Harry Braun

Harry Braun

"Empowering the Majority is Critical"

Introduction

The 2016 Democratic Presidential Campaign of Harry Braun began with his formal registration as a Democratic Presidential Candidate with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), which was verified on May 29, 2015, and the Braun for President Campaign Committee’s registration with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) which was verified on May 28, 2015. Braun’s formal presidential announcement to the American public and the national news media is expected to occur during the month of August 2015 in a video address that will be posted on Facebook and the BraunforPresident.US website after his Wikipedia and Facebook postings are completed.

Braun’s political career began when he ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress in Arizona’s First Congressional District in 1984 against the popular incumbent Congressman John McCain. Braun's objective was to inform the voters of the critical need to shift from an Oil Economy to a solar-sourced Hydrogen Economy, where renewable and pollution-free hydrogen fuel is made from water with electricity from solar technologies.

The World According to Braun

Doug MacEachern, writing for The New Times in Phoenix, Arizona made the following observation of Braun’s campaign in an article titled: “The World According to Braun.” “Wouldn’t it be great to find a candidate for the U.S. Congress who had a solution to all of the catastrophic problems of our day? The list of those problems is long, but let’s look at the top few: impending nuclear holocaust; pollution; (exponential) depletion of energy resources, and economic instability spurred on by vast deficits. A solution to any one of these fearful crises would undoubtedly merit bags full of Nobel prizes for whoever offered it. Well, someone does have a solution. At least he sincerely believes he does. Harry Braun, Democratic opponent of John McCain in District 1, is convinced that his solution – a worldwide conversion to hydrogen power, from power now supplied by fossil fuel and nuclear plants – represents the difference between an idyllic future and doomsday.”

Joel Nilsson wrote in the Arizona Republic, “A key element of Braun’s energy platform is what he calls the “Phoenix Project,” a plan to mass produce hydrogen with electrolysis by using solar power to produce the electricity. . . Liquid hydrogen, when burned produces pure water vapor, and is pollution-free, he said. Braun said that the technology already exists for a hydrogen-based energy system. . . Everything that is now burning fossil fuel will work – and work better – with hydrogen. This is not a technical problem, Braun said. This is a political problem.”

Utopia or Oblivion

Even before studying physics professor Alpert Bartlett’s paper: “The Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis,” published in the American Journal of Physics in 1978.Braun was well aware of the exponential nature of both the problems and the solutions that are evolving simultaneously. Buckminster Fuller, an architect, engineer and mathematician who coined the phrase “Spaceship Earth,” also lectured extensively on power of exponential growth, and in 1970 he wrote a book “Utopia or Oblivion,” which investigated the enormous challenges facing humanity due to the simultaneous exponential growth of both the problems and solutions facing humanity, and the possible technologies that could be developed and deployed to avoid extinction.

Braun was also influenced by Alvin Toffler’s book “Future Shock,” which argued that exponential acceleration and change can and does overwhelm people, leaving them "future shocked.” Toffler wrote that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock, which he also referred to "information overload." Braun was also influenced by "The Immortalist," a book by Alan Harrington that discussed the exponential advances of medical technology and molecular biology that would soon eliminate aging and disease.

Defining Utopia

Given the exponential knowledge and technology explosion that has taken place in every discipline, humanity is indeed on the threshold of both a technological “utopia” of a poison-free and renewable Hydrogen Age, that will enable an era of regenerative molecular medicine that is already reversing aging and disease. A major breakthrough occurred in 2014 with the discovery of a protein called GDF11, which was found to activate the body’s stem cells in order regenerate molecules, cells and tissue. "The discovery that young blood -- and in particular, a single blood protein called GDF11-- can regenerate many organs, was named by Science as one of the ten top breakthroughs of 2014. Furthermore, a key group behind the work—Amy Wagers’ Harvard University stem cell team expects to “shortly” identify the human cells that generate GDF11, she told Bioscience Technology in a recent interview. It was a series of “oh my moments,” Wagers said, when her group, and that of Harvard neurologist Lee Rubin, found that GDF11 can rejuvenate stem and differentiated cells in muscles and brains of old mice—in many ways, including via DNA repair...

