Seven things we need to fix if we are to restore a functioning democracy in America

[arendt]

Seven things we need to fix if we are to restore a functioning democracy in America
by arendt

...."...the more that science has delivered inventions that in themselves are not only beyond the pale of most
....people's comprehension, but also with such abundance and speed that they literally challenge the ability
....of most people to make sense of them, the more people have been forced to retreat to pre-scientific
....guarantors to make sense of their world. The end result is that no one takes seriously any longer one of
....the profoundest dreams of the Enlightenment, i.e., the notion that science would liberate men generally,
....so that if the masses were not fluent in the detailed understanding of science or scientific method, they
....would at least appreciate the necessity for governing human affairs based upon the strong guidance of
....science."

.........- I. Mitroff & W. Bennis, "The Unreality Industry - The Deliberate Manufacture of Falsehood and
...........What Its Doing to Us"

This essay lays out what is broken in our current form of government, no matter which party is in charge. (And, no, I'm not saying the parties are the same. I'm saying the problems facing any genuinely democratic political activity in this country apply to all parties.) A later essay, after feedback about this one is absorbed, will make some proposals about fixing our form of government.

What every un-bought, politically-aware person agrees is broken about our government today:

....1 Our Constitutional system of Checks and Balances
........The many impositions of George W. Bush (and the rubber stamp Congress, and the Right Wing fanatics
........appointed to the judiciary by the cowardice of the Democratic Party) on the Separation of Powers have
........created a de jure dictatorship. We live in a country without habeus corpus. The willful denial of history and
........legal precedent, as fundamentalists and their enablers in both parties gleefully dismantle the wall between
........Church and State, is the death knell for rationality in our political discourse.

....2. Corporate domination of government.
........The revolving door between corporations and government has accomplished the corporate goal: the
........elimination of meaningful regulation and the emplacement of corporate lobbyists to directly write laws
........that further the domination of the corporations, while also providing them with piles of corporate welfare.

....3. Corporate domination of media.
........Over the past twenty years, local media has been conglomerated. Small owners have been bought out or
........pushed out. Confiscatory Intellectual Property laws (DMCA, UNITA) have been passed that take away
........ownership rights (first sale, click through licenses). Net neutrality hangs by a thread; an era of monopoly
........and kickbacks and censorship in telecommunications is poised to begin.

....4. Privatization of the Electoral Process
........Another corporate power grab, this time by a handful of fundamentalists, strongly aligned with the GOP.
........It is suicidal for citizens to allow the privatization of the bedrock process of democracy. To hide vote
........counting behind corporate secrecy laws makes democracy a sick joke.

....5. Oversight of intelligence and covert ops
........The $30B black intelligence budget is completely out of control (Duke Cunningham is a poster boy for this); as
........are the agencies themselves. The agencies are engaged in a turf battle between the military and the CIA;
........(the X-Files is looking prescient here) but the public is denied any participation in this battle, which it will
........nevertheless pay for - both in taxes, and in bad consequences. The agencies are now operating inside
........the U.S., under the fig-leaf of "homeland security". In reality, they are actively sabotaging our democracy.

....6. Over-populated, gerrymandered voting districts.
........The ossified nature of the political system in the U.S. has contributed strongly to the above problems.
........In fact, its weaknesses have been actively targeted. Congressional districts currently have somewhere
........in the neighborhood of half a million voters, versus the maximum of 30,000 strongly suggested in the
........Federalist Papers. Congressional districts simply have too many voters for representation to be effective.
........Corporate contributions rule; the voters are de facto disenfranchised.

....7. Centuries-old state boundaries and the un-democratic Senate
........This is another long-standing problem that the corporations have exploited. Equal representation for relatively
........tiny states in the Senate is an anachronism. It allows 16% of the country to veto the other 84%. That veto is
........used to disenfranchise urban areas, and the generally more progressive agenda cities support.

That's the top of my list of what is broken. These are the issues I will press my representatives to address, even
though I believe the system is broken. I think there are still people who care in that system.

You many think something else is more important. If you do, then reply to this post.

The rest of this essay amplifies these seven points and tries to tie together the problems of facing all of them at once.

--------

Bush and the GOP have smashed our Constitution. It is a write-off. It will be more expensive to repair it than to replace it.

