Residential consumers who install solar energy systems (including solar water heating and solar electric systems), small wind systems, geothermal heat pumps, and residential fuel cell and microturbine systems can receive a 30% tax credit for systems placed in service before December 31, 2016...
Federal Tax Credits
“The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state ….[As Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to] ‘remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.'” — Adam Smith
“Though the principles of the banking trade may appear somewhat abstruse, the practice is capable of being reduced to strict rules. To depart upon any occasion from those rules, in consequence of some flattering speculation of extraordinary gain, is almost always extremely dangerous and frequently fatal to the banking company which attempts it.” — Adam Smith
The Occupy Movement can take some pages from earlier movement struggles for civil rights and social justice.
“If the movement continues deliberately to not select who shall exercise power, it does not thereby abolish power. All it does is abdicate the right to demand that those who do exercise power and influence be responsible for it. If the movement continues to keep power as diffuse as possible because it knows it cannot demand responsibility from those who have it, it does prevent any group or person from totally dominating. But it simultaneously insures that the movement is as ineffective as possible. Some middle ground between domination and ineffectiveness can and must be found.”
Flowchart of consensus based decision-making (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
[Alternate title: Hacking Consensus]
Did consensus kill Occupy or are reports of its death greatly exaggerated–or both?
First of all, words like Occupy, consensus, capitalism, socialism, democracy, anarchy, liberal, conservative, and green all have one very important thing in common: each is, by itself, absurdly ambiguous. Each has a wide range of definitions, variations, and parts…some of which conflict with or totally contradict each other. Depending on the intended definition(s) (often absent or poorly specified) each term can represent a desirable set of ideals or a set of dreaded evils, or a mix of both.
For example, early capitalism was relatively democratic compared with the aristocratic manorial and feudal systems it emerged from. Many serfs and tenants evolved into self-employed freeholders. Eventually, however, that decentralized and egalitarian form of capitalism tended to morph into its own opposite: a system of concentrated monopoly capitalism. US capitalism returned, full circle, from its egalitarian, anti-feudal roots to a new iteration of top-down rule by a small, rich elite–in effect, neo-feudalism. So early capitalism was revolutionary while modern capitalism became mainly counter-revolutionary, both under the same banner, after numerous reversals of bias in the interim. Other minor but potentially competing or co-evolving variants include green, natural, ecological, and p2p capitalism.
Similar arcs, trend reversals, and full-circles can be found in the histories of socialism, democracy, anarchy and most other “brands” of political and economic ideology and their many variants and hybrids.
Even within a single culture and a narrow historical period, simple one-word labels like capitalism and socialism, liberal and conservative, etc., conceal important variations and overlaps. Over time a brand like “Made In Japan” can go from signifying “inferior crap” to being associated with high-quality, high-tech gear. The fallacy of brand bias, whether for products or ideas, is partly a matter of intellectual fads and out-dated assumptions, and partly a matter of over-generalization.
As we are re-discovering today, largely thanks to the Occupy movement, effective political democracy and economic democracy are mutually interdependent. Changes in economic bias, either democratic or anti-democratic (distributed or concentrated, egalitarian or authoritarian, etc.), sometimes precede corresponding political shifts. Political trends may follow more “organic” grassroots economic trends. In other cases the chicken comes before the egg and economic trends follow political reforms. But in almost every case, it seems clear that political or economic extremes of any kind can lead to backlash: collapsing bubbles, revolutions, counter-revolutions, etc.
An interesting catalog of intellectual fads and over-generalizations related to common ideological brands is presented in Dave Pollard’s review of The Democracy Project (a new book by David Graeber, prominent analyst of the Occupy movement and author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years). Pollard not only summarizes some of the key issues in Graeber’s book; he adds important social, economic and political insights of his own including a “sketch of the ‘camps’ of political and philosophical movements of the 21st century; elaborated on here.”
In Creating a World Citizen Parliament (published in Interactions, the magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)), Douglas Schuler writes:
Building civic intelligence. The seventh, final, and probably most daunting challenge is building civic intelligence [22]. The goal of this project is to help make individuals, and especially groups, actually smarter in relation to our shared problems. This is the conjecture that motivates this project: We won’t successfully address our problems if we don’t increase our civic intelligence.
Civic intelligence is the ability of people working together to address shared problems. It’s a type of community capacity or collective intelligence focused on shared goals: the capability of addressing civic ends through civic means. Although this idea has been explored by countless authors (including, somewhat prominently, John Dewey), it has not historically been the orientating idea it needs to be.
–Douglas Schuler
Comparative Consensus
Many people insist that consensus is an all-or-nothing proposition, which is what distinguishes it from majority rule. This is the ideal or “pure” form of consensus. But if consensus is seen as relative (a matter of degree), rather than Boolean (true or false, all or nothing), then in some form, and and in some degree, it is common to any collective problem-solving or decision-making model. It is the basic currency of civic intelligence.
But many of the arguments for and against consensus just seem to beg the question: what is it? What forms can it take? What are its internal moving parts? The topic of consensus, like democracy, anarchy, capitalism, etc., covers both an abstract general notion (with varied definitions) and an evolving set of in vivo and in situ practices that are application-specific and context-dependent.
Like many movements before it, OWS bumped up against various practical limits of “pure” consensus. But Occupy’s process of innovation and work-arounds (hacking consensus) is ongoing. So reports of Occupy’s death are greatly exaggerated. In fact it has a growing number of definitions, variations, and moving parts. Its increasing diversity and complexity outpace the ability of activists, journalists, and scholars to connect all the dots.
