Our country was founded by a revolution. Yet the notion, in America, that our government must be replaced is a curiously rare one. The Republican Party can steal power, but it never occurs to ordinary citizens to steal it back.

Activists, throughout the eras of Clinton and Bush, could and did produce a steady, systemic, and seemingly endless litany of the number of ways in which the American people--along with the rest of the world--were being robbed and in many cases terrorized by a fundamentally and steadily more undemocratic form of government, a corporate-controlled plutocracy that now dominates public policy across the planet.

Regardless, in the US, almost completely without exception, serious activists and organizers focus on reforms--and sometimes dizzyingly trivial reforms at that. Not only many people in the United States, but most people in the world are being disenfranchised by a stunningly exploitative economic system. That system also threatens such fundamental changes to the planets' biosphere that life on earth could itself be threatened.

Most of those public policies have been championed, if not originated, by the United States government. They operate directly against the self-interest of most US citizens, who never approved them (or approved them without being fully informed of their consequences). It is truly taxation without representation--and government as a menace. Yet the word "revolution" is generally confined to a few sectarian nut cases. It connotes, in America, either a quaint and foolish notion of '60s anti-war radicals, or a militia nut's flatly impossible fantasy--the violent overthrow of the best armed and most violent regime in world history.

Curiously, we have all lived through an era of instance after instance in which some of the world's most repressive governments have been brought down, essentially nonviolently. There have literally been dozens since 1989. But we see these as curiosities or historical flukes--not lessons and inspirations from the overthrow of Communist and Third World despots that will help inform the even bigger First World task that lies ahead.

The Bush team is calmly enabled by the Democratic Party, which is mainly only too happy to cooperate or only offer token resistance to the rapaciousness of people who are literally employing millions of surrogates in their single-minded pursuit of practices that will enrich them, enslave us, and, eventually, destroy life on our planet. Many of us know that our government doesn't answer to us--that both major parties are fundamentally corrupt. Less widespread, but widely suspected, is the reality that neither party will ever willingly allow America's globally destructive course to be meaningfully altered. It will require a change in the structure of American government that, quite simply, removes them from power.

The scale of our problems, locally and globally, demand so much more than letter-writing campaigns and a few hundred people holding pointless rallies in scattered cities that most concerned citizens recognize these actions as--at best--dike-plugging activities, and--at worst--sheer folly and naivete.

What we need is not "a plan" so much as an enormous movement--a movement with the determination and self-discipline of a military or corporation but the love of an extended family, a movement dedicated to inserting family, community, and environmental values into economic and political decisions, and dedicated to creating genuinely democratic self-government for all peoples--including ourselves. For one weekend, during FTAA, the militance of what that sort of movement must look like (and the reaction it will necessarily provoke from the police state) was on display--on a small scale, in Quebec and a few other places.

In much of the world, such demands already exist--but they have been largely flattened by the political and social engineering of the American juggernaut, a juggernaut that can only be weakened--and then dismantled--from within.

This is the scale we need to start building for. We must stop thinking about the Endangered Species Act, or the War on Drugs, or the Pentagon budget, or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or the prison-industrial complex, as isolated issues. We must start thinking about toppling the system that makes these and countless other issues so frightful, and that will generate far more destructive initiatives than our weak, fragmented responses can ever address.

When I am holding a stick and waving it to keep it away from my dog, she does not lunge for the stick to get it; she goes for my hand. We need to go for America's arm, its body, its head.

How can we do this? I'm only one person, and others with far more wisdom and experience can doubtless contribute much to this discussion. Here's where I would start:

Defining the problem for mainstream America:

1) Ridiculing George W. Bush's syntax and alleged stupidity is fun, but it-- and he--aren't the problem. The system is. Identify Bush's undemocratic policies, the backgrounds and conflicts of interests of his employees, cronies, and financial backers, and their comprehensive dishonesty to and contempt for the American people. Start where the public is; tie the corporate state mentality to local issues that your community cares about; I guarantee there are links.

2) Don't beg the Democratic Party to provide opposition. They are not the opposition, any more than when the Yankees play the Red Sox, the Red Sox are opposed to baseball. They are participating in, and benefitting from, the same government structure that is screwing us.

