Declaration of Necessity

Article I

The Truth

We still hold these truths to be self-evident. That all people are created equal, that they are naturally endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among people, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Governance becomes destructive to 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.

The American Shareholder Amendment is an act of prudence. We choose to alter this government. The necessity for this choice is driven by a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursued not by a foreign crown but by a domestic confederacy of governors and extractors who have together made the citizen the resource and the country the vein.

Article II

The Indictment

The transmission is mechanical and it is now visible. The leveraged-buyout firm purchases the necessity — the hospital, the housing tract, the nursing home, the local paper — on borrowed money secured against the asset itself, then strips the asset to service the debt and pay the fee. The asset-management complex holds the index of every public company it also lobbies, and votes the shares of the citizen's own retirement against the citizen's own wage. The money-center bank underwrites both ends of the transaction and clips the spread. The donor class funds the campaigns of the regulators in waiting; the regulators draft the rules; the rules are enforced by the agency staff who will be hired, on departure, by the regulated. The revolving door is not a metaphor; it is the mechanism. Public office has been converted into private toll, and the toll is collected on every necessity a citizen must purchase to live.

To prove this, let the facts be submitted to a candid people.

The citizen was right. The memory is accurate. The theft was real, and it was carried out by the same hands now urging the citizen to forget. What follows is the record.

• They have converted shelter into speculation, until the house a family lived in for forty years became an instrument the family could no longer afford to inhabit.
• They have converted care into extraction, until the hospital in the next county was shuttered not because the community no longer needed it, but because its closure paid better than its operation.
• They have converted the credential into the debt-trap, indenturing a generation of young Americans for the privilege of qualifying for work that no longer pays the loan.
• They have converted the pension into the lottery, shifting the promise of a dignified retirement onto the citizen's own shoulders, and taxing the citizen's savings on the way through.
• They have shipped the country's tools and the country's industries to its adversaries, broken the chain of skill that passed from one working generation to the next, hollowed the towns that built the republic, and called this efficiency.
• They have permitted a financial layer to multiply between the citizen and every necessity — between the worker and the wage, between the patient and the medicine, between the renter and the roof — and to charge a toll at every crossing.
• They have permitted the regulator to become the employee of the regulated, until the agencies established to police extraction became its instrument.
• They have permitted the courts to be closed against the citizen by clauses the citizen never read, and the record of pattern abuse to be sealed against the public upon whom the abuse was practiced.
• They have permitted private capital to purchase the public square, the public press, and the algorithms that decide which Americans are heard, and called this freedom of speech.
• They have permitted both parties of the governing duopoly to compete for the favor of the same donors, to debate the same false questions, to deliver the same outcome, and called this democracy.
• They have told the citizen that the theft was the citizen's fault — in every department of government and through every season of administration — that the citizen's wages were lazy, the citizen's debts irresponsible, the citizen's memory of a country that worked a sentimentality.
• They have criminalized poverty itself, processing the poor through fee systems that turned destitution into city revenue, until the unpaid parking ticket became the warrant, and the warrant became the eviction.
• They have hollowed the local press, until the citizen who once knew what their county commission was doing was reduced to a spectator of national outrage, trained to feel about distant things they could not affect in place of acting on near things they could.
• They have permitted the patenting of life itself — of seeds bred by ten thousand years of farmers' work, of genes found in the bodies of citizens, of medicines paid for out of the public purse — and charged the public a toll at the pharmacy counter for what the public funded twice.
• They have converted the prison into an extraction industry, charging the prisoner for their confinement, the family for their phone call, the released for the supervision of their freedom, until the political constituency for filling the prisons became those who profit from them being full.
• They have inventoried the data of children as capital before those children could read, training the systems that would later set the terms of their adult lives — against them, in markets they were never told existed.
• They have armed the local police with the equipment of foreign wars, until the citizen on their own street confronted the gear sent home from the warzones to which their children had been deployed, and the line between peace officer and occupying soldier was erased without a vote.
• They have auctioned the foreign policy of the republic to the makers of munitions, whose continued profit requires the perpetual manufacture of enemies, whose lobbyists draft the budgets that buy the weapons, and who recruit for those wars from the towns whose factories they closed.
• They have stopped teaching the republic's own history — the structure of its government, the reasoning of its founders, the precedents of its self-correction — until a generation that could not name its rights could not defend them, and civic illiteracy became the precondition for every further dispossession.
• They have converted human attention into harvested commodity, surveilling the citizen's reading, their conversation, their location, their heart rate, the trajectory of their thumb across glass, and selling these into markets the citizen never entered for purposes the citizen was never told.
• They have engineered human desire on industrial scale, tuning platforms and food and gambling and pharmaceutical advertising against measured biological response, until the citizen's capacity to govern their own appetite was treated as a market inefficiency to be solved at the citizen's expense.
• They have corrupted science itself with their sponsors' money, suppressing findings against tobacco, against fossil carbon, against opioid prescription, against ultra-processed food, against the chemicals in the water and the soil, until the citizen could not trust that what was published represented what was known.
• They have priced the formation of a family beyond a working wage — housing beyond family formation, debt against the unborn child's adulthood, medical bills attached to the act of giving birth, daycare priced past the second income required to afford it — until the question of whether young Americans could afford to become parents was answered, at scale, in the negative.
• They have taken the land from those who work it, consolidating farms into the holdings of pension funds and foreign sovereigns, until the family farm became a museum exhibit and the ecological knowledge of generations of stewardship was extinguished in one generation of consolidation.
• They have privatized the commons in every form — water, seed, spectrum, the genetic record of life on the continent, the maps of the land itself — selling to private parties what the citizens held together, on terms the citizens never approved, in transactions the citizens were never shown.
• They have made the closing years of an American life the final extraction event of the American economy, warehousing the elderly in facilities owned by private equity, staffed below the level dignity requires, financed by the methodical depletion of every saving the elder ever made.
• They have made the work of caring for the young, the sick, and the old the worst-paid labor in the country, while the work of moving capital became the best-paid, and trained two generations of capable Americans to choose the second over the first.
• They have used every emergency to ratchet permanent power — war powers, surveillance powers, financial-emergency powers — each declared crisis enlarging the standing capacity of the executive, no subsequent return to normalcy ever giving back what the emergency had taken, until the citizen lived under permanent provisional authority and the rule was written by exception.