Tag: Democracy

Borrowing from Our Children’s Treasure

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”   ~ Aldo Leopold

We see this phenomenon in the seven states who have been drawing down the Colorado River Basin water resources to the point of an emergency, and now in the proliferation of data centers in support of AI. In both cases large scale industrial projects drive decisions rather than prudent decision making with a land ethic (meaning the best decision making by a thinking community).

Citizens are finding themselves in a water crisis across seven states who utilize Colorado River Water, or in the fact that citizens in U.S. states are in a quandary as data center developers pressure them to either sell their homes or face the whine, pollution, grid and water overuse of mega data centers built in their backyards.

These kinds of abuses and overuses of the planet’s generosity occur without an ethic that all agree upon. Aldo Leopold made the greatest contribution to this discussion in his landmark essay, The Land Ethic. Leopold considered a land ethic as a dynamic outcome of a thinking community working together for the best outcomes for both the biotic health of the land and for people. The quote above sums up the concept.

When the Colorado River Compact, which includes seven states that utilize its waters, discussed how they could work together to share this great river’s resources, they did so in spite of a basic fact: the river experiences periodic one-hundred year droughts as shown in fossil records and tree rings.

Americans living in these states have witnessed a long-term drought that has all but emptied the two giant reservoirs, Lake Mead (lower basin states) and Lake Powell (upper basin states).

Desert states like Arizona and California, have sucked the regions dry to support enormous growth in cities and agriculture. Before building the Hoover Dam to create Lake Mead, Congressmen in 1878 sent John Wesley Powell to assess the southwest region for its potential for development of the western states. He returned after 18 months to deliver a sobering conclusion: the arid region is unsuitable for large scale development based on available water supply and geological aspects of the west. Read a summary of his report here.

Today, nearly a century later, mega-wealthy oligarchs who developed artificial intelligence (AI) want to build huge (thousands of acres) data centers to power AI. The horses are ahead of the cart again as the public isn’t sure they want AI to be developed without careful discussion and oversight. Virginia, a drought-stressed state, has hundreds of data centers clustered in the northern part of the state and are salivating for land in rural area. They bully landowners, promise huge tax income while drawing large amounts of fresh water from aquifers. The trend is to push out home owners, farmers, and even small townships, by offering as much as $12M an acre. Some owners are pressured when neighbors sell and leave other land owners who whose homes, farms and enterprises are their treasures. Air pollution for gas-powered turbines, noise pollution, and hidden impacts such as the water required to produce the power to run the data center are unsustainable and undemocratic. Read this recent executive summary of data centers pros and cons from CERES, a nonprofit that supports sustainable business solutions.

Ceres Report Drained by DataDownload

What is missing is the values-discussion that Aldo Leopold described that is a dynamic process within a thinking community. It is an ongoing discussion that considers the health of the land when making decisions that could decrease its well-functioning. Read The Land Ethic Below. **This is one of the most downloaded files on my blog. People from all over the world read it. My own view is that no one from the scientific community has analyzed “how to live on a piece of land without ruining it” better than Aldo Leopold.

The Land Ethic_A Sand County AlmanacDownload

How We See Each Other

“The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality,” Wilkerson writes. “It is about power — which groups have it and which do not.” ~ Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson

America is beset with a wound of spirit. Slavery, or the subjugation of others based on skin color, origin – or any other arbitrary distinction -is an ongoing contradiction in our Constitutional lives yet to be resolved. Today, Black Americans are still struggling for equal representation. Now, with the striking down of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, are we back at the basic question: Do Black Americans have a right to equal representation in voting districts? We are at another make or break moment. Is the Supreme Court right that there is no longer a need for federal oversight of district maps in southern states which have historically worked to suppress the vote of African Americans?

Human beings can be vicious, murderous, and also kind and loving…and everything in between. We are a complex species with potential for good or bad. Our canon of law traces all the clever ways we try to obtain power.

For millennia, humans have sought distinctions that give them a false rationale, stemming their sense of guilt when taking what is not rightfully theirs. More advanced cultures are more tolerant, making judgements based on how people act in various situations.

Much of this wisdom of the ages was on the minds of our founders when we set out to establish a new kind of government based on equality. Yet, most of them owned slaves and denied poor whites privileges who did not own land. Over our history as a nation, Americans have subjugated and disparaged African Americans, Irish, German, Slavic, Italian and Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans. The Constitution and Bill of Rights, and ongoing adjudication in our courts, continues to refine how we live together and who gets a “slice of the pie.”