The challenges of hacking consensus models might include:
inefficiencies of scale (numbers of people involved) and scope (number and complexity of issues)
resource constraints (physical space, infrastructure, time requirements, process proficiency levels, information distribution)
I have a few opinions about consensus based on personal experiences but I’m not an expert on the subject. So I would love to see a broad comparative analysis of variations, case studies, and academic research on social/civic organizing and decision-making models that have, as a common theme, a significant bias towards consensus; but which also try to address the practical limits or failures of consensus. Can anyone suggest one or two of the best available resources on this topic?
Innovations in consensus processing
Automation might be one approach to minimizing some of the problems with consensus process. For example, a consensus status metric (the relative degree of consensus at a given point in time) might be generated from data mining using sources of “Big Data” including opinion and preference data from social networks, consumer purchasing data, polling and petition data, referendum results, public comment data, etc. Instead of starting from scratch with a blank slate on any topic (degree of consensus = zero or unknown), efforts at creating consensus on a given topic or set of topics might begin from a data-derived point of reference–a de facto initial consensus status benchmark. This might save a lot of the time and energy associated with seeking consensus, especially in the early stages of consensus processing.
Another example of automation might be a “human microphone (mic check)” app for mobile phones. If lots of people in a general assembly could “conference” their mobile phones together in “speaker phone” mode, this might be a way of creating amobile public address system on the fly.
Mobile and remote meeting apps might also address many other infrastructure and consensus-processing issues faced by online and in-person assemblies, committees, etc. For example, an “artificial intelligence immune system” for consensus-toxic behavior patterns might be able to minimize disruptions by minorities, reduce inequalities of access or influence, or produce antibodies against manufactured consent.
Innovation can have unintended negative consequences but Trial and Error is the Hinge of Evolution; and the perfect is the arch nemesis of both the individual and the Common Welfare even in the sometimes highfalutin’ world of consensus.
LP: You favor consensus democracy with collective deliberation and equal participation. How can that operate at a large scale? What’s wrong with majority voting with rights?
DG: Majority voting tends to encourage maximizing the differences between people, rather than encouraging compromise, creative synthesis, seeking common ground, which is what consensus is designed to do. Majority voting also invariably needs some sort of coercive mechanisms of enforcement. Don’t get me wrong, nobody’s talking about absolute consensus, like they used to do, where just one person can block everything and there’s nothing you can do about it. Consensus is just a way to change proposals around until you get something the maximum number agree on, rather than our system, say, where practically 48-49 percent of voters each time always ends up crushed and defeated. And yes, when you get up to a larger scale, you can’t just rely on assemblies or spokescouncils. It does make sense to decentralize as much as possible. Consensus only works if you don’t have to ask for it unless you really have to. But as for scaling up: there are any number of possibilities.
One I’ve been studying up on of late is sortition. Through much of Western history, it never occurred to anyone that elections had anything to do with democracy — they were considered aristocratic. The democratic way of choosing officials, if you had to do it, was lottery. Give people basic tests for sanity and competence and then let anyone who wants to throw in their name have an equal shot. I mean, how can we do much worse than a lot of the people we have now? Sortition would be more like jury duty, except non-compulsory. But there are all sorts of other possibilities.
LP: Is democracy possible in America? If so, what might it look like?
DG: It’s possible anywhere. But it would take enormous changes in our economic and political assumptions. Myself, I’m less interested in mapping out a constitution for a truly democratic society than creating the institutions by which people can collectively decide for themselves what it might look like. The one resource in the world that’s absolutely not scarce at all is smart, creative, people with ideas we’d never have thought of. Solutions are out there. The problem is 99 percent of those people spend most of their lives being told to shut up.
We have a bailout by the people, for the people, coming up November 15th called the Rolling Jubilee. This is a project of the OWS affinity group Strike Debt where we buy debt for pennies on the dollar, but instead of collecting it, we abolish it. The banks got bailed out. We got sold out. The 1% won’t sponsor a #PeoplesBailout. But we are the bailout we’ve been waiting for. Join us.
We cannot buy specific individuals’ debt – instead, we help liberate debtors at random through a campaign of mutual support, good will, and collective refusal. The Jubilee begins November 15 with a variety show and telethon in NYC. All proceeds will go directly to buying people’s debt and cancelling it.
The banks got bailed out. We got sold out. The 1% won’t sponsor a #PeoplesBailout. But we are the bailout we’ve been waiting for. Join us.
Bernard d’Agesci (1757-1828), La Justice. Holds scales in one hand and in the other hand a book with “Dieu, la Loi, et le Roi” on one page and the Golden rule on the other page. (Photo credit: Wikipedia. Click image for larger versions)
Some friends of the delightful and brilliant Karen Armstrong recently started a website called Charter for Compassion. The charter is based on the Golden Rule (See Karen’s Ted Talk video at the end of this page). This got me to thinking about the Golden Rule in more detail than usual…
The version most familiar to me is this:
So in everything, do unto others what you would have them do unto you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7:12)
The Golden Rule is the simplest expression of two primal axioms of sociality, empathy and reciprocity. This is the basis of all that we call justice and morality. All that has been written on justice and morality over the ages almost seems to obfuscate those issues when compared directly with the Golden Rule. Maybe that’s why Jesus is quoted as saying this single sentence “sums up the Law and the Profits.”
Without empathy, there could be no kindness or compassion. Empathy, kindness, and compassion are far more primal than religion, philosophy and ethics. Empathy has its own type of brain cell, called the mirror neuron, which is also found in other animals. This suggests that the evolution of empathy preceded human beings.