The rubber-stamped "unitary executive" with its "signing statements" and its extension of "commander in chief" to all government activities has completely demolished the Separation of Powers. We now have the Attorney General threatening judges who dare to uphold the law. We still have a dangerous, lame-duck GOP Congress that threatened to defund judges, even as they themselves pass laws that are blatantly un-Constitutional. We have a police state enacted into law by the Patritot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the John Warner Defense Appropriations Act (which weakens posse comitatus). We have a political process that is exposed to be nothing but bribery, with Jack Abramoff as bagman and Tom Delay and Karl Rove as the recipients of his manipulations.

Even with the Democratic recapture of Congress, the religious and political fanatics installed as Federal judges over the last twenty years will prevent any repair from succeeding and quickly throw the country into fatal turmoil. Fifteen years of bad precedents from this crowd will provide plenty of ammunition to stall any meaningful reform. If that isn't enough sabotage, we also have the corporate fifth column in the Democratic Party, the DLC. You can see the DLC at work already, not only Rahm Emmanuel sabotaging progressive candidates, but his fellow corporate apparatchiks giving Joe Lieberman a free pass for breaking all the party rules. Worse than that, Joe is in line to be chairman of the DHS committee, where you can expect a bipartisan whitewash, a la the Warren Commission, of that corrupt and anti-democratic organization.

----

Its time to face the facts. We need a new Constitution. One that cannot be easily hijacked by a tiny, hyper-funded elite with total control of the media, and lately, the voting machinery. We can guarantee one thing: any new solution has to be cheaper for the American taxpayer than the "million buys a billion" lobbyist culture that reigns in Washington today.

Of course, a Constitutional Convention is simply not going to happen, no matter how broken the system is. A formal political process like a Convention requires a degree of goodwill and rationality that was long ago destroyed by the poisonous rhetoric that has demonized thinking clearly and tolerating other points of view.

Nevertheless, it is still a pleasant fantasy to imagine an honest government in this week after the victory - before the corrupt reality dashes the hopes falsely raised by the sane corporatists' take-down of the lunatics in the Bush Administration. (The Democrats wouldn't have won if the corporate media hadn't suddenly decided to cover the kinds of stories they had routinely ignored for five years.)  Baker and Gates, and all the other Bush Family placemen will put the velvet glove back over the iron fist, and the corporate Dems will call it victory.

----

The biggest problem facing American democracy today is the power of anti-democratic domestic institutions: theocratic fundamentalists and anti-regulation corporations. With the beginnings of backlash building against the "useful idiot" fundamentalists and their own belated awareness of being used, the theocrats can be seen to be what they always were: cannon fodder to advance the corporate program of smashing government regulation.

The main adversary of democratic government today is the power of multinational corporations. These corporations are "everywhere and nowhere". They evade tax laws, move production to the most wretched places on the planet, bribe and extort from governments, run shameless propaganda campaigns on media they totally control, and collaborate with rogue and legitimate intelligence agencies.
 
Show me the president of the corporate hydra that is devouring the world! Show me how to decapitate the corporate threat, how to hijack it. The answer is, you can't. Corporate power is organized like the internet, or like the "leaderless resistance" cells of a terrorist group. It is distributed. An outcome a corporation wants may be blocked by this law or that politician. But, the corporate network just "routes around" these temporary outages, and eventually gets its way. Look at our laws, they are exactly what the corporations want. It does not bother them that it took forty years to eviscerate our system. Under current law, corporations are immortal.

Corporations have escaped government control. In fact, they have created their own shadow government. They run their own political networks. These networks are called lobbyists and focus groups and pollsters. Each corporation specializes, in issues relevant to its business, but they coordinate in the sense that they do not needlessly poach on each other's territory. However, they do have "parties" of a sort. When there's some juicy market to be grabbed via the kind of government regulation and subsidy that corporations whole-heartedly support, competing coalitions' lobbyists battle each other, like with the internet fight between telecoms and computer companies.
 
If I am in a fight with an unkillable, relentless, shape-shifting adversary, I want the same weaponry. I want a survivable, specialized, compartmentalized (not to say underground cell) form of government. I don't want any Presidents or CIA chiefs that are like giant aircraft carriers - supposed assets, which in actuality require more ships and planes to defend themselves against attack than they deliver in combat power.
 
I repeat: show me the "leader", the "president" of the corporate assault on democracy. It is not Bush, he is a puppet. It is not even Cheney or the PNAC. It is not Bill Gates or Jack Welch or any one CEO or banker. This is a decentralized, flocking-style phenomenon. The leaders pop up from moment to moment, held together by their collective agreement on laissez faire economics which is their decentralized guiding principle. Stop one assault on one asset of democracy, another assault on a different asset takes its place.
 
