Here it is, July 4, Independence Day, and what is anyone doing about it? The standard patriotic pose is about as genuine as the President's Day White Sale with cartoon characters of Lincoln and Washington hawking kitchen appliances.

I hate to introduce a taboo subject, but this country really needs a revolution. The founding document says, "Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

This is the document these hypocrites like Bush pretend to be sending us to war for. If ever there was a time for revolution, this is it. The abuses of King George may have been worse in theory because it was established in law that he was a king and had power over everyone. But beyond the theory that we are now free, today's Baby Bush has launched more abuses and atrocities against the American people than the king ever did.

In a personal letter, Jefferson went much further than he wrote in the Declaration of Independence. ""God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. . . . And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

Before someone drags me off as a "terrorist" for saying so, let me say that I am serious, but revolution does not have to be bloody like the Russian revolution, or the bloody military coup launched against the democratic government of Chile by Nixon and Kissinger. We have Nelson Mandela as an example now. We have Eastern Europe as an example. We have Ghandi and Martin Luther King as examples. The American people really must restore the republic, reestablish the rule of law and democratic government, but it must be done by adept application of every tool and strategy in the age of smart machines and the information revolution. Guns and bombs are irrelevant, of no use in this struggle. It will take intelligence, and intelligently exercised force.

It's not a struggle of guns or muscle, but a struggle of ideas. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, "We should see the scientific, literary and artistic Zeitgeist declared bankrupt about every 30 years; for during this period the errors contained in it have grown to such proportions as to crush it by the weight of their absurdity, while the opposing view has at the same time been strengthened by them."

We are definitely past the point when the intellectual, legal, historical baggage and sheer inertia of the current social, economic and political structure is beyond the point of manageability, that is for anyone but the tiny minority that is temporarily profiting from the current crisis: the Halliburtons, the Bechtels and all the other corporate giants who are thriving in the current undemocratic, unsensible situation. And they too will be overtaken by the natural forces being unleashed by the environmental catastrophe this civilization is creating.

When you have people like Nancy Pelosi saying that impeachment is just too much of an effort, too much trouble, against a regime of mad criminals like this, you know we are beyond the point where the political system makes any sense or even begins to achieve what it was set up to achieve in regard to the well being of the people. Pelosi -- I love her. She's smart, spunky, classy, articulate, knowledgeable. But what is she talking about? What is she supporting? The right of the status quo to continue no matter how destructive it is to the integrity of the constitutional republic itself? Something is seriously wrong here and these establishment figures really need to shake off the lethargy and look at what is happening, i.e. the destruction of the democratic foundations of the country. This is how serious it is.

In a minute or so, the right to having an abortion will be overturned and the legal basis for civil rights will be reversed and nullified by a block of corrupt thugs who have been placed on the Supreme Court by a usurper who seized and holds power without democratic support. The Supreme Court is now dominated by appointees of criminal presidents like Bush, Bush and Reagan, all of whom worked actively to establish an imperial executive branch that can conduct wars or whatever it wants in defiance of the public, the laws, without even the knowledge of the people.

As Brent Budowsky put it, "The United States Supreme Court is moving to reverse long-cherished American notions of constitutional law." He refers to "a pattern of extreme actions that violate cardinal American ideals on matters including torture, the Geneva Conventions, attacks on the Bill of Rights, presidential assertions of authority to violate statutes with non-binding statements, secrecy of unprecedented scope, the inability of Congress to perform its historic function of preventing executive abuse, and now a bitterly divided Supreme Court that threatens values long thought to be part of our national consensus."

Our lethargic career politicians, servants of corporate America, have stood back and let things degenerate to this point, as the Bush administration has grabbed one handful of power after another, discarded every law and principle of accountability, equality, justice, anything that limits the power of them and the corporate elite they represent. Now it's up to where these people who blatantly put Bush in power in defiance of the whole concept of elections, are going to "legally" nullify everything the constitution has meant in practice over the last two centuries. Are we to stand and let that happen because procedurally they occupy their positions legitimately, even though the criminals who placed them in power were in power illegitimately themselves, and are clearly determined to destroy democracy in America?

Therein lies the rub. That is the crisis of the republic. It is well past time to overthrow the corrupt, rotting order and reestablish a legitimate one. It takes not guns, but determination, clarity, which is something that Nancy Pelosi is not displaying when she commits herself to let the Bush administration get away with whatever it does with no fear of action taken against them. It's crazy, but it's a collective insanity. That is what must be shaken off. There are many, many in the population who have that clarity, few in the political and media classes. It's time they got the message.

Good thing, as Pete Seeger said, there are more of us than them. And in the end, the pen is still mightier than the sword. It really is still a battle of ideas, which is why the raw massive power of the corporate media are such a factor. But even that power is not holding out. As things get worse, more and more people are seeing beyond the bull that constitutes the corporate media diet.

A quote by Willis Harman is empowering. I can't resist bringing it forth one more time: �Throughout history, the really fundamental changes in societies have come about not from dictates of governments and the results of battles but through vast numbers of people changing their minds -- sometimes only a little bit.

�Some of the changes have amounted to profound transformations -- for instance, the transition from the Roman Empire to Medieval Europe, or from the Middle Ages to modern times. Others have been more specific, such as the constitution of democratic governments in England and America, or the termination of slavery as an accepted institution. In the latter cases, it is largely a matter of people recalling that no matter how powerful the economic or political or even military institution, it persists because it has legitimacy, and that legitimacy comes from the perceptions of people. People give legitimacy and they can take it away. A challenge to legitimacy is probably the most powerful force for change to be found in history.

�To the empowering principle that the people can withhold legitimacy, and thus change the world, we now add another: By deliberately changing the internal image of reality, people can change the world. Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are those we believe in.