“The feeling of compassion is the beginning of humanity.”
But the Golden Rule doesn’t stop at empathy. It also includes reciprocity. Like empathy, reciprocity has its roots in pre-human evolution. It is involved in the process of natural selection. Empathy and reciprocity are the biological and instinctive forces that make animals social and from which all complex human sociality evolved.
Somewhat like the principles on which it is based, the Golden Rule predates recorded history. It was around long before Christianity or Judaism or even religion. It may even predate language. Of course, it would. It is in our DNA — literally.
The Golden Problem
In practice there may be a bit of a rub to the Golden Rule. What if someone doesn’t want to be treated the way I might want to be treated, but the way in which they wish to be treated is perfectly reasonable and agreeable to me? Then perhaps I should do unto them the way I would want them to do unto me if I were them. This would make the rule somewhat recursive.
Then, what if the way some people wish to be treated is bad for them? All responsible parents and guardians face this problem. The recursive property doesn’t help in this case. Nor can the parent necessarily treat the child the way the parent might wish to be treated if she is perfectly honest with herself. We are all a little too childish and selfish ourselves to follow the Golden Rule to the letter without indulging each other far too much. Another modification is needed.
“The Golden Rule” mosaic (Photo credit: Wikipedia. Click image for larger version)
Golden Solution: Enlightenment
A certain amount of indulgence is good for us, especially as children, but enough is enough and too much is bad for the character (and often for the waistline, too). Responsible parents sometimes attempt to treat their children the way an enlightened person would want to be treated, hoping that such patterning helps a child to develop into that enlightened person. We can apply this to everybody, really, since all of us can stand to become a little more enlightened.
But what is enlightenment? Who is enlightened? What does an enlightened person want? How would they wish to be treated? I guess this is what all the books on justice and morality are about–maybe this is why we need them. They are trying to tell us what enlightened people should believe, what they should want, or how they should behave; and they are written (broadly speaking) by our best and brightest (i.e. most enlightened) minds.
But what good is the Golden Rule if we are still thrown back into this quagmire of disputed and contradictory theories of right and wrong? Is there no simple rule for enlightenment?
According to Emmanuel Kant, the Golden Rule could be formulated in a broad, general way that he called a categorical imperative. It is intended to minimize the subjective variations in what different people consider good behavior by removing the relative advantage of acting selfishly in the pursuit of one’s own personal good:
“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”
In other words, don’t do anything you aren’t willing for everyone else to do right back at you. I don’t think it solves any of the above problems, though. Kant’s deontology still turns upon consequences. What are rules of behavior but after-the-fact consequentialism? Any practical kind of deontology or consequentialism must be derived from experience. What else could we base either one upon, unless we want to base or morality on legend, myth, or superstition; fictions which like Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy are more suitable for ignorant children than responsible adults.
Corollaries of the Golden Rule
I will propose several corollaries to the Golden Rule, which I hope will fill in some of the blanks and answer some of the questions left hanging by the Rule. To qualify they must be consistent with (if not directly implied by) the Rule, and they must share its simplicity of expression in plain language. The aim of this short list of corollaries is nothing less than to dispense with the rest of the Prophets and the Philosophers of law, which the Golden Rule failed to do on its own.
This corollary helps to answer some of the questions about enlightenment I asked above. I will do unto you what I would have you do unto me if it is also in your best interest and (as much as possible) for the greatest good of the greatest number.
This is the principle that persons “do well by doing good.” This meansthat acting to further the interests of others (or the interests of the group or groups to which they belong), ultimately serves one’s own self-interest.
When possible, respond to an aggressor without violence. The phrase originates from the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament:
38 ¶ Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: 39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. 40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. 41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. 42 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. (Matthew 5:38–5:42 KJV)
In the Gospel of Luke, as part of his command to “love your enemies“, Jesus says:
27 ¶ But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, 28 Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you. 29 And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also. 30 Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. 31 And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise. (Luke 6:27–31 KJV)
Note that in Luke 6:31 above, the doctrine of turning the other cheek is directly related to the Golden Rule. This principle, in less absolute or categorical terms, may also be the basis for certain versions of the legal doctrine of proportionality. But unlike the “eye for an eye” kind of proportionality, the New Testament kind of proportionality favors the least severe response necessary to satisfy a compassionate and forgiving standard of justice and to maintain peace.
“A soft word turneth away wrath…” (Proverbs 15:1 KJV)
BTW, by using bible quotes (familiar to many of my tribe) to illustrate some of my corollaries I don’t mean to imply that they depend on any religious authority. No. They have numerous secular expressions.
Or, to put this another way, “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” again from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:1). Saint Matthew goes on to say:
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye; and lo, the beam is in thine own eye? 5 Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
This is all about empathy and reciprocity, the foundations of the Golden Rule. But lest you doubt me, does Matthew 7:12 sound vaguely familiar:
“All things therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them: for this is the law and the prophets.”
Literally translated, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” This is the phrasing of Karl Marx, but the first known description of the principle was given by Étienne-Gabriel Morelly (1717 – ?) a French utopian thinker and novelist, but an otherwise “obscure tax official.” (Wikipedia) Morelly proposed in his 1755 Code of Nature :
Every citizen will be a public man, sustained by, supported by, and occupied at the public expense.
Every citizen will make his particular contribution to the activities of the community according to his capacity, his talent and his age; it is on this basis that his duties will be determined, in conformity with the distributive laws. (Wikipedia)
I don’t know (or care) much about Communism, but I think I know the Golden Rule when I see it. Who would not want to be treated in such a fashion, from each according to ability and to each according to need, unless they had previously been brainwashed by some cruel and perverse ideology (I won’t mention any names)?