If we are going to beat the corporations, government is going to have be as distributed and unkillable as they are.
 
--------

I think that new governments must grow organically from old ones, like a baby grows in its mother's womb. Governments are organic life forms with complex non-linear flows. (In contrast, the 18th century governmental architectures still in use today are mechanisms: things that are hammered together and turned on.) We have the internet as our pre-natal environment. The next government will have its Constitution written as Open Source, object-oriented code. It will be a much more hands-on, inter-active government. People will be in touch with it on a daily basis. Such intimate contact is needed if the people are to be in control and to have faith in their collective ability to rule themselves and defend themselves. Voting once every two years after the corporations have picked the candidates is not democracy, it is a farce.
 
Just as the Enlightenment concept of "separation of powers" was derived from the best thinkers of its time, a 21st century Constitution needs to use all the scientific knowledge we have gathered about self-aware, self-regulating systems. The best example, although it is hardly understood in detail, is the human brain.
 
We have come full circle. The Enlightenment succeeded because its proponents were right for their time. In their time, logic was too little applied, and more logic produced better results. But, in our time, the Fundamentalists are succeeding because we have built a government in such a manner that its complexity is only comprehendable by a few experts. Fundies can argue that logic has failed, and even get people to believe that faith is the only alternative.

My proposal is that we redesign the architecture of government AND that we show some humility by acknowledging in the mechanisms of our new architecture that rationality is limited, that people can be psychologically manipulated, that sharp lawyers and media propagandists can create an unreal world, in which people do not automatically act in their own rational self-interest. (This is something the laissez faire economists still refuse to do. They are really 19th century physicists, still dreaming the Laplacian Dream of a perfectly calcualble and rationally knowable universe, unsullied by Heisenberg, Godel, or Turing.)

----

While withholding any concrete proposals until the next essay, I want to point out what attacks any new architecture of government must defend against:

In today's world, the threat to democracy comes from the scale and complexity of the society. The governmental structures were never designed for this load, so they would be hurting even without hostile action. The weakest point of existing governments under immense load is the executive branch. My fear about centralized executive authority, as implemented in 18th century democracy (as opposed to in a dictatorship, where it comes with total command of the security apparatus) is that it is the most obvious place to attack. We need to re-think how the executive branch executes the law. We must de-concentrate the power that has been placed in the hands of one man. Because we have just seen what happens when that one man is a new Caligula.
 
There are two types of attack on the executive branch: decapitation and hiacking.
 
In decapitation, you simply wipe out the government and let anarchy (i.e., militias, corporations, spooks, warlords) take over. Then you loot what you want in the anarchy, usually raw materials. When you've grabbed the easy pickings, you set up "company store" kleptocracies to exploit people for the duration. We have done this to places where the government and society are so weak that this "state of nature" is not too far below what is already there - places like Iraq, Columbia, and Afghanistan.
 
I don't think decapitation works in an advanced industrial society. The resources are more fragile; there has to be someone to "keep the lights on". You can't turn today's America into a bunch of corporate maquilladora towns in one fell swoop. You need to make sure that an entire generation has gotten no education and that their parents have no steady employment and no savings. All that preparation means that the upcoming generation not only has no choice, they don't even have an idea that anyone has ever had a choice.
 
That said, let me move on to hijacking.
 
In hijacking, you put your own people in charge and warp the democracy to your liking. That is what is going on in the U.S. today, and it is the classic CIA modus operandi. You stir up trouble. You have the media distribute your marching orders and control the agenda. You manufacture crisis after crisis to eliminate rivals. And, finally, by whatever means, you grab control.
 
Because the U.S. Constitution was so well written and its people so well eductated, this process took over 50 years. I'm counting from the National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA and all of the apparatus which has been used to undermine American democracy from the inside.
 
Like a bank vault, democracy is not impenetrable. The idea of a vault is that the time it takes to break in is supposed to alert the police, who arrest the robbers. Well, the alarm bell has been ringing loudly in America since Reagan's October Surprise stole that election. Its just that very few people could believe the bell was ringing. That is because democracy relies on openness, tolerance, honest public disagreement, and a willingness to compromise. It has very few mechanisms to deal with entrenched politicians who use dishonest discourse, intolerance, secrecy, covert actions and take-no-prisoners tactics over a period of decades.

Any new architecture of government must be able to distinguish honest and principled disagreement from dishonest and unprincipled hijacking. Given the glibness of sociopaths, that is a very hard problem. The next essay will address that problem.

