how much I enjoyed his show and what a fine job he was doing in trying to awaken the country into a higher sense of urgency and how we must hold elected officials to a new standard of accountability, and if they did not comply, they’d be voted out of office.

      I agreed that accountability was necessary, but it was already a known issue with the congressmen and women who run our country – they simply did not get it, even though accountability has been around since time immemorial; and that by voting in a new batch of congress-people to replace the recalcitrant incumbents would just be more of the same – since they come to D.C. and immediately begin following the party line instead of tending to the country’s business.

      However, I continued to dwell on the issue of Congress and what we can or should do to make it do its job more effectively; and the more I thought about it, I could see that Congress was not and probably would not be in any kind of learning mode. Nothing of what we said to them in the past has ever taken hold. They just go on doing what they do best … everything for themselves and zilch for the country. They are always the gainers and the people, the losers.

      They are basically irresponsible and self-serving. This was not about to change simply by giving them a talking to, or saying look, if you don’t straighten up we’ll put somebody else in there. Of course, we keep doing that, but it never seems to remedy the problem.

      The fact remains that the country must rid itself of their incompetence and ineffectiveness. I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could abolish Congress altogether.

      But, that would be tantamount to revising our whole form of government – who or what would we put in its place – too much of an overhaul, I thought. My next thought was to somehow eliminate Congress’ ability to vote on legislation and spending, and give this power to the people – the citizens of America. I said to myself, I’m sure the people would be more caring and more concerned with doing the right thing; and that they would pass legislation more in line with their own needs, and be less wasteful of the tax revenue that flowed into D.C. each year.

      At this point, I was hooked - for the more I thought about it, the more I realized that we had to do something, and do it quickly in order to get this country of ours back on track and out of its mired position. This steered me into the possibility of getting one or two constitutional amendments passed. Who, me?

      I pursued the issue did some preliminary readings, and was lucky to have found a good reference section in a local library. There was enough material there, where I was able to get answers to some of the questions I was posing.

      The result is this book – but I want to say right off the bat, that I don’t consider myself a professional writer, although I have written one book (2004); nor am I deeply knowledgeable about the Constitution, Constitutional law, or Constitutional matters. I am a citizen, however and I care a great deal about the direction this country has taken. And there’s no doubt in my mind that there are millions of other citizens throughout the country who are aware of the precarious situation this nation is in – and agree, along with me, that we have to somehow pull it back from the brink.

      What this book proposes to do it to offer the citizen a view as to what might be done in the way of amending the Constitution, in order that the power to vote on national legislation and national spending is given directly to the people.

      Much of the book is quoted material taken from a number of sources, such as The Federalist, the U.S. Constitution; Encyclopedia of the American Constitution and others. It is somewhat instructive rather than being overly narrative, because, this is the way it first came to me. I’m as much a student of this material as may be the reader – my sole motivation in its research and writing being that, I, as a citizen of this good country, want nothing more than to rescue it from its current danger and current lack of affirmative direction our leaders are taking it; for it is being lead by people who do not believe in it, nor base their governing doctrine on the principles of our Founding Fathers.

      We must not allow this political-machine element to steal our country from us; and the way we can do this is to

      1) take it back, and

      2) govern ourselves.

      Chapter I

      Declaration

      First declaration;

      I, the citizen declare that I will not support nor vote for any candidate for Congress, who does not first solemnly promise that he will introduce and / or vote for an amendment to the Constitution that will nullify his/her power to vote on any proposed legislation and monetary expenditure.

      Second declaration;

      I, the citizen declare that I will not support nor vote for any candidate for Congress, who does not first solemnly promise that he will introduce and/or vote for an amendment to the Constitution that will give the power to vote on any legislation and monetary expenditure, to the citizenry of the United States of America.

      We can take our nation back by passing two amendments to the Constitution:

      One amendment would nullify Congress’ right to vote on the passing of all national legislation and spending power on all national expenditures.

      The other amendment would bestow the power to vote on all national legislation and all national spending to the American Citizenry.

      The other thing we need to do is to decide, as a nation, if we would, could and have the fortitude to govern ourselves. Not an easy thing to do, but I do think that we are faced with the issue of whether we want to be self-sufficient or have Big-Brother and Big Government take care of us, and thus continue to dictate to us as to how we should exercise our freedoms, which would at some point eviscerate our freedoms altogether.

      In examining the issue of self-government, we found in our search a number of surprising aspects to it.

      There is the aspect of how much power the people actually have and how it can be used for better government; what the source of the power is; how it is bestowed upon man by natural law; how elected officials assume power which is usurped and not rightfully theirs; and why the people should consider self- government.

      In reading much of the material, I discovered two fundamental facts; one was how little the founding fathers (particularly Madison) regarded the masses of the people despite the Constitution’s Preamble, which states, We the People. Their point of view basically was of a deep distrust and an assumed lack of ability to self-govern, which forced them to weigh-in heavily on representation, rather than direct democracy as the preferred form of government.

      Another discovery was; how much power the people truly have, and this by virtue of a divine law or the law of nature- all sovereignty emanates from this, and not from the dictatoriality of man-decreed governments, and it may be prudent that we do today, what our founding fathers saw fit, in their collective wisdom, not to have attempted 235 years ago … and that is to establish direct democracy.

      We, as a nation are straining hard and struggling to remain upright fiscally and economically. We spend money we don’t have, thereby mortgaging our children’s futures. We have a huge national debt which is heavily weighing down on every man, woman and child in this country. Our trade deficits continue to climb, and we are rapidly becoming a debtor nation.

      The power to spend must be taken away from the elite few that sit in congress, for they spend money which is not their own. The people who pay the taxes should be the ones to decide how it is spent

      Congress has shown over the many decades that it cannot spend money in a

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