This one is a little more technical, but its not complicated. Decisions and authority should be vested at the lowest practical level of an organization or institution. This is a clear “do unto others” corollary — do you want to maintain your human dignity in your place of work or your community?
Subsidiarity is the idea that decisions are better made where they have immediate effect. The idea is a key because it enables people to make decisions for themselves. Human Dignity demands more than becoming a cog in a wheel.” (Solidarity With Salisbury)
1. (Christianity / Roman Catholic Church) a principle of social doctrine that all social bodies exist for the sake of the individual so that what individuals are able to do, society should not take over, and what small societies can do, larger societies should not take over
2. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) the principle of devolving decisions to the lowest practical level
“Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.” – Aurora Levins Morales
“Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom.” ― D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature
I’m going to stop on that note, but please suggest any other corollaries to the Golden Rule that you think should not be left out. The goal is not to include everything but the kitchen sink, but to include essential corollaries that keep the Golden Rule from being overly ambiguous, or from being too silent on important social issues..
“Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.”
A little later in the story Holmes states,
“It is cocaine,” he said, “a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?”
Limitation of classical social movements
Classical social movements have often been limited by tunnel vision, cooptation, astroturfing, diversion, attrition, intimidation, repression, legal injunction, corruption, constraints of philanthropy, etc. Meanwhile, today, the 1% (the looter elite), are attacking the 99% on every side, capturing every institution of society, and privatizing every resource on the planet.
“America is in financial ruin. Europe and Asia are on the brink of self-annihilation. Chaos reigns. But like I’ve always said, there is opportunity in chaos.” (Xander Drax, The Phantom)
What cultural transformation has lacked is an organic form, an embodiment tailored to chaos: a stigmergicswarm, or a slime-mold for example.
“When food is abundant a slime mold exists as a single-celled organism, but when food is in short supply, slime molds congregate and start moving as a single body.” (Wikipedia)
A Slime mold growing on a beer can (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The 99% Solution is an emergent cultural slime mold that can engulf countless separate islands of class, political identity, and single-issue activism.
The 99% Solution has the potential to initiate and sustain a fundamental cultural phase transition.
The 99% Solution can assimilate (but does not require) leaders, agendas, advisers, critics, and philanthropists. It only requires active participants.
“You will be assimilated. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile.”
(Star Trek)
Poor Richard
Related articles
The Co-Intelligence Institute works to further the understanding and development of co-intelligence. It focuses on catalyzing co-intelligence in the realms of politics, governance, economics and conscious evolution of ourselves and our social systems. We research, network, advocate, and help organize leading-edge experiments and conversations in order to weave what is possible into new, wiser forms of civilization.
Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion
Alain de Botton is a philosopher with some very constructive suggestions for improving secular society by selectively plucking useful heirlooms from the traditions, practices and organizations of religion while leaving the rest. He surveys the cultural and social capital of three major religions– Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism– and suggests some assets worth salvaging.
(credit: Wikipedia)
Botton isn’t asking atheists and agnostics to kiss and make up with religion. He is a non-believer. He may not be the confrontational type, but he’s no double agent with a secret religious agenda, as some atheists might fear. His mission is to initiate a humanistic renaissance in secular society that will bring us up to speed in some areas where religions may have superior social and cultural know-how.
“The starting point of all religions is that humans are weak and vulnerable and needing direction, but as I look at secular society, I see how we’ve been abandoned to make our own way through life and how challenging that is.”
“Religion has a lot to say about how to live and love, caring for others, handling suffering, dealing with death and all the other universal experiences that make us human.”
“The error of modern atheism has been to overlook how many aspects of the faiths remain relevant even after their central tenets have been dismissed.”
– – – –
Religion for Atheists suggests that rather than mocking religion, agnostics and atheists should instead steal from it—because the world’s religions are packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies.(Amazon.com)
“It is when we stop believing that religions have been handed down from above or else that they are entirely daft that matters become more interesting. We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: firstly, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And secondly, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.”
Note: I have not read the book (so it could be awesome or awful), but based on the interviews and articles below, I like this guy. I think he is measured, pragmatic, and non-polemical; and he has one of the most constructive arguments I’ve heard in a very long time. It strikes me that the approach taken by Botton could go a long way towards ratcheting down the hostility between atheists, agnostics, and our superstitious brothers and sisters :). It is the kind of thing that might be a useful balm for folks in the Occupy and 99% movements who struggle to maintain solidarity with each other despite differences that are sometimes deeply rooted.
Interviews
My favorite interview is from C-SPAN’s Book TV. You can view the whole 58-minute After Words interview with Chris Hedges here or watch a ten-minute segment below, followed by other interviews from You Tube.
Corporate-controlled media, including the PBS News Hour, has made much of the “violence” committed by persons supposedly associated with the Occupy and 99% movements. PBS joined practically every commercial media outlet in linking the alleged May 1 Ohio bridge bombing attempt to Occupy Wall Street (OWS) via an absurdly sketchy association between OWS and “anarchy“.
Entrapping Occupy?
Apparently this intimidated Occupy Cleavland to abandon their May 1 rally. They made this statement:
May 1, 2012 – Cleveland – While the persons arrested Monday evening by the FBI have participated in Occupy Cleveland events, they were in no way representing or acting on behalf of Occupy Cleveland. Occupy Cleveland has affirmed the principles of non-violence since its inception on October 6, 2011.