Listen to a scholarly discussion about the impact of the Civil Rights Act from the National Constitution Center.

Isabel Wilkerson explains in her landmark book, Caste (2020) that she set out to discover the origins of our discontent. In her lengthy study, interviewing thousands of people, the things that divide us the most are not so much color or gender but rather about who’s got power.

In a 2023 interview with Oprah Daily, she was asked about the banning of Caste from libraries across America. She responded, “In writing Caste, I had to do a tremendous amount of research into India and Germany during the Nazi era. The Nazis studied the United States’ Jim Crow laws in creating the Nuremberg laws. We are coming perilously close to the spirit of what they were doing in another century with the banning of books. It’s revisiting a past that we should never want to experience again.”

It seems to me that we are at a new juncture in determining whether a redistricting map achieves the goals of the party submitting it for review: to determine whether it serves to weaken the moral principles of a Republic to achieve a new form of government, i.e. an autocracy based on white male supremacy and Christian Nationalist ideology. Yes, it is a grab for power, but much more, right? It seeks to tamp down the voices of Black Americans who are seen as opposing white power and privilege which for centuries enslaved generations. Sound familiar? I think we are right back at Reconstruction.

What do you think? Please submit comments.

Resources:

National Constitution Center Civil Rights Town Halls on YouTube:

Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice: Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act

Scotus Blog

Brennan Center for Justice

Lest It Slip through Our Hands

There have been 9 generations of Americans since the ratification of the Constitution.  Our form of federal governance has been discussed and amended by citizens over our Republic’s history as we labor together to create a more perfect union.

Over the last 80 years however, that “conversation” has gradually intensified until the present moment. The rule of law and civil rights are ignored. Corruption is flagrant. The treasure of America is being raided and spent without Congressional oversight.

Dark money has bored into the election system, causing candidates to find more substantial sources of funding to win a race. Citizens United, one of the most consequential Supreme Court rulings on the election system​, has diminished the vote of the people. The rich and powerful ​have steadily gain​ed greater influence.

The American citizen is the last and greatest bastion of our freedom and justice. But how do we become the kind of citizens who know how to wield power or identify its misuse​ by our representatives and administration?

I can only share my own experience to describe how I learned about my government and the roles a citizen plays to fulfill his or her obligation.

As a child and teen my parents led discussions at the dinner table about our nation’s history and, at times, of elections and why they voted for a candidate. Often, my mother and father diverged on candidates which was fun with spirited debates. This was how my sisters and I realized the nature of democracy​: it is participatory.

In public school, we students learned how and why our form of government was established, and what rights are guaranteed and rules of order. Social studies and civics education was integrated into K-12 education. Debate clubs offered students instruction on how to defend ideas while learning to respectfully listen to opposing views. When Congress functions in this manner it is called bipartisanship. Compromise is the core.

Public institutions further reminded us about democratic behavior. Churches, clubs, libraries, museums, and public leaders across many disciplines modeled how we treat and care for each other as citizens and neighbors. Standards of moral behavior kept the Republic steady. No​ one is above the law in a democratic nation.  

My parents and grandparents also supported our education with expectations we would apply ourselves to learn a body of facts and skills that prepared us to go out in the world. Then, there were generally accepted truths and facts shared by three TV channels. Diversity of thought and opinion were available in numerous print magazines and journals. People read books, journal articles, and local newspapers. We exchanged opinions face to face.

My parent’s love of reading was contagious. Biographies, literature, and poetry – culture from across the world – was brought to us as we read together or listened to discussions. I recall my father reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries out loud on a winter’s day around a roaring fire. How was this possible? There were no cell phone​s, no social media. And, in our small southern town in Tennessee, no business was open on Sunday. There was time and quietude. We were not wealthy or powerful people. Our relatives were farmers and skilled laborers. They all understood that dreams could be fulfilled with a good public education.

I do not expect that we could or would even wish to go back to those “slow” times, but maybe we might look back to understand how to raise up citizens who are curious, well read, and able to function as a living guardrail to keep our democracy fit and strong.

A key skill is the ability to discern when ideas that are opposed to a healthy functioning democracy rise up as they do from time to time. Today, American citizens can barely make heads from tails with an onslaught of disinformation and outright lies. AI enables citizens to create false videos to fool an electorate. We are all to blame for the mess we are in today.

