A letter that was authored by:

Martin Zehr

Green Party Member
As Wall Street holds our pensions and 401(k)s hostage, we need to develop a tactic as effective as theirs. It is overdue for us to express our outrage in an effective way. We have our own assets in this economy. We bring the millions of dollars in stock investments, bank deposits, home mortgages and certificates to the table. Too often, we suffer by hesitating until it’s too late to act. We passively watch our pensions and 401(k) devalued by speculation on the stock market by money market funds. We sit by and listen to Congress tell us how difficult things will be if we don’t throw $1 trillion dollars to fix real estate prices. Now that the bailout was passed and signed, our children will be hit with new punches aimed at Social Security, a public education, public infrastructures, and any semblance of economic stability for the future.

There is an old saying that “what goes around comes around”. Failing to protect OUR economic interests results in no health care, mortgage foreclosures, homelessness, unemployment, public education that is getting worse and worse every year, no economic security and no political representation of our views. Fear of hard times is something that only paralyzes us and keeps us from acting decisively and collectively.

Those of us who have lived in hard times and are living in hard times need to knuckle up to the challenge. We have lived during good times and bad times individually with various degrees of effectiveness. If we want to stop being marginalized we need to work together for common goals and find new ways to make our views effectively demonstrated.

If our weapons of choice are economic, we have an opportunity to reverse the scenario. Right now we are being held hostage by Wall Street. Our very homes, children and retirement are being held hostage. If we are paralyzed by fear, we become like a deer frozen in a spotlight. If we act now and on in a mass action, we put our chips on the table.

So, what can we do? The investment bankers speculated with our money and our homes. They are losing in their high risk gambles but none of their losses are theirs to begin with. They are taking our homes and depleting our pension funds and 401(k)s. They are depriving us and our children of Social Security and health care and education by increasing the budget deficit.

Our chips are things of value to us. We have money in the bank. We have homes. We have to act before we lose them. Yet, the greatest fear out there is a run on the banks. Why? Because the commercial banks fear it the most, it becomes our most potent weapon. Our fear is losing our homes, being unemployed or becoming homeless. We can get the money from the banks. We SHOULD get the money from the banks. It is ours and if we wait too long the message will not be heard.

Take our cash and make a dash. This is a simple but a dynamic force in becoming heard with total clarity. If we are to go through hard times, so be it. But we will never be heard until we act to be heard. Withdrawing our deposits at banks will not deny us of the cash we need for the future. It will simply provide us with the economic leverage that we need to demonstrate our dissatisfaction. Withdrawing our pensions and 401 (k)s is a double edged issue, that will cost us in 20% or more of what is in the fund. But, we can wait for the stock market to go up again, but we should avoid playing games and expecting the economy to get rosier. Many of us have no health care already so we cannot lose that. We are already losing our schools and Social Security remains on the chopping block in the future.

It’s time to get off our knees and start acting together. It’s time for us to act in ways that will have an impact. Let’s stop agreeing with those who do not have our best interests in mind. Let’s show that WE are here and will not be invisible in their debates over our lives and our children’s lives. Take our cash out of the banks and cast your vote. Take the cash out of the banks and make our public officials listen to us. Stand up and don’t be cowed by the very uncertainty that Wall Street and Congress would have us live with.

Tags: activism, citizens, corporatism, crimes, economics, power, third parties
Categories: Commentary, Economics, Power, Third Parties, activism
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An Article by:

Russell Cole

Bad for Democracy is scheduled for publication in September of 2008

In order to ascertain the significance of the thesis propounded by Dana D. Nelson in her manuscript, Bad for Democracy, it is useful to first characterize the way in which American democracy is perceived according to the collective representations, instructing the political understandings possessed by the preponderance of Americans.

American mythology instructs us that the composition and ratification of the Constitution serve as historical markers for the solidification of American democracy. According to this narrative, prior to the Revolution, there was a growing democratic fervor. Ultimately, this ground swelling of radical democratic sentiment resulted in a rebellion against Monarchy and colonialism. Following the independence of the American Colonies, the devotion to democratic ideals continued; albeit, in a form that was reckless and unsustainable due to its unmanageability. As a consequence, the Founders of the Nation saw fit to innovate a political structure that both manifested democratic principles as well as a state with a workable governability. From there on, as this orthodox history suggests, the Nation was set along a course leading to the continual improvement of its democratic fixtures.