[patrice]

1. Corporate Citizenship, especially with Individual's losing privacy and

Civil Rights. Corporate citizens have more rights than individual citizens.

[arendt]

2. At least 3 of my 7 points explicitly mention problems caused by corporations...

the revocation of corporate citizenship. The death penalty for corporations, and many other
things need to happen.

Stay tuned; and thanks for the feedback.

arendt

[cascadiance]

8. We need to get rid of the judicial activist instituted "corporate personhood"

I don't think we even need to pass a constitutional ammedment on this. I don't believe the constitution itself (without hte Santa Clara/Southern Pacific activist ruling) supports this notion. Perhaps we just need to put some law that's well crafted that challenges this notion and forces SCOTUS to rule on it. Then we'll see what separates the "judicial activists" on that court from the real ones. If they rule incorrectly, then perhaps we'll need to get a constitutional ammendment to make it clear that corporations AREN'T persons and should not have the rights of such.

Going along with that we need to get rid of the corporate "rights" to "free speech", and put in place national and state "clean money" public campaign financing every place. We cannot require this unless we get rid of corporate personhood and money is free speech notion. I think the latter will need to be fine tuned to avoid trimming back real rights to free speech.

[leftofthedial]

7. all the rights and none of the obligations

and none of the consequences for evil acts

[clichemoth]

3. You raise some intriguing point.

The first four things are entirely fixable and the new Dem-controlled House and Senate has promised to do exactly that. If they don't, we must raise hell until they do. That's why we voted for them in the first place.

The fifth is dodgy because there are certain things that simply can't be made public because they would put the lives of American servicemen and intelligence officers in jeopardy, but the separation of domestic and foreign intelligence MUST be upheld strongly. We don't need a "Department of Homeland Security". If the various agencies can't coordinate efforts amongst themselves without an additional layer of obscure bureaucracy, something's broken.

As for the sixth, this would give us something like 10,000 House members. Where would they meet? Would we have to convert the MCI Center or RFK Stadium into a new Capitol? Good idea, but an absolute logistical nightmare. The arbitrary cap of 435 needs to be done away with, but any more than 1000 seats would be a mess. This would conceivably give minor parties with local bases a chance and break the dualistic monopoly (yes, I know that's an oxymoron)

There's a reason for the equal representation in the Senate. Without it, thinly populated areas would have little to no representation. It breaks both ways. You have vast red mountain states, small blue New England states, and of course Alaska and Hawaii. Perhaps California, Texas, and New York should be split because they are so large and have so many urban centers that don't have anything in common with those at the opposite end of their respective states.

I would also argue that there needs to be a mechanism for a vote of no-confidence as well. If such a thing existed now, I don't believe we'd have * in office right now.

[arendt]

4. Welcome to DU, Clichemoth

You seem to be an optimist.

If you think that the current bunch of corporate Dems in Congress is going to reign in
the corporations who bought them their seats, I have a bridge to sell you. (No offense,
just my opinion.)

I am not buying the national security dodge. Bush just demonstrated with V. Plame,
that they can jeapordize national security for political purposes. And nobody yet has
gone to prison (except that lying bum, Judith Miller).

We absolutely must have democratic control over the intelligence process. We have
too many examples of rogue intelligence operations that get into self-financing mode
via drug dealing or bogus international banks like BCCI. The current way we manage
intelligence agencies is broken. It needs some daylight. For the time being, no one
else in the world can really hurt us (the booga-booga Arab terrorists are going to
nuke the U.S. is more likely to be a false flag job by our own rogue intel agencies than
to be a real threat.

As for point number six, we already have over 20,000 UNELECTED Congressional
staffers. Corporations know exactly which of them to approach to get what they want.
Do you? LIfe is complicated. 10,000 members can be handled if you structure it
correctly.

There is a lot on the web about this. Mostly, I might add, from conservative sources.
Check out www.thirtythousand.org.

As for the Senate, I respectfully disagree. The Senate is de facto gerrymandering. It stinks.
Your proposal is that all the wrongs cancel out. I say they don't. Many other democracies
have gone to Proportional Representation.

No confidence is a useful tool in a classic, centralized democracy. We have to move
past hyper-centralization.

------

Many thanks for your comments.

arendt

[bj2110]

5. Counterpoints

"As for the sixth, this would give us something like 10,000 House members. Where would they meet? Would we have to convert the MCI Center or RFK Stadium into a new Capitol? Good idea, but an absolute logistical nightmare. The arbitrary cap of 435 needs to be done away with, but any more than 1000 seats would be a mess. This would conceivably give minor parties with local bases a chance and break the dualistic monopoly (yes, I know that's an oxymoron)"


In this age of technology, global connectivity, and uber-communication, why exactly does the House need to meet in the same physical location? Please explain.