Should we wish to keep our democracy, we must seriously confront these issues. Working locally to speak truth to power; to discipline ourselves to listen respectfully to ideas you may abhor. But listen we must.

We are the guardians of freedom, of liberty, lest we neglect our obligations and let it slip through our hands. 

Capitol Building Rotunda, Photo by Susan Feathers

They are Stealing Our History

The first steps taken by the incumbent regime sought to selectively erase American history:

  1. Fired the national Archivist putting the national archives under the watch of the Secretary of State who also holds several other major offices for which he has no training; the minions of fascism bore away in the Archives like termites in channels and holes under no sunlight of public observance;
  2. Deleted web pages of government agencies, replacing articles and documents to reflect a racist, white history and removing all they call “woke” (i.e. racial justice; the mistakes America has made at home and abroad as we have learned how to live up to the high ideals of a true democracy where truth is key; the most egregious are the removal of civil rights struggles over our history, and the multicultural nature of our population from our inception: a. erasure. deletion of language of human rights and therefore human dignity; b. lying about the truth [misinformation] thus disabling citizens of a shared history, shared reality; c. denigration and shaming as a way of instilling fear and removal or disempowerment);
  3. Harassment and legal actions against America’s most prestigious universities in order to make Boards of Governance to bend to their will;
  4. Attacking science institutions and ignoring the illegality of impoundment of funds authorized by Congress.
  5. Harming the public and worldwide population by denial of climate change; removal climate change research and monitoring facilities and staffing; withdrawing from global climate and health agreements and initiatives.
  6. Disempowering political opponents and the public through legal, social media, and law enforcement activities meant to shame and induce fear;
  7. Abandonment of the government’s responsibility to the public to follow the laws and regulations of a democratic Republic through our federal, state and local laws.
  8. Acting against longstanding policies that have created peace among nations with longstanding allies across the world.

I never thought this could happen in the United States of America, but it truly is and we in the fight of our lives to defeat the evil doers in the trump regime that seek to install a Christian nationalist autocracy with unelected fascist ideologues like Steven Miller supported by the Heritage Foundation.

I fault the Republican party which no longer can claim any legitimacy in our Republic, our democracy. They abrogated their claim to moral fortitude by selling out the American people for an ideology inconsistent with democratic values. Indeed, looking over its long pursuit to enslave Americans whom they have long deemed unequal to white Christian males, we have tolerated it long enough. We must turnover this vile, dark element and once and for all declare and reiterate the moral force of our founders’ vision with a new one for modern times including a public awareness of its duty to guard against despots and their sycophants and the utter corruption of wealth in our politics.

Photo by Susan Feathers. A ghost crab on Santa Rosa Island, Gulf Islands National Seashore: sands of quartz crystal washed to sea form barrier islands.

Letter to Congressional Republicans

January 26, 2026

Letter to All Republicans

US Congress 2026

Dear Senators and Representatives of the Republican Party,

This moment requires members of the Republican House and Senate to act decisively to protect the civil rights of citizens and adhere to Constitutional laws. Under your watch, the nation has never been more at risk of becoming another form of government: autocracy.

We the People have patiently waited for you to stand up for democracy. There is no more recent and brazen example as the persecution of Minnesota leaders and citizens. Pam Bondi’s request for voter roles is a clear violation of state’s sovereignty under law. Other cities have endured violations of civil rights by ICE but in Minnesota the worst of the far right ideologues of your once great old party are persecuting people it labels with a host of unamerican labels from elected officials right up to the White House.

We are not dealing with a “strong executive” but with people in key positions of power who have publicly stated their hatred of immigrants and their hatred of Democrats. Whatever happened to a nation in which both Republican and Democratic administrations were adhered to by citizens of all political views because all our leaders followed the rule of law and Constitutional laws.

My view is that we learned who DJT was in his first administration in which he pushed against the laws of our nation but was held in place by our guardrails against a despot: Supreme Court and Legislature. Now we have a stacked court of right leaning judges who have given immunity to a leader who is exactly the kind of person our founders wrote about who if he got into power would destroy the Republic. That is what we are witnessing, and, I have to say, is doing so with a lot of facilitation by you and your colleagues.