Defining Oblivion

However, the doomsday scenario Braun warned about in his 1984 congressional campaign is also now taking place exponentially worldwide. Scientists refer to this “oblivion” scenario as the sixth mass-extinction event in the Earth’s 4-billion-year old history, which is now entering its final exponential stages, where the exponential curves spike sharply upward until they collapse,[3] which means it is almost over. “The smoking gun in these extinctions is very obvious, and it’s in our hands,” co-author Todd Palmer, a biologist at the University of Florida, wrote in an e-mail to The Washington Post.

In 2003, The New York Times reported on scientific paper’s published in Nature on the largest study of its kind, which counted the number of fish in the fisherman’s nets for the past 100 years, determined that over 90 percent of the fish in the global ocean ecosystems had already been lost. The oceans have been used as a toxic chemical dumping ground for many decades. The bees, which pollinate the fruits and vegetables are disappearing, as are the major forests in the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades.

State of Emergency

None of the existing presidential candidates are discussing this global “State of Emergency,” whereas Braun has spent his professional career as a research analyst identifying the technologies that could completely replace the toxic oil and nuclear systems that are making the Earth uninhabitable. Braun worked with senior engineers for more than a decade at the McDonnell Douglas facility in Huntington Beach California, under the supervision of Dr. James Blackmon, Kenneth Stone and the Sandia National Laboratories on the world’s most efficient solar “Dish Stirling” energy conversion system, that was similar to an automobile from a manufacturing perspective. Braun also worked with engineering professor William Heronemus, the former superintendent of ship building for the United States Navy, who developed sea-based “Windship” hydrogen production systems that Heronemus stated could have been built in the 1800's, by simply replacing the sails on the masts with rows of wooden wind turbines, which would produce and store the hydrogen below the water in the ship's hull. Pictures of these windship systems were published by The National Geographic Society in 1975, and in The Washington Post as a result of Braun’s 2004 presidential campaign in Washington D.C..

Braun's 2004 Presidential Campaign

As Washington Post reporter Joel Achenbach wrote: “Eleven of the candidates on the D.C. ballot are Democrats ... Among those running is Harry Braun, the only candidate whose slogan is “Making America Energy Independent & Pollution Free with Windship Hydrogen Production Systems.” “I’m talking about making hydrogen from water,” Braun said in a phone interview Sunday. “President Bush wants to make it from coal and nuclear power. That’s not clean hydrogen, that’s filthy hydrogen, and that’s nonrenewable hydrogen.” The Braun plan is to build “windships,” which he describes as 500 to 1000 feet tall, with the (spherical) “hull” anchored under the sea just off the coast. A large mast would hold wind turbines. A crew, below water, would run the machinery to convert ocean water to liquid hydrogen. Each windship would cost (approximately) $10 million. How many of these enormous windships would Braun need? “About a million,” he said. The project would cost $6 trillion total, in his estimation.

Braun participated in a Presidential Candidates Forum in 2004 in New Hampshire that was covered by C-Span

Braun’s second Presidential Campaign in 2012

Given President Obama was unopposed in 2012, Braun and his wife Dorothy made an effort to run as a Democratic alternative to Obama, but neither the Democratic party officials Iowa or New Hampshire or the major newspapers or television news networks would acknowledge Braun’s campaign, in spite of his new focus on passing a Democracy Amendment he had written that would empower the majority of citizens to approve all laws, legislation, presidential executive orders and judicial decisions that impact the majority of citizens. However, the University newspapers and television reporters did cover Braun’s campaign.

An Editorial by The Daily Iowan included the following observations: Democratic presidential candidate Harry Braun’s solution to the nation’s problems is a constitutional amendment only 26 words long: “We the people, hereby empower the majority of American citizens to approve all federal legislation, executive orders and judicial decisions that affect the majority of citizens.” Enacting this as the 28th Amendment would effectively institute a direct democracy in the United States, allowing the citizens to directly vote on all legislation that has gone through the Congress. Braun’s Democracy Amendment . . . should be considered as a way to empower the American people to beat back our entrenched citizen apathy.