In contradiction to this grand mythology, Nelson provides us with a concise – although thorough – counter-narrative that expresses aspects to American historicity that run in opposition to the premises underlying the standard master-narrative. Central to her thesis is the recognition that the historical trends in American politics have not conformed to a trajectory headed toward an increasingly enhanced democratic embodiment. As Nelson quite correctly indicates, the practice of radical democracy and the cultural attributes with which it is associated – those behavioral habits that dispose the citizenry so that they take an active role in the ongoing affairs of government – had a more complete expression during the Colonial epoch than in subsequent periods of American history.

With the ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of a centralized office wielding executive powers, a trend was set in motion that is comparable to the political transformation undergone by the Roman Republic during the Roman Revolution. That is, similarly to the Roman Emperor, whose ascendancy to power was associated with popular land reform, the Presidency in American governance has been interpreted as a political mechanism offering representation to the populous. Presidentialism, as Nelson terms it – which is defined as the stature that has been infused into the semiology attached to the conception of the High Office – has been, from its inception, increasingly interpreted as a vehicle for the realization of the popular will in the body of public policy.

Even more, the concept of Presidency has acquired a semantic value, adding to the concept a latent notion of paternalism. We, as citizens, are all too willing to submit to this parental authority; not only during times of uncertainly, peril, and calamity, but during times unmarked by social drama, because we see him as the personification of the democracy that we collectively form as Americans. When the President appears powerful and impacting, we relish his strong paternal presence because we conflate it with our collective contributions, as citizens, to American polity.

However, it is precisely this quality that is assigned to the Presidency – an attribution that causes the Presidential incumbent to be perceived not simply as the outcome of democratic process, but as the carrier of the vitality belonging to the body politic – that contributes to the cultivation of behavioral dispositions, rendering the citizenry democratically disinclined. We confuse our ability to engage in a ritualized affair – where we cast a single vote that infinitesimally affects the outcome of a Presidential Election – with the operations of a functioning democracy. This illusion is propagated by the growing authoritarianism of the Presidency – which reinforces the prejudice that voting in Presidential Elections somehow epitomizes democratic civic engagement.

As Nelson adeptly points out, democracy is more than mere electoral politics. For a political order to be democratic, public policy must be determined through the direct deliberative participation of the citizenry. The Republican Romans, for instance, indeed had elected officials. Furthermore, the aristocrats in the Republic formed the Senate. Nevertheless, only through passage in the House of Plebes could legislation be enacted. Although the Republican Romans possessed intermediaries between the state and the public, such as the Senate who could advise and consent, the commoners, whose votes were organized according to tribes, remained politically empowered through their ability to directly legislate.

Democracy, in order for it to exist in America, must take on similar attributes to those instantiated by the Roman Republic. Americans must learn to acknowledge that the unilateralism of the Presidency is antithetical to democratic organization. Democracy is a messy affair; one that involves an ongoing public dialog conducted in an effort to arrive at new compromises among shifting factions. Democracy is not a political condition whereby a “Decider,” as Nelson mocks, is endowed with solitary authority over pertinent matters of state.

The Populist Party of America has already adopted a platform that calls for political decentralization, with the intention to effect a condition conducive to what we have coined, localized democracy. We realized that through the political empowerment of local communities – a state of affairs that can be hypothetically achieved through the decentralization of government – the political influence of individuals can be amplified; thus, accentuating the motivations of ordinary people to participate in the dealings of their municipal polities.

People will become more politically conscious and politically engaged because, within the context of municipal affairs, their participations can have demonstrable consequences upon the public policies that bare the closest immediacy to the Lifeworlds that they inhabit. In other words, the impact that can be had through participation of people in localized democracy will seem more concrete and more relevant and, therefore, more worthy of their sustained interests and their persisting efforts.

In the prescriptions she lays out for a democratic revival, Nelson appears to have unknowingly joined Populist America’s activist chorus. She recommends political decentralization. Even more, Nelson introduces the verbiage, leaderless democracy, in order to designate an organizational state that is comparable to the networked politics that I had summarized in earlier writings that examined a developing theory of democracy, which has been labeled by members of open source software communities as Extreme Democracy:

http://www.midwest-populistamerica.com/articles/theories-of-extreme-democracy/; http://www.extremedemocracy.com/.

Despite the lack of originality marking the recommendations included under the breadth of the normative section belonging to Nelson’s work, she does provide a valuable survey of the various trends in Computer Mediated Communications that are not only leading to a new paradigm of democratic organization, but to a larger intellectual phenomenon that should be considered a new episteme.