Occupy Cleveland has spoken out and worked against violence in all its forms, including:
Wars and occupations
Economic violence of financial inequality, unemployment, debt, and foreclosure
Social violence of racism, sexism and homophobia
Environmental violence of global warming and fracking
Occupy Cleveland believes the only way to respond to a violent federal and corporate state is through active non-violence.
Main$tream media routinely downplay the size and peacefulness of OWS turnouts and their many non-violence declarations and instead they highlight vandalism and try to tar whole protest movements with the actions of a few. And some are quick to label vandalism as terrorism. The issues of justice and proportionality, and the distinctions between violence against property and violence against persons, usually get lost if not intentionally discarded. Though I’m strongly committed to non-violence, I’m not a pacifist and I tend to side with Occupiers who maintain a high tolerance for “diversity of tactics”. However, should high tolerance be UNLIMITED tolerance for all the flies, infiltrators, provocateurs, self-serving spokespeople, etc. attracted to the movement?
An Occupy blogger writes:
I was having a conversation with someone about what MLK and Malcolm X might have talked about… If MLK might have understood Malcolm’s approach . . . even if he could not publicly admit it. When posed the question, “Did Malcolm ‘help’ the civil rights struggle?” . . . the quick retort was, “Not near as much as Bull Connor.”
I think OWS, the 1%, and the security forces each want the other side to be violent enough to make their opponents look bad. The corporate security state also wants OWS to be both violent and non-violent (and they secretly promote both sides within OWS) so as to increase the division inside OWS. IMO neither the corporate state nor the bankers and other plutocons are at all afraid of OWS violence. They welcome it so they can appear to be justified when they unleash their wildly disproportionate violence on the 99%. To an extent we also welcome the excessive police violence because it helps us recruit sympathy and support.
And let’s be perfectly clear–the OWS news I am most compulsively attracted to is news of vandalism, violence, etc. The human brain is wired this way and both the for-profit infotainment industry and the independent activist media exploit this in every way possible.
“As you prepare to Occupy and join the 99% Movement in Chicago for the People’s Summit and other actions and activities beginning on May 18, 2012 , please open yourself to the needs of others. Consider how your actions affect those around you who are also struggling for a new world.
I will refrain from violence of fist, tongue, and heart.
I will Remember that nonviolence seeks justice and reconciliation – not victory. We must overcome our desires to control and conquer, as this will only replicate the oppression we oppose.
I will Take care of myself and one another, Stay positive, practice self-care, and acknowledge the good work of those around me.
Safety + Solidarity = Success
By participating in the bus trips that are being provided to and from Chicago, I agree to participate in the People’s Summit March and Rally on May 18, 2012. I further agree that if I violate any part of this action agreement, I will not be allowed on the bus from that point forward or be provided with any other support for the remainder of the action and trip.”
I like the sentiment of this bus ride agreement and would not hesitate to assent to it in full good faith. However, it goes without saying that I reserve the right to act according to my conscience and best judgement from moment to moment, accepting responsibility for my actions, no matter what I have affirmed or promised in the past. That is the highest form of honor. We cannot eradicate complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity from real life. We all use rules and promises to help us live, but every moment that occurs has never happened before. Rules and commitments are good when they help us compensate for information we can’t get. They are bad when they encourage us to ignore new information as it arrives.
In some cases what passes for ethics can actually be a kind of corruption or irrationality. Instead of Primum non nocere (first, do no harm), we may sometimes need to settle for Vitare superfluum nocere (avoid unnecessary harm) to avoid falling into a Reductio ad absurdum (reduction to the absurd).
“[Primum non nocere], is one of the principal precepts of medical ethics that all medical students are taught in medical school and is a fundamental principle for emergency medical services around the world. Another way to state it is that “given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk causing more harm than good.” It reminds the physician and other health care providers that they must consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. It is invoked when debating the use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit.”(Wikipedia)
Disclamer: the views expressed in the following video do not represent me or PRA 2010.
I’m trying to be agnostic about the “black blocks” at this point, but this video raises a few questions. 1) Why characterize other groups (implying OWS?) as “just standing around with signs” ? That seems like a cheap (and false) shot. 2) Why step on the actions of other groups like OWS and union protests? 3) Are bb’s hostile to OWS? Is OWS a target of bb’s in some way?
State Violence, for and against
To some extent, the blame for state violence can be laid at everyone’s feet. We all ultimately foot the bill for it, we drive the demand for it with our consumerism, and most of us awkwardly tolerate or ignore it. The main reason I try to minimize my energy usage is that most fuel is paid for in part with violence. The way I think of it, every gallon of gasoline sold in the USA (and in many other places) contains a pint of blood and misery. A few drops of domestic blood, and whole lot of foreign blood.
In conflicts over resources, who are the attackers and who are the defenders? Who are the freedom-fighters and who the terrorists? As Fox News says, YOU decide.
LOWKEY – TERRORIST?
Solidarity Now: workers + cops + soldiers + anti-war activists + anarchists + poor + et alia = 99%
The debates around war, Imperialism, reactions to Imperialism, and terrorism have been with us always and fill thousands of volumes. I include the topic here for perspective, because they go to the motives and the passions of those on all sides of the argument (and there are many sides). These issues can be sources of conflict within Occupy and the 99%, as well as between the 1% and the 99%.