“We have never been a democracy,” Braun told the DI Editorial Board Tuesday, “We are a republic.” This is true: The American legislature is representative, and American citizens have no direct way of proposing or approving legislation. Braun’s democracy amendment would change that. Congress would still write laws, he said, but every law would face a referendum by the citizens; in other words, no major change would occur in the country unless it was supported by a majority of the public. Braun is correct about the increased need for democracy in this country, and the popular discounting of direct democracy as valid political procedure is unfair. (Note Switzerland has had a constitutional democracy since the year 1291.) …

The vision of a democracy is that the people, sufficiently educated and invested, are capable of governing themselves. This is fundamentally opposed to conceptions of elitist rule, including those advanced by (some of) America’s Founding Fathers. …“By the rules that I define as a democrat, we don’t have any democrats,” Braun said. We have republicans who call themselves Democrats, but if you look at the way our government works, it’s not of the people by the people.” That’s a shame. And Braun’s idea, while radical, is a welcome addition to the popular discourse.

Braun’s initial awareness of the mass extinction event came from the Earth Day coverage in the 1970’s when he was an undergraduate student at Arizona State University, and since that time he has been focused on, and planning for, this fossil fuel and nuclear-induced chemical contamination and climate change chaos that is now inevitable. But Braun’s analysis from reading The New York Times for many decades is that U.S. national security priorities serve the financial interests of what Braun refers to as the “Oil Industrial complex" which includes the oil-owned pharmaceutical corporations, the major Wall Street Banks, and network news corporations. And now the latest Oil Wars in Iraq and Ukraine, which are also for the benefit of corporations that include Halliburton, Exxon and Chevron, are continuing, where the bombs being dropped daily are tipped with depleted uranium-238, a highly-toxic isotope that has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Once the bomb is detonated, the u-238 isotopes are pulverized into nanoparticles, which will then be picked up by the wind and blown worldwide, due to the immutable laws of physics that are referred to as "diffusion," which occurs every time cream is poured into coffee.

Given this unprecedented chaos, Braun believes a key component of the solution can be found in Article V of the U.S. Constitution.

The Article V Democracy Amendment

Article V of the U.S. Constitution is a relatively short paragraph that deals with amendments, and after a careful reading, Braun noticed language that clearly empowers the majority of citizens to bypass the Congress and State Legislatures, in order to both pass and ratify amendments in what are referred to as “Constitutional Conventions.” Given this insight, Braun has organized his 2016 presidential campaign as a Constitutional Convention that is specifically focused on the ratification of the 28-word Democracy Amendment he has written and proposed on the Democracy Amendment USA.net website, which reads as follows: “We the People, hereby empower the majority of American citizens to approve all laws, federal legislation, presidential executive orders, and judicial decisions that impact the majority of citizens."

While most Americans assume the United States is already a Democracy, one only needs to consult a dictionary to know that the USA is, and always has been, a lobbyists-based Republic, which is directly responsible for the completely unnecessary contamination and destruction of the Earth’s global ocean ecosystems and atmosphere, which is a major factor of the mass-extinction event now taking place. As such, Harry Braun believes it is imperative for the majority of Americans to “take action now” to ratify the 28-word Democracy Amendment he has proposed with the Article V Citizen Ballot that can be downloaded from the DemocracyAmendmentUSA.net website as a verifiable paper ballot. Once the Article V ballot is filled out by a registered voter, it can then be sent to their Secretary of State where the ballots can be verified, counted and archived. And as per Article V of the U.S. Constitution, when the majority of citizens in 38 states send in their ballots, the amendment will be ratified. And given such a paper-ballot voting system is convenient and completely verifiable, one can only wonder why all voting in the U.S. is not accomplished in this way.

It is important to note that none of the national U.S. elections in recent years have been verifiable, and few Americans actually know who is counting the vast majority of the votes. It is not the federal or state governments that count the votes in public, but a private corporation, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), which has approximately 4,500 localities in 42 states that sell computer voting systems that allows ES&S to count the easily hacked computer votes in secret, and then announces the results. This brings to mind a quote from Joseph Stalin, “It’s not the voters who count, but who counts the votes.”