"There's a reason for the equal representation in the Senate. Without it, thinly populated areas would have little to no representation. It breaks both ways. You have vast red mountain states, small blue New England states, and of course Alaska and Hawaii. Perhaps California, Texas, and New York should be split because they are so large and have so many urban centers that don't have anything in common with those at the opposite end of their respective states."


Again, the age of technology, global connectivity, and uber-communication has rendered obsolete the importance of land ownership. Acreage, square mileage, land assets, these will all become a de-valued commodity in the world market. Therefore, the need to give a voice to those with little of the dwindling value will decrease. The world is moving towards a full person-to-person society, and having two representatives regardless of population quantity is simply another means for hidden executive power.

[clichemoth]

12. Given all the election fraud that we've seen.

You'd think that trusting our legislative process to the Internet wouldn't be a road we'd want to go down. Now, there may be a way to do it where the entire lot of them only has to be in the same place to convene the session and then meet in regional groups in separate locations, but votes and hearings must be conducted in person and transparently or there'd be even more potential for abuse than there already is. Instead of just taking bribes from lobbyists, they could let the lobbyists do 99% of the work for them while they slept.

The importance of land ownership can't be rendered obsolete as long as we're standing on land. The communications networks have to run across it, satellite uplinks have to go somewhere, it's still our primary source of food and water, so on and so forth. Someone has to control it, and if individuals value it less because they aren't as tied to it, it just makes it easier to concentrate all the resources in the hands of a few, whether that few are called the Communist Party Central Committee or Bechtel and Halliburton.

Universal individual democracy can't work. Humans are fallible creatures. We don't always support what's best for everyone or even our own rational self-interest. The beauty of the Constutition when applied correctly (and some would argue that we've still never gotten it right) is that there should always be someone willing to counter someone else's bad ideas.

[arendt]

14. Geeks know how to make it secure; but they've been kept out.

There are ways to make internet communications provably secure. Its just that the
crooks who are running e-voting made sure to avoid those ways. And the public
is so tech-illiterate they bought the BS. The Australians already have Open Source
e-voting technology that went through a national public contest. This can be
done.

Another aspect of a huge number of legislatures is that it costs 100x as much to
bribe them all. Even corporations would balk. Plus, with smaller number of voters
per district, it would fast become clear who is shilling for the corporations. Anonymity
would go down.

I agree completely about land. My proposal has much to say about it.

Not quite sure your definition of "universal individual democracy". We must have
"representatives". We must have abstraction layers. The world is way too complex
to have everyone aware of every issue. The lobbyists win all the time that way.

Thanks again.

arendt

[BeFree]

22. Clichemoth, etal,

I think the answer is video conferencing. Can't you just imagine a 'C-Tube' full of videos of government officials talking? They'd all be singing a different tune were they on air everywhere, eh? It would be a part of the *new* media in which we are all members.

One of the problems our democracy faces is the idea that property is to be more or less equally represented in our government. That idea is what allows a minority to more representated, leading to the imbalance under which we endure. It is time for that idea to be expunged from the constitution and we get back to the idea that all humans are created equal; Created equally and therefore should be represented equally.

We can have universal democracy. But it would have to be a grassroots movement best started and sustained locally. Then when we take representation away from things and move more toward representing just people, democracy will come alive and grow to its fullest potential.


Great thread!

[arendt]

13. I don't want to dribble out my explanation, but let me give some hints...

re #6:

> In this age of technology, global connectivity, and uber-communication, why exactly
> does the House need to meet in the same physical location? Please explain.

I don't know where you got the idea they would all meet in the same place. I agree
that would be chaos.

They would meet in one hundred separate legislatures. Two in each state.
That is de-centralization. And, of course, both the legislatures and the voters
would make heavy use of the internet.

They would have different areas of legal jurisdiction. E.g., there would be a defense
legislature, a commerce legislature, etc. The communication between legislatures
would need to be as complicated as the current system of "referrals", where there
are "split", "joint", and "serial" referrals.

I stand by my opinion that the Senate is a weak echo of the House of Lords. Senators
used to be appointed, not elected, right into the 20th century. The institution is an
anachronism. We need a better way to protect minority rights. The Europeans use
Proportional Representation.