I am 80 years old, and I have never seen anything like we have in Donald Trump: an erratic, unstable human being; a person ignorant of our country and the world al large; a man whose mental health is deteriorating in plain view. We have never been more at risk in national security.

The killing of two Minnesota citizens by ICE who were protesting (their civil right) and the cowardly way in which Homeland Security reacted by calling them both insurrectionists is how dictatorships operate. Each family has a right to a full investigation. Life is not cheap in America under normal conditions.

I am begging you and your colleagues to stand up for the Republic! Protect our 250 years of striving together to make the best country we can. My God, the world is turning away from us. But do you know what I hold each of you most responsible for? Breaking the trust of the American people in such ways that you have weakened and endangered us. STAND UP!! Think about your legacy.   

Sincerely,

Susan Lee Feathers

Devoted Patriot of American Democracy

Teacher, Writer, Active Citizen

Freedom, Nation’s Capitol. Photo by Susan L Feathers, 2013

New World Order

Witness: from America’s ashes a global reorganization without US…

Mark Carney is the wise leadership America lacks. Americans at home are under attack from a vicious police force created by a rogue regime purportedly of the Republican Party. THIS cabal of small minded, unelected ideologues, has nothing to do with our Republic’s governance or American history. The man in the seat behind the Resolution Desk is a despot, a tyrant, and an ignorant and psychologically damaged man.

Kudos to Mark Carney and all the men and women who lead democratic governments across the world and who live in reality.

Americans enter a new world where we are a danger to the world and a minor player in world affairs. We can thank the MAGA party and the cowardly republican reps supporting and in lock step with a fascist movement tearing up our democracy in plain sight.

Americans, we must recover what we can, and then elect sober, intelligent leadership which can recover our values and come to terms with how this tragedy has happened to us. I suggest we study how Germany recovered after they, too, tried to destroy other nations and create a white male hegemony.

As an American, as daughter of a decorated WWII veteran, my heart is on the ground. In spite of that, I am actively working with my fellow Americans to recover the guardrails of our democracy, and then work to repair the damage to our collective belief in our country’s ethos.

Photo by Susan Feathers

The Courage of Our Convictions

History and Justice

America and Americans are riding a rising wave, a tsunami caused by tyrants in our body politic. The winds of ill will call us to ride the powerful wave to its resolution in the renewal of this Republic in its 250th year.

Truth bubbles up whenever forces seek to push it down, down from our sight and the light of facts. Our founder reminds us, “Facts are stubborn things.”[1]

Therefore, we take the courage of our convictions and we go out. Out we go to the streets with friends; we pick up a pen, and we write from experience and the assurance of our laws; we write from our shared wisdom; we text and email our Representatives, and we stand above the fray and call upon our fellow Americans to stop the madness:

  • A powerful Executive is not synonymous with abuse of power;
  • The powerful and lasting alliances through NATO and the United Nations have kept the world from worldwide war for 80 years; wholesale destruction of those alliances imperil American lives and those of our allies for coming generations;
  • Hatred of immigrants affronts the entire history of this Republic which has stood as a refuge for the repressed and made up our population over its entire history; no nation and its people are “garbage”;
  • Oil is a bygone energy source; nations around the world are converting to clean, renewable, cheap energy and should the tyrant stay in office, America will decline.
  • No intelligent leadership declares climate change a hoax.
  • The current president is not fit for office:  mental and physical incapacity; vicious, revengeful and dangerous to our Republic, citizens and nations worldwide.
  • The cabal of unqualified ideologues who surround the president are re-writing American history in their image and imaginations. Hundreds of years and millions of citizens’ labor to faithfully and accurately record our history and culture is being defaced, altered or all together destroyed.
  • Declaration of the United States of America as a Christian country defies the Constitution’s basic tenet of separation of church and state. We honor citizens’ personal choice of faith including the right to choose none.

History and Justice are watching, and they are recording on their stone tablets the ugly record of your assaults against humanity, your sloppy footprints on the Capitol. If it is Sorcery that abides now, watch out for falling catapults and hurling marble thrown by the straight aim of monuments surrounding your little stick and mud manifestations.

Now we see you, then, we don’t.

History and Justice are watching.

[1] John Adams

Any Grown-ups in the Room?