War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today–JFK
The “systematic use of violence and intimidation” is common to many states (including the US and the UK) and non-state actors, whether the target is a foreign enemy, a domestic riot, or non-violent dissent. But those who SIGN UP for conflicts might do it because of brainwashing, or thinking they are fighting for God and country, freedom, justice, good social order, etc. Some people try to weigh the motives of combatants; others think that personal intentions or delusions are, once they sign up to kill, oppress, or exploit people for cash, religion, patriotism, or for just about any other motive, irrelevant. They are terrorists whether they wear bluejeans or a uniform. By another definition a “terrorist” is anyone standing between the USA and “our” oil.
Scott Olsen (credit: Jay Finneburgh / AP)
What about those who sign up for law enforcement or military service, not to oppress people for money, but for honorable motives, including a desire to improve their institutions from within? I think there are far more service people than some peace activists or Occupiers may think who bring their consciences with them to work in many ways, including dissenting up the chain.
What about Bradley Manning and other military whistle-blowers? Did their military service make them terrorists or facists? Did their acts of conscience make them traitors? Or are they working class heroes?
What about Scott Olsen, the 24-year-old Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq, then stood up for the Oakland and SF Occupiers and took some brain damage for it? Was he a terrorist, a military fascist, a traitor, or a hero?
What about 16-year-old Tariq Aziz, the US citizen killed by an unmanned US “Peace Drone?”
Terrorist or terror victim?
What about retired Philadelphia Police Captain Ray Lewis, arrested in full uniform at an Occupy Wall Street demo after branding fellow officers ‘obnoxious, arrogant and ignorant’?
Was he a terrorist, a traitor, a pig, or a hero of the 99%?
An Occupier comments:
“Personally, I am heartened by the participation of Veterans for Peace and Occupy Marines. But this national neurosis of “you are never allowed to criticize the military or question the virtue of soldiers” has got to stop.”
Many within the 99% take different sides on these questions. Like Fox News says, YOU decide. But consider this: some popular uprisings have succeeded only because large portions of the police or military forces sided with the people.
Occupy Violence
“I’m really frustrated that asking questions and wanting to discuss hypotheticals is construed by some as support for violent tactics. I have never seen a black bloc in action. I’m going on theory and hearsay. So far I refrain from condemnation because I have little information. I’m not going to call that support, and I can see both sides of the issue. But I am reasonably certain that a true commitment to strategic non-violence means having considered and understood the alternatives.” (an Occupy blogger)
Fair enough.
So is this violence?
credit: Citizen Kane (click image for source)
It is an act of vandalism of state property and an act of strong provocation towards the officer. Both may be acts of violence by some definitions. Is it justified?
Wikipedia says “Vandalism per se is sometimes considered one of the less serious common crimes, but it can become quite serious and distressing when committed extensively, violently or as an expression of hatred and intimidation.”
So vandalism is or isn’t ( more or less) violent and/or intimidating by degrees depending on the circumstances.
By some definitions, something that creates intimidation and fear is violence. By that definition, the massive police presence in full riot gear at a gathering of unarmed protestors including seniors, children, etc. is itself an act of violence.
One Oakland Occupier said:
“I was a liberal reformist believing in the 99 meme until I went through the two destructions of the Oakland Commune and all the state repression brought to bear on us since, and, well, the 99 meme is over. Dead. Kerput. In fact we don’t even chant that anymore; we chant “We are the Proletariat!”
Trauma changes people on both sides of a conflict. It can bring people together in solidarity and it can break them up into factions, or both at the same time. Consider the Stanford prison experiment.
My thesis is that violence is a very complex issue that ALL of us oversimplify in various ways according to our biases and context. I consider mowing my own lawn an act of violence against nature, but I do it anyway because of a particular cost-benefit analysis.
We each must follow the laws of the land and the dictates of our consciences as best we can — or not — and live with the results. Hopefully when shit happens, when there is blow-back, when there is collateral damage to others, , etc., we learn from the consequences of our actions.
My dad was a career military man and I was a part of the 60’s counter-culture. That drove a deep wedge between us. That was all my doing, because I felt passionately that I had to stand up against US Imperialism. Looking back from the vantage point I have now, I know that he wasn’t an Imperialist. He was a brilliant, kind, sensitive, and funny man who made some difficult and brave choices and maybe some blind ones. He didn’t invent radar technologies and electronics countermeasures in order to harm others, but to protect us. How those technologies were used can be laid at all our feet.
It turns out my Dad was a decent guy that I never got to really know. That’s one reason I now embrace a 99% that is full of people I have disagreements with (including a lot of punks 🙂 ). We shouldn’t make the same mistake about our 99% brothers and sisters that I made with my Dad.
But one thing on which I differ with some proponents of vandalism and “revolutionary violence” within the 99% is this: The 1% is not in any way afraid of nor intimidated by our violence. They welcome it. They want it. They deliberately encourage and provoke it. It works almost entirely in their favor and seldom gains us anything but negative press.
No doubt for some of the 99% it is a right of passage like “counting coup“. The analogy applies well because the 1% aren’t truly harmed. (Some property or pawns of the 1% might suffer some damage or intimidation, but the 1% themselves are never scathed.)
It may also be a bonding experience for groups like the black blocks. But at the same time it alienates others in the 99% (perhaps some of the “reformist liberal bourgeoisie”–i.e. anyone who disagrees with certain anarchists or Marxists 🙂 ) who are strangely more annoyed or embarrassed than impressed. . . .
This kind of violence (and far worse) is often used by a small resistance group against a superior opponent. But rebels and anarchists aren’t the only ones who try to “wag the dog“. Its a tactic favored by many fleas and underdogs. But the 99% is not a pack of fleas or underdogs. Acting together we are the Big Dog.