Anyway, thanks for responding. And stay tuned for my next essay (although it
may take until the Thanksgiving break for me to get it ready).

arendt

[clichemoth]

23. So, basically, we'd have multiple legislatures....

each consisting of a large number of representatives (I'll use my 10,000 figure since it would allow for a reasonable constituent:Rep ratio that would work even if population doubled), portions of which each meet in various places throughout the country. And if representatives didn't attach off-topic riders or poison pills to pretty much every single bill (something that should be forbidden), the referral policy wouldn't necessarily need to be that complicated. If something can't pass one body as originally written, start over.

Why not have multiple executives as well? One covering the areas of legislation passed by each legislature? It would prevent one man from imposing his ideology on the entire government.

And yes, some form of MMPR would be essential to making something like this work. I'm partial to NZ's system, myself.

[arendt]

24. NO. Total number of reps on the order of 10,000...

each legislature is small, on the order of 100 reps, like today.

But 100 legislatures times 100 reps apiece gives you about 10,000 elected representatives.

And, yes, riders and poison pills will be ruthlessly dealt with. We can't go cross-wiring the
machinery.

> Why not have multiple executives as well? One covering the areas of legislation passed by each legislature?
> It would prevent one man from imposing his ideology on the entire government.

Now you are getting the idea! You are a quick study.

But, please, let me get some feedback on the problem, before I post my proposal.
You are uncovering the details before the groundwork is in place.

arendt

[Laelth]

6. The only one I have the least bit of trouble with is #7.

On numbers 1-6, I agree that those are all serious problems. I understand the problems that #7 causes the Democratic party (over-representation of Republicans in the Senate), but I have to honor the deal that was struck between the larger and the smaller states at the time of the drafting of the Constitution. The low-population states agreed to give up some of their sovereignty to the Federal Government of the United States only on the condition that they would be over-represented in the Senate. While I don't like the effect that has on my party, I can't condone re-writing the underlying contract between the states.

However, if we could get a Constitutional amendment passed, through which the smaller states gave up their over-representation in the Senate, I'd be all for it ... but how likely is that?

-Laelth

[ThomCat]

9. Agreed. 1-6 are definite. 7's not going to happen

except in dreams. There is no way an amendment is going to get ratified by the states that strips most of those states of some of their power and representation.

[arendt]

15. Variable-sized states based on lines drawn on an empty map is a dangerous anachronism

I respectfully disagree on #7. Here are some reasons.

> I have to honor the deal that was struck between the larger and the smaller states at the time of the drafting of the Constitution

1. My starting point is that the current Constitution has been shattered/poisoned by the laws and judges of the GOP.
That contract is over, null and void, broken.

2. I am proposing a new Constitution that can withstand the threats of today: intelligence black ops, corporate hijacking.
Variable-sized states as the basis for representation is a fatal anachronism that has to go.

3. Today, large states are threatening to break themselves into multiple smaller states to deal with this problem.
Each large state could do this unilaterally. So much for your sacred contract.

-----

But, in general, I believe I have anticipated your concerns. I ask you to be patient until the second essay,
in which "all will be revealed".

arendt

[Laelth]

17. Fair enough.

I'll hold my fire for the moment. ;)

But a new Constitutional Convention? How can we amass support for that? I took an oath to uphold the Constitution we have now. Asking me to embrace a new Constitution is going to be a tough sell.

But I'm listening.

:dem:

-Laelth

[arendt]

21. You are doing it right now...

the new Constitution will be debated, written, and trialed on the internet.

Do you need to ask permission to change the culture? You won't get it.

We figure out what we want to do. We try it with a small army of volunteers,
sort of like rotisserie/fanatsy baseball.

arendt

[FormerDittoHead]

18. I agree with the spirit of #7 as well - SOMETHING should be done...

The foundation of a democracy (or democratically elected blaw blaw) is that everyone gets a vote.

My personal opinion is that the framers were not clairvoyant. Wyoming wasn't even a state at the time, and there was no deal struck with Wyoming and its 1/2 million people at the time.

But today, for example, Wyoming 1/2 million gets as many senators as New York's 20 MILLION.

When I say SOMETHING should be done, there is no reason to redraw borders, rather, how about suggest an amendment (and that's what we're talking about here) that would offer limits on state population ratio representation in the Senate.

So, for example, "no state voters would have more than a 10:1 advantage or disadvantage in the Senate". The remedy could be as coarse as taking one senator away from Wyoming (sorry for picking on you, but you are the lowest populated state) or giving their 2 senators fractional votes, or increasing those states with that many more people fractional votes greater. We have math and computers and everything. It can be done.