The Universal Mind

Once the majority is in charge, which Braun refers to as a “universal mind” of over 250 million citizens, they will then be the new United States Citizens Congress, who will use their paper ballot’s to determine who the next President and Vice President shall be, and how long they shall serve. Thus if a candidate says one thing in a campaign and then does the opposite after he or she is elected, they can be easily replaced by the majority. Thus elected officials will serve at long as they have the support of the majoritythe pleasure of the majority. And in the event the majority elects Harry Braun as their first democratic President, he will recommend on day one that the majority of citizens authorize him to make such destructive fishing practices, as well as any chemical contamination of the oceans illegal, and that such fishing regulations should be enforced by the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Navy. And if any ship is caught violating the U.S. regulations, it will be seized and the crew fined and arrested.

This amendment will transfer all political power from elected officials and the lobbyists who bribe them, to the majority of registered voters who will be empowered to approve all laws and judicial decisions that impact the majority, which Braun refers to a "universal mind" of over 250 million people, who will then be able to end government secrecy and bribery, as well as the existing drug laws, which Braun alleges clearly violate Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the first Amendment, while replacing all toxic fossil and nuclear fuels and chemicals with modularized wind, cannabis and other solar-sourced hydrogen-powered energy and economic systems.

The United States Citizens Congress

Millions of high-quality jobs will be created in such a reindustrialization effort, that will affect all existing vehicles, aircraft, appliances and power plants that will be modified to use the hydrogen fuel. And since the solar hydrogen production systems have been in use for over 200 years, they are in the public domain, like the technology in Hoover Dam, which means the trillions of dollars in annual hydrogen energy sales will go to the U.S. Treasury rather than private energy corporations. With such annual revenue, taxes on the middle class will be dramatically reduced – or eliminated – by the new United States Citizens Congress, while still allowing the new democratic government to finance the mass-production of wind and hydrogen-powered “Lifeboat” and larger “Arcology Ark” indoor food production systems in every community.

Lifeboat Food Production Systems

Such indoor food production systems have been used for three decades in Denmark’s most severe winters, and if they are powered by off-grid, modularized wind-powered hydrogen production systems, they will be able to operate in spite of the climate chaos, while creating millions of high-quality jobs by producing poison-free food and fuel in every community. This would be a dramatic improvement over the existing refined sugar junk foods now being consumed that that are causing epidemics of obesity and disease.

Details are in the book “Wheat Belly” by William Davis, M.D., who states that wheat is “among the most consumed grains on earth, . . . but it has changed dramatically in the past fifty years under the influence of agricultural scientists. . . and small changes in wheat protein structure can spell the difference between a devastating immune response to wheat protein verses no immune response at all.” And “despite dramatic changes in the genetic makeup of the wheat and other crops, no animal or human safety testing was conducted on the new genetic strains that were created. Test animals fed glyphosate-tolerant soybeans (known as Roundup Ready) show alterations in liver, pancreatic, intestinal and testicular tissue compared to animals fed conventional soybeans.” The wind hydrogen technologies require no research and development and are pictured on Braun's Phoenix Project Foundation.US website.

Harry Braun’s Personal Background

Braun was born November 6, 1948 in Compton, California and he and his wife Dorothy now reside in Canton, Georgia. He is a graduate of Arizona State University, and the founder of his company, Mesa Wind LLC, a wind project development company. Braun is the founder and senior scientist of the Phoenix Project Foundation, a non-profit 501-C3 organization that is based on Braun’s Phoenix Project book that was initially published in 1990 and again in 2000, which deals with the interrelationships of exponential growth, molecular biology, photobiology (i.e., the biological impact of sunlight on humans and other animals), regenerative medicine and Braun’s 5-year Phoenix Project plan to shift from an energy and economic system based on oil, coal and other highly-toxic and unsustainable fossil and nuclear fuels, to a wind and solar-sourced “hydrogen economy” that is both poison-free and inexhaustible.