The tail wagging the dog is a concept used by an inferior side in asymmetrical conflict. The 99% includes many who see themselves as inferior in strength to the 1% and so act as inferiors and employ the tactics of asymmetrical conflict. That’s rational as far as it goes. On the other hand, the 99% is actually the biggest dog in the fight if it acts that way. In order to act that way it has to first think that way. As noted by Étienne de La Boétie (a 14th century anarchist) in Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, power has never originated from the inherent strength of tyrants. Great power may reside in the tyrant temporarily, but it has always derived, at its root, from the beliefs and behavior of the masses. If the masses (The Big Dog) awaken, they do not need to employ any asymmetrical, underdog methods.
credit: Wikileaks (Facebook)
A typical anarchist might say something like: “The specter of potential violence is the ONLY thing the oligarchy understands.”
Oh? The anarchist knows this how? I think the oligarchy also understands our franchise to vote, it understands non-violent civil disobedience (especially in large numbers), it understands an efficient competitor, it understands the power of the consumer purse, it understands a general strike, etc. Of all these things the “specter” of violence is probably the least of its worries. The biggest favor you could do the real oligarchs might be to blow up Wall Street or something big like that. The real oligarchs aren’t in NYC, and wouldn’t be touched. But thousands of dissenters-turned-“terrorists” would be in concentration camps within a month, and most of the 99% would have turned against them.
There is no final answer. There is no perfect solution. There is only practice.
Poor Richard
“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves” (Matt 21:12)
Acknowledgement/disclaimer: I have included some publicly posted quotes, links and an image borrowed from Facebook friends without permission in the spirit of fair use. Opinions expressed herein or in linked-to blogs are those of the respective authors only.
Friends, brothers, and sisters . . . I come not to bury ALEC but to praise it — not for its deeds, but for its design.
We often confuse the evil men do with the tools and logistics used. I don’t think many progressives yet see the potential for good and for actually promoting direct democracy hidden in the ALEC model because of how it has been abused. I think that’s why things like ALICE (ALEC’s non-evil, progressive twin) aren’t getting more support.
When I look under the hood of the ALEC machine with a system analyst’s eye I see some things that I like. If the 1% plutocons had not invented the ALEC model, the 99% would need to do it. ALEC is to politics as genetic engineering is to old-fashioned selective breeding. It takes the process of creating legislation from being an art to being a science and technology. And as destructive as such political engineering can be in the wrong hands, its technical innovations are potentially a good thing for participatory democracy.
“ALEC’s astonishing influence exposes the progressive Achilles’ heel: a lack of a similarly entrenched, nationwide infrastructure of state and local policymakers and advocates that can create and support lasting change.” (Katrina vanden Heuval, Deepening the progressive bench, via The Democratic Startegist)
In politics, liberals are still bringing protest signs to what has become, in the era of ALEC and other authoritarian political innovations, a gun fight (sometimes literally). It’s hard not to envy the 1% such a big, swinging tool.
Of course the ALEC model, as implemented by the 1%, violates tax and lobbying laws. We need to bust them HARD on that. Common Cause is calling for a tax fraud investigation. Meanwhile, we need to copy, hack, and re-mix parts of the ALEC model into a new model that is a venue for creating public interest open source legislation. The right-wing ALEC is run like a criminal conspiracy. A citizens’ Open Legislative Exchange Council (OLEC) can be run like a democratic cooperative. The old ALEC is sick in the original sense of the word but a new public-interest OLEC could be sick in a street way, yo?
Why bother? Many state legislatures still have part-time and/or unpaid lawmakers with small or shared staffs. This makes them very susceptible to lobbyists who will hand them ready-made bills on a platter (not that corporate-sponsored national legislators aren’t, too). And we still want to think that legislators should be regular people, 99% people, who need not be professional career politicians, insiders, or technocrats who are independently wealthy and technically capable of writing good legislation in their spare time.
Transparency vs Secrecy
What ALEC prefers to do with as much secrecy as possible, the 99% can do in full daylight. An open version of the ALEC model can give all stakeholders in the 99% community a fair place at the legislative drafting table and every stakeholder can have a position on the people’s “open legislative assembly line”. Our legacy political institutions often failed to do that even before they were captured by 1% money.
OWS and open-source legislation
Part of the Occupy Wall Street movement could undertake to re-engineer the ALEC model to be consistent with 99% values and methods such as crowd-sourcing and open source collaboration. I think such adaptations would actually increase the tactical power of the model. A green ALEC could research, engineer, and promote legislative projects that would implement much of the OWS 99% agenda through well-crafted, enlightened and responsible species of open-source legislation. Instead of being governed by and catering to profit-motivated corporations, Citizens’ OLECs would be governed by and accountable to public interest groups and activists across the 99% spectrum.
“On January 18th, we saw a day of online protest that at least for now killed SOPA and Protect IP. The Reddit community was one of many that played a huge role in pressuring not only businesses like GoDaddy to change their stance, but also members of Congress like Paul Ryan. Now, the community has come up with a proposed plan to create a piece of legislation, called the Free Internet Act, Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian explains.”
The U.S. congress’s attempts at e-democracy have been a “baby step compared to what others have done around the world,” says Matt Lira, the digital communication director for Congressman Eric Cantor. For Lira, there are some key reasons why he’s had difficulty pressuring Congress to become more digitally savvy. He contends that the political party in power has little incentive to give up authority to an experimental process that may tip the balance of power. Congress’s two most significant e-initiatives have been launched by Republicans — America Speaking Out, an aggregation platform where users list and prioritize various social issues, and YouCut, an SMS-based voting system to select which programs a few Republican congressman will attempt to cut. (mashable.com)
The Republicans may be slow to adopt e-democracy, but it seems they are way ahead of the 99%! Other countries, including Brazil, are ahead of us, too. We will need to elect more progressive legislators and get money out of the political process before we can make democracy much more participatory. But a tool like a citizens’ Open Legislative Exchange Council should be invaluable to a new class of 99% citizen-legislators and voters.