The only thing I really agree with is that #7 is a good thing to put on the table. The current apportionment of senators to people IS outdated and hurts the democratic process.

[welshTerrier2]

10. democratic reforms must be "THE" issue

either we the people have power or we don't ... when our democratic institutions are not safeguarded, those who seek to subvert democracy by bending the system to their own greedy pursuits always have sufficient capital, sufficient influence, and sufficient access to do what they want and the best interests of the country and the American people are quickly brushed aside ...

your essay is excellent ... i would add a few specifics here and a little of this and that ...

i guess one my major offerings would lie in your checks and balances category ... we have watched for more than 6 years as Democrats were all but excluded from the legislative process and those they represented did not have a minority voice but rather they had no voice at all ... and now Democrats rule the roost ... even if a bi-partisan spirit were to prevail and be offered generously, the rules governing Congress must be reformed ... generosity is no substitute for the rules that govern ...

currently, the minority party lacks subpoena power and it lacks the right to call hearings ... what check and balance can we possibly hope to achieve in a "to the victor go the spoils" system of governance? because the minority party and their constituents are the most logical counter-force to those in power, the rules must be changed ... will the Democrats acknowledge that the system of checks and balances demands this change to the rules? i doubt it ...

next, on gerrymandering, we cannot allow a party-driven carving up of the electorate ... if we are to leave the definition of voting districts up to the legislature and not the Courts, we must define a set of objective criteria on which districts will be formed ... any whiff of partisan bias outside the objective criteria should be overturned by the judicial system ... criteria should be based on such things as population size and demographics, geographic areas and so forth ... gerrymandering that alters the "political character" of a voting district is NOT acceptable ...

and then there's the whole issue of the Fairness Doctrine, media centralization and the nature of political advertising itself ... democracy is dependent on voters knowing the truth ... ads that are designed to distort the truth and "paint pictures" by presenting out of context photos of opponents, accusatory-toned narrators and such irrelevancies as marching bands and cute babies, aircraft carrier settings and white women making suggestive invitations to black candidates should be out of bounds ... yes, this will raise all kinds of free speech problems ... if it's a crime to yell "fire" in a crowed theatre, my view is that distorting the truth and poisoning the democratic process should be outlawed as well ...

and, though there are probably numerous other aspects of restoring our democracy that should be addressed, most specifically publically financed elections and the severe restricting of the paid lobbying process, i also would like to see changes about the Congressional "seniority system" ... why should states with very tiny populations be able to return the same Senator or representative back to Congress year after year after year and garner a disproportionate influence over national policy by automatically procuring committee chairmanships? it seems to me longevity is neither a plus nor a minus ... this archaic system is highly undemocratic and should be replaced with a system that better represents the American people as a whole ...

great post, Arendt! i'll recommend this one for sure ... among the sad heap of "who do ya like in '08" posts, it's nice to see "THE" most important issue occupying a little DU bandwidth ... maybe if some of those candidates and their supporters would make democratic reform THE central focus of their campaigns, they'd be a little bit more worth getting enthusiastic about ...

[arendt]

16. Very solid response

You hit the nail on the head: the sad heap of "who do ya like in '08" posts.

Yours is the strongest, most nuanced of all. I can't do justice to responding to
it in the minutes left before I go to work.

So, let me read it, and get back to you later.

I like your "fire in a crowded theatre" analogy.

arendt

[welshTerrier2]

19. a recent post on this issue

a few days ago, i made the following post on this issue: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=132&topic_id=2951935

reforming democracy was one of the top two issues i discussed ...

as for your "#7", i am very new to this idea ... i first saw it discussed only a few weeks ago and have yet to "think it through" ... i've been pushing for similar objectives, i.e. better representation and a greater degree of communication between elected representatives and their constituents ... the objectives are the same; the method of achieving them very different ...

to reform our current system, citizens need to demand that their representatives hold regular, public, free forums in their home districts ... why don't most Senators speak around their home states outside of campaign season? there's no excuse for it ... so many cynically point to the detachment of the voters ... "when we do hold meetings, nobody shows up" ... that may well be true; it's their job to change that! you can't run an out-of-touch government and then complain that voters are apathetic ... it will take time to build trust and interest ... the problem is, too many reps don't make the effort at all ... unless, of course, it's "vote for me" and "how about a small donation" time ...