The hourly dismantling of the American Republic demands that grown-ups stand and exert their authority as citizens. Afterall, this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Since 2015, Donald J. Trump has intended to rid us of the rule of law. His principal tool has been obfuscation of fact, otherwise known as lies. The Heritage Foundation, which brought billions of dollars to elect Trump and crafted Project 2025, engaged Russell Vought as its principal writer. Later installed by Trump as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Vought is orchestrating the takeover and destruction of democracy at an unrelenting pace.

Because Trump doesn’t read or investigate, he is a stooge for powerful ideologues.  A barrage of Executive Orders signed in the first quarter of his term were lifted directly from Project 2025. This plan cloaks itself in the language of patriotism and democratic values, while the intent is its opposite: the wholesale destruction of the guardrails in the Constitution to check executive power. Now that Trump et al have functionally dismantled or made ineffective federal agencies and branches of government, the intent is clear: empower the Executive to Install a new form of governance: authoritarian. All of it is unconstitutional. A raft of lawsuits in pursuit of these thieves has made some progress in holding back full scale implementation. However, a Supreme Court dominated by Trump nominees, is preventing just outcomes that are within the scope of a true Republic as shown in our history.

Onerous still is the outright rewriting of our history. This is accomplished on a large scale while the American public watches in shock. So preposterous in scope, the dismantling of historic buildings, art and information in our museums, National Archives, federal buildings, and even the architecture of the White House, has temporarily stunned Americans. Some make jokes about it, but Trump is dead serious. I imagine closets filled with cans of white paint and gold leaf off the Oval Office and a meandering president doing touch ups late at night. Its about image with Trump. But the people who made him president intend to take what is ours.

The most recent outrage is the announcement that there will be no national holiday commemorating the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. who advanced civil rights through faith and leadership, and built a powerful nonviolent movement that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Instead, we will celebrate the birthday of Donald the Trump.

One of the most tragic periods in recollection, history will not forget the mean intent and childish actions of a mentally dysfunctional leader installed by a party and minority electorate intent on imposing their warped, racist ideology on all the rest of us. We must resist! Citizens and courts are the last bastions of the Republic. Recall the warning of John Adams when asked the outcome of the Constitutional Congress. “You have a Republic, if you can keep it.”

To me this is the strongest statement of our shared responsibility to be ever vigilant and willing to defend the government that emerged from our founders best ideas. Now, as the jaws of injustice aim to rip asunder both the physical and ideological bulwarks of Freedom and Justice, we must stand up as adults and resist these forces that fool an unwary citizenry through lies and the theft of democratic language to mean its opposite.

Wherever each of us resides, we must be willing to speak truth to power, to correct lies and misleading language. Pick your battles, friends, for such is the multi-pronged attack on American laws, customs and values that there is plenty of room for everyone to choose their cause.

Make no mistake. These are dangerous people running our Republic. Free and fair elections are their next target. If we lose that battle, I fear it will harken the end of our democratic society.

Tolerate no fools. We must be the adults in the room. We must restore our liberties and place our trust in each other to do so justly.

https://open.substack.com/pub/anntelnaes/p/trump-dusting-off-the-old-playbook?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Update: Today’s Substack post from Heather Cox Richardson pay tribute to Rob Reiner and his wife by quoting from the film by Reiner, The American President.

In this clip, the American President speaks to an opponent about character and the requirement of the Office of President which depends of good character. In our current situation, this should be said to the current occupant of the White House Office of the President whose name I shall not utter for he has violated every aspect of character Americans have come to value in their President.

America at 250

“The Declaration was just the beginning.”

“The revolutionary ideas of 1776 and the national framework established in 1787 laid the foundation for America’s story—chapters that continue to shape our nation today. This toolkit gives you everything you need to explore the founding documents and the enduring vision they set in motion.” ~ The National Constitution Center

At the National Constitution Center located in Philadelphia you will find an entire curriculum for 2026 that you can use to explore the history of and the ongoing shaping of our self-government. We the people at every decade have been the force and the protector or our self governing experiment.

Several years ago, I discovered the National Constitution Center and have been an active participant in their programs through the podcasts, the archival papers, and the lively discussions free of politics. Conservative and liberal voices and scholars debate our history, the meaning of our founders’ documents, the functioning of our three branches of government: the checks and balances.

Reader and friends, this is a place of refuge for all the fraught and worried public no matter your political persuasion. Here, we carry on the processes and scholarship that not only defines American but also charges all of us to read and study and debate our current governance.

I’m looking forward to dipping into this curriculum. and I plan a year of focus and study about the American path and promise.