The emergence of social knowledge – facilitated through the device of web based communications – is generally characterized as decentralized modalities of content authoring and editing. Wiki platforms, such as the Wikipedia, are demonstrative of this understanding of knowledge and the processes through which knowledge is most effectively constructed. In the spaces generated by the Wikipedia, anybody can contribute to the creation of content by either authoring original materials or editing the materials already published on the platform.

Although there lacks a sufficient amount of studies to draw generalizations with certainty, preliminary studies, such as the one conducted by Nature, have compared the Wikipedia with traditional reference publications, such as Britannica, and have found the rates of errata between the two respective reference materials closer than one would probably suspect. Additionally, the Wikipedia, in comparison to Britannica, possesses a far greater amount of materials devoted to a broader range of topics. Further, due to its decentralized editing process, it takes less time for the Wikipedia to correct its errata than it does for publications, such as Britannica, that follow a traditional workflow process.

All of these developing social formations fall under the extension of the concept, Web 2.0: web platforms that are devoted to collaborative knowledge building conducted by a community of interlocutors. This new form of sociability suggests that radical democracy – a state that is, oftentimes, embodied by Web 2.0 communities – is not only a deontological ideal – a social condition that we should strive to foster, because it is inherently desirable – but a form of social organization that is pragmatically endowed.

In order to understand why social knowledge produces knowledge constructs on a scale that supersedes in volume and quality the knowledge built from traditional social institutions, such as the Academe, it is illuminative to first explore the precepts that support the epistemic prejudices associated with High Modernity and the Academe:

Political centralization, according to its interpretation under the lens of the new social knowledge understanding of knowledge, is a relic belonging to the social condition marked by industrial capitalism: a myriad of interdependent industrial productions that require homogeneity in order for there to be the predictability that is necessary for the various manufacturing outputs to be interoperable with one another. What is more, industrial capitalism calls for cultural uniformity, in order to effect a state wherein the activities of labor can be integrated into the system of interdependent industrial functions that collectively comprise the modes of production; a social organization that requires social agents, serving a labor, to react in predictable ways when operating as cogs in the machineries constituting the modes of production. Following this logic, organizations must possess an executive authority, under which all other offices and capacities are integrated, in order to ensure their synchrony. In short, they must all fall under a unified command structure.

The paradigm of centralized organization continues to reign dominant in contemporaneity. Nonetheless, this centralized model of social organization is not necessarily the most efficient or effective. Whether we are to compare a starfish to a spider; Native American Apaches to the Aztec or the Incas - decentralized structures are proving to be more resilient and adaptable.

Nelson refers to the popular work, The Starfish and the Spider, authored by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, who point out that leaderless organizations – similarly to the starfish and the Apaches – cannot be destroyed by annihilating a single component of their structures. Contrarily, in a case of spiders and in the case of the Native American empires, the organisms can be killed by simply targeting their central nervous systems – or, specifically in these cases, the head of the spider and the metropolises, belonging respectively to the Aztec and to the Inca.

The challenge for the reader is to understand how these properties, attributable to leaderless organizations, relate to potential democratic reforms enacted upon the American sociopolitical establishment. I would suggest that leaderless organizations – or, in the context of this essay’s ensuing sociopolitical considerations, what I shall call networked politics – possess a dual function:

Initially, networked politics can be used as an instrument of insurrection. The recent success of the popular uprising among the Filipino is evidentiary of the efficacy of networked forms of resistance. The insurgents relied upon a moblog – a server upon which contents derived from wireless gadgets can be published by a decentralized public – in order to coordinate their activities. Therefore, the Filipino revolution was not centralized, falling under a single command structure; rather, it was decentralized and voluntarily associational. Although networked politics have just now emerged as a topic of social scientific research, historical incidents, such as the historically recent Filipino revolution, suggest that they might be the optimal form of political resistance in a world where social actors are increasingly connected via the availability of Internet based forms of communication.

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, networked politics are more resistant to the consolidation of sociopolitical power under any particular hegemony. If we look to traditional forms of popular insurrection – those that were guided and controlled, to a large measure, by van guards – we see a tendency for the elites, who orchestrated the successful revolution, to simply consolidate power themselves, forming another hegemonic faction in control of the society’s sociopolitical power.