3) Don't focus on the "bad" policies so much as a "bad" system: one that removes public policy decision-making from communities and even whole countries. Tell stories of comprehensive corruption, steadily getting worse and offering steadily less recourse for ordinary citizens, regardless of who is "in office" at any particular time.

4) Remind people not only that George W. Bush is carrying out destructive policies while not even winning a majority of votes cast, not only that they in many cases contradicted his campaign promises, not only that Clinton did the same things (and Bush senior, and Reagan), not only that a majority of Americans don't even participate in elections, but that our choices are artificially narrowed for us, and that the vast majority of possible public policy options are never discussed or proposed by any of the tiny handful of individuals allowed to meaningfully compete for state or federal office.

5) Focus on the fact--this is where right-wingers have appropriated a genuinely appropriate populist issue--that our unrepresentative government is forcibly taxing us to enrich themselves and especially their backers. The American government, at home and globally, has become an enforcement mechanism by which the wealth and labor of almost all of the world's citizens (and a vast majority of those in the US) are being stolen for the benefit of a few.

6) Most people in the US believe in the stated ideals of this country-- freedom, democracy, self-determination. Again, right-wingers use this language, but they are issues for everyone. This is what we and all of the world's citizens want--and not just the individuals but the very structure of the US government is now serving to rob us of these things.

7) Communicate the urgency as well as the scope of the problem. Not in the sense of blaring headlines and inflamed rhetoric, but in the sense of irreversibility. As the world becomes a village, global environmental problems, death, destruction and misery will increasingly be mirrored in the lives of most Americans as well.

8) Emphasize, ultimately, that while radical change is needed in the service of the future and of worthy, lofty ideals, it is most urgently needed out of all of our self-interest. Now.

Defining the direction in which government should go: We should, as I mentioned, embrace those ideals most people identify as the professed ideals of America. But to get those, we must change America's form of government-- avoiding ideological labels, because we are creating something completely new--so that:

1) communities and local jurisdictions have far more self-determination;

2) governments at all levels are allowed to exist only at the size that allows them to serve the interests of all citizens--not just elites, and especially not themselves;

3) public policy at all levels has incentives to incorporate human, humane, and radically sensible environmental values in its economic and legal decisions;

4) corporations have fewer, not more, rights than people, particularly regarding criminal and civil liability and the ability to move freely among different jurisdictions (including national boundaries);

5) the wealthy--who benefit far more from government services as they are now defined than anyone else--either get taxed at a higher level more proportionate to the benefits they receive, receive fewer benefits, or some combination, and in any case are no longer allowed to have a greater influence in public policy decisions than anyone else; and

6) the United States cannot enter into international agreements in which it has a greater structural capacity to influence decisions than another sovereign nation.

How do we achieve this?

1) Keep focused on the big picture.

2) Mobilize people, not Republicans or Democrats.

3) Don't marginalize ourselves. We are the majority; the people in control of our government are not.

4) There are 3,072 counties in the US. Target them. In community after community, focus on local organizing, promoting ideas that improve people's daily lives, and raising money for both the creation of alternative institutions, businesses, and media, and for further organizing and ways of supporting people who dedicate themselves to overthrowing the government. Do this in a way that respects local autonomy and issues but pulls toward a common national (and global) goal. Embrace--don't reject--diverse tactics. Focus on goals and tasks--not process, subcommittees, and grandiose points of unity.

5) Focus on individual issues that are winnable, and capable of motivating large numbers of people toward the larger goal.

6) Become ungovernable. It's not that hard. We cooperate with our destruction in a thousand ways--from the way we do our jobs to the taxes we pay to how (and if) we spend our money to whether we physically allow the business of the state to proceed unmolested. They can't control us unless we let them.

Do not underestimate this; it will be difficult, and there will be blood (though far less than in people's traditional conception of revolution). Power never gives up without a fight. The object is not to seize centralized power, but to dismantle it, so that we all have some. A sustained refusal to be oppressed is actually far easier in a country with this much wealth than it was in country after country, where--recently--such revolutions overthrew tyranny, successfully and with relatively little bloodshed.

These are only one person's ramblings; different points can be argued, praised, condemned, refined. The message is that this type of thinking is now essential. Revolution is not only necessary, but possible. Let's get to it.