Democracy is about empathy — caring about your fellow citizens, which leads to the principles of freedom and fairness for all. Empathy requires both personal and social responsibility. The ethic of excellence means making the world better by making yourself better, your family better, your community better, and your nation better. Government has two moral missions: protection and empowerment for all. To carry them out, government must be by, for, and of the people.  

From George Lakoff in the Huffington Post

A government that cannot carry out those missions of protection and empowerment begets failed states, like Somalia, Afghanistan, Haiti and possibly California.  War, poverty and earthquakes are not the threat, California is threatened by a few who believe that government should be for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many.  Loopholes and giveaways that cannot be closed or stopped allow a few to take far more than a fair share while California is ripped with budget cuts that are moving the California we love toward a failed state.  

One third plus one of either houses of the state legislature currently can veto any budget or revenue legislation – and they do, refusing to consider any new sources of revenue including closing loopholes and ending giveaways.  They want to privatize California and run it like a business for the benefit of a few.  The purpose of a business is profit for the owners – the purpose of government is protection and empowerment.  These two purposes are contradictory and are in conflict.

Californians for democracy will not standby and let California fail.  We will put a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November 2010 that says

“All legislative action on revenue and budget must be determined by majority vote.”  The California Democracy Act will change the California Constitution in two places – replacing “two thirds” with “a majority” one for revenue the other for budget.  Over 700,000 signatures of Californians who are registered to vote are needed to put it on the ballot.  This is your chance to change California history.

The petition is now available at www.CA4Democracy.com, both in the 4 signature version (14″ x 8.5″ legal sized) that we have been using and a single signature version (11″ x 8.5″ letter size).  These petitions can be downloaded, printed, signed and mailed.

In order to make this campaign go viral it is important that you help by telling everyone you know in California to go to www.CA4Democracy.com and get the petition.  

1. Email all the Californians on your email list and tell them to similarly forward the email.  Make sure the email has the website in it.

2. Write on your facebook wall and those of your friends & groups with the same message.

3. Find blogs that mention the California budget crisis or similar topics and leave a comment telling readers that they can do something about this issue by signing the petition and helping it go viral.  The best way to do this is to write a short comment in Word and then paste the same message in all the blogs you can find.

4. Look for letters to the editor opportunities and mention the website every time.

5. Those of you who Tweet – please drive your listeners to the website.

6. Become a circulator of petitions or more involved with the campaign, visit  the website.