the little theme you commented on in my previous post about getting truth to the voters is probably the most important function of a real democracy ... what the hell good does it do anyone to have the right to vote if the entire political process is designed to misrepresent the truth ... "my guy is great because of this; the other stinks because of that" ... it should not be about sales pitches ... a healthy democracy demands respect for the voters' right to know the truth ... the truth is that election campaigns are no longer about the best ideas for the country but about getting people elected ...

i am elated that the Democrats have regained control of Congress ... truly we were, and still are, a nation on the brink of great suffering and decline ... but i am equally saddened by the way we won ... our success, in my view, was based more on successful political tactics than on laying down a clear vision for the future ... we played the anti-bush game as effectively as it possibly could have been played ... i'm not dismissing the outcome but we did not campaign with integrity and truthfulness ... the great issues were not put clearly before the American people ... what exactly is the Democratic plan to address the ideas you and i have raised about democratic reforms? to be fair, i have heard some good ideas about lobby reform from Nancy Pelosi ... i commend her for that but were these ideas a key plank in the Democratic vision before the election? is that what Democrats "ran on"? ... and on global warming, the other key issue i discussed in the post linked above, Democrats are offering some vagueries about alternative energy ... that, i'm afraid, is woefully inadequate ...

we have built an electoral system, even our democracy itself, that does not lend itself to communicating bad news to voters ... if we have used more than our share of available fuels, if we must "cut back" on our lifestyles and suffer greater inconvenience, if our production of carbon dioxide threatens life on the planet, who will deliver the bad news about the changes we must make? surely it will not be someone needing to garner more votes and raise campaign funds ... at least that is true in this "win at any cost" climate ... as long as candidates and parties put winning above the national interest, and they clearly do, our future will be very dark indeed ... there is no question the great American empire is approaching a day of reckoning and our own democracy and electoral processes stand in the way of making the changes we so desperately need ...

so, anyway, who ya going with in '08?

[OneBlueSky]

11. Bravo, arendt! . . . I'm particularly with you on reining in corporations . . .

and their influence on government . . . or, more precisely, their outright control of government . . .

we're supposed to have a government of, by, and for The People -- and corporations are supposed to be nothing more than tools to help society function . . . we need to clip their wings and return them to their proper place . . . and stop the practice of corporate lobbyists writing the laws regulating their industries . . .

[annabanana]

20. It is posts like this that shine the spotlight on the true value

of the internet, and think tanks like DU.

I hope that the deep thinkers and clear writers here take good note.

[athena]

25. I would like to add tax reform.

I'm reading http://www.amazon.com/Perfectly-Legal-Campaign-Benefit-Everybody/dp/1591840198">Perfectly Legal by David Cay Johnston (an amazing book everyone who is not a millionnaire should read). The alternative minimum tax (AMT) needs to be repealed or significantly reformed. Otherwise, more and more middle-class taxpayers will have to pay the AMT in the next four years, and since most people who pay the AMT are unaware they are paying it (the tax programs calculate it for you in the background), they will think the Democrats have raised their taxes.

Of course, the Bush tax cuts for the rich also need to be repealed; it is thanks to them that the supremely wealthy are relatively unaffected by the AMT.

[arendt]

26. The tax system is bent, not broken...

I think that putting citizens in charge of government, instead of corporations will allow
us to undertake tax reform. In that sense, tax reform will be a result of fixing the seven
things I listed.

arendt

[Psyop Samurai]

27. Looking forward to your next installment...

I'm inspired by your ability to look forward, given the often paralyzing despair a view as unblinkered as yours can produce.

This is a great post. We need serious touchstones like this from our best thinkers, and must refer back to them continuously, and build upon them. Otherwise there's the tendency to get lost in ephemera and diminished expectations and someone else's framing.

This should be at the top of the "Greatest" threads.

K&R

[arendt]

28. The current system is a flaming wreckage. The only place to look is ahead...

I have had these ideas for almost ten years, but everyone is too busy playing
politics as ususal. Who's up. Who's down. What are the tactics.

That is how we got to this horrible state.

Finally, the system is so de jure and de facto corrupt, bent, broken, hinky,
dirty, and just plain rotten that many people are willing to try something,
or anything, that might offer a viable alternative.

The internet is almost, but not quite, in the pockets of the corporations. But,
people of both left and right are fighting to save it. If net neutrality is snuffed,
any alternative politics is snuffed with it.

One of the first battles we have to win is for net neutrality. And we have to
do it right now (maybe in this horrible lame duck session the GOP have
called to shoot a few more slugs into the dying body of our democracy).

But, yes, we need to talk about the big issues. If not now, when?

arendt