As Orwell so brilliantly depicted in his Animal Farm, the revolutionary elites – which, in the case of Orwell’s short story, were comprised of the van guard pigs on the Farm – following the revolution, simply transform into the role that was assumed by the previous governing class. Consequently, the pigs, after staging the revolution, eventually morphed into an embodiment indistinguishable from the human farmer who had been expelled during the uprising.

However, in the case of network politics, there is no centralization, so there will not necessarily be any faction in a position to install an elitist governing structure, or hegemony, in the post-revolutionary social order. To translate the argument I am making into Nelson’s terms – the expressions she used when constructing an alternative American historicity – the emergent social condition will not possess a unified executive branch, and, therefore, it will be absent of Presidentialism: The cultural condition whereby Americans are disposed to conflate democratic processes with the presence of a strong, paternalistic Executive Authority.

Russell Cole

Tags: activism, constitution, decentralization, democracy, executive powers, government, populist party america, Russell Coles Blog, self governance, Social Change, sociology, sociology web 2.0
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, constitution, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Decentralization, self-governance, Social Change, Sociology, activism, executive powers
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An Article by:

Ben Tanosborn

Last Sunday, at our annual family gathering celebrating the clan’s mothers, and their constant efforts to keep the men-folk firmly footed in reality, I assigned myself the task of counting happy and sullen faces at the reunion, excluding those of youngsters – all my grandkids are happy by default, what one might call by birth-fate.  Well, more than counting, I was trying to derive some obvious direct proportionality between happy faces and political conservatism.

Sole purpose of this exercise was a curiosity-check in my part, a sort of small sample verification of the recent findings in a scientific study funded by the National Science Foundation, which headlined as: Conservatives [Are] Happier than Liberals! 

Duh!  I could have told the two NYU researchers that; but, if scientific validation was the primary reason for the study… let’s just say that the money was well spent!

Well, the truth is that our family did not prove to be a good sample, being rather happy folks by their very nature… forget the politics.  And our politics are basically centrist; the extremists’ overflow divided down the middle.  Bottom line: there was nary a sullen face in the crowd… except for mine, but that is a given for this progressive head of the clan.

According to the results of this study, us-lefties are just a bunch of displeased, sad, discontent, sorrowful, depressed, dejected, joyless, miserable, gloomy, disconsolate, hapless, melancholy (plus a whole lot other adjectives) folks.  And that frame of mind apparently shows in our faces by being morose, sulky, gloomy, somber, glum, sour and moody among other things.  It seems, or so the study interprets, that we-liberals are truly bothered by the social and economic inequalities which prevail in this world.  And that because of biological or mental malformation, we were dispossessed of that magic gene that all conservatives have: the rationalization gene.  (That’s my take.) 

Results from many sociological and psychological studies tend to indicate that liberals succumb to the effects of inequality in such a fulminatory way that they feel impotent to counteract it by grasping for some measure of rationalization; while conservatives do not find a great problem in replacing any moral order with something more congenial to their needs or convictions.  Little surprise then that the Pew Research Center found in a 2006 survey that 47 percent of conservative Republicans in the United States described themselves as “very happy,” yet only 28 percent of liberal Democrats made the “happy” list.

When American conservatives claim adherence to family values, or to a certain moral order, they are not really coming down the mountain after having talked to the Creator.  Those values, and the moral order from which they are drawn, satisfy nothing but the permissibility of their desires, “their families”… values that are exclusionary as the very private reasons that created them; values that rationalize inequality in the crudest of forms, most particularly in social and economic aspects.  Thus, they may advocate the sanctity of life for an unborn child; yet neutralize, via rationalization, the genocidal killing of a million Iraqi children, or America’s warring involvement anywhere in the world.

Perhaps rationalizations which focus in the behavior of specific individuals can find eventual remorse and the return of one’s conscience in its original state, undamaged.  But group rationalizations, as those being used in society which permit the strong to abuse the weak in economic matters, or the subjugation of peoples, or the taking of human life no matter the circumstances; no, there is no return of the group conscience, not in its original state and, most definitely, not undamaged.

Aristotle said it well over two millennia ago when he wrote (The Ethics) that, “men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.”  Perhaps we could add cultural to revolutionary to find greater applicability to modern times.  Indeed, it is their private lives that drive conservatives to modify their conscience and take the low road of rationalization when it comes to inequality or defining social justice.

As for me, I’ll remain long-faced to the world… trying to stay in peace, happy, within.

Tags: activism, Ben Tanosborn, government, power, reform
Categories: Commentary, government, Power, Ben Tanosborn, activism, reform
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