Bitcongress – Law Creation, Voting, Debate, Community Budgeting, Decision Making
Reddit site for participating in creating the Free Internet Act (reddit.com) The “Free Internet Act,” is open-source legislation, debated and hammered into shape by volunteer contributors on Reddit’s r/fia sub-forum, standing in as volunteer representatives for the rest of us.
The Freedom of Internet Act (formerly Free Internet Act) is an act aimed to legislate the Internet and its uses worldwide, as an alternative to SOPA and PIPA (Wikipedia)
Iceland crowdsourcing its constitution, (CNN Video) Iceland officials are turning to the web, Twitter and Facebook for advice on how to rewrite the country’s constitution.
Direct Democracy in Switzerland (vote.org) By Gregory A. Fossedal, Chairman, Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. “More than half its [the Swiss Constitution’s] provisions, as of the late 20th century, were derived from popular ballot initiatives or referenda voted on directly by the people.”
The Guardian: Blueprint for Democratic Participation, (video, fora.tv) Yochai Benkler, co-director, Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The SOPA/PIPA debate provides the first example of how the Networked Public Sphere was able to shift the debate, and the outcome, on a piece of critical legislation… Combining network analysis, text analysis, human coding, and interviews, new research offers a unique insight into the dynamics of what the future of democratic participation could become.
Openlaw is an experiment in crafting legal argument in an open forum…Building on the model of open source software, we are working from the hypothesis that an open development process best harnesses the distributed resources of the Internet community. (The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University)
The General Will, a project from Occupy Boston to facilitate the massive analysis, rewriting and creation of legislative documents. You can import existing bills from Congress and edit with other users using a wikipedia/reddit-like interface.
Open Assembly /Open Source Democracy/ is an Online Consensus Engine that allows groups to make decisions over the internet.
Liquid Feedback / Interactive Democracy (open software platform) “Anyone can select his own way ranging from pure democracy on the one hand to representative democracy on the other. Basically one participates in what one is interested in but for all other areas gives their vote to somebody acting in their interest.”
OpenCongress brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, public comments, and more. OpenCongress is a free, open-source, not-for-profit, and non-partisan public resource website. OpenCongress is a project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with a mission to encourage civic engagement. The Sunlight Foundation is our Founding and Primary Supporter.
“It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.” (Sun_Tzu, The Art of War)
Addendum for techies What kind of technology platform do we need for open, crowd sourced legislation development? I hate to say it, but we probably need at least the same caliber of development tool-set used to build things like Linux or other huge software projects. It would be a highly integrated and graphical development environment with ungodly enterprise-class content management and project management capability. Last but not least you’d want a great semantic “legislation debugger”. After all, legislation is a hell of a lot like a giant code repository. There would be a very large “legislation developer” community with different skill sets. It might take a half dozen different user interfaces for different classes of participants and different client devices (notebooks, tablets, smart phones, etc.) I think the shortest path might be integrating and customizing some of the open source enterprise-class applications out there like Eclipse and whatever the biggest CMS might be. Wikis have the scalability but not the ease of use necessary for all classes of users. It all has to run as web services so users only need a browser. I think we’re talking a chunk of change and a very good team to build something like that. Any feedback would be nice.
A trade-mark phrase all across the Occupy Stuff universe is “Mic Check!”.
Shouting “Mic check” means “everybody in earshot listen up and repeat after me…”
Many items of an OWS/99% reform agenda have been hammered out in countless hours of consensus-based “General Assembly” meetings around the US and around the world. “Mic Check” is about as good a phrase as any to represent the entire, evolving OWS consensus process or practice.
This consensus process as a whole, including all its rules and variations, represents the idealistic side of OWS. It has produced many fine ideas for social, political, and economic reforms. But to balance this “mic check” consensus idealism, OWS needs a complementary, pragmatic process that we might call a “Reality Check”.
What should an OWS “reality check” process consist of?
The academic side of my nature would say that a “reality check” is about using a modern systems science approach: empirical evidence, quantitative measurement, quality control, continuous self-correction, etc. From that perspective the “reality check” process is about how OWS studies and corrects itself– how the movement observes, measures, interprets, documents, and improves itself inch by inch, day by day.
On the other hand, a more intuitive or poetic side of my nature would say that a “reality check” is all about ones instincts or “gut feelings”.
But gut feelings and scientific methods might seem at first glance to have little in common. How could both represent a coherent interpretation of “reality”?
They represent two different ways of empirically checking or verifying a particular interpretation of data. The “gut feelings” approach (gut feelings about “truth” are sometimes referred to as a “bullshit meter”) is instinctive and fast, whereas the “scientific” approach is generally more formal, standardized, and tedious.
Although a gut feeling and a scientific measurement are both empirical, the former is more subjective and less rational, while the latter is both more objective and rational. We are equally “conscious” of gut feelings and rational proofs, but we tend to feel more conscious of how we arrive at our scientific measurements and rational proofs–whereas we are often far less conscious of how we arrive at our gut feelings. Our gut feelings just arrive on the threshold of our awareness spontaneously. They are generated by various specialized parts of our brain that have evolved to rapidly respond to danger or opportunity. They do not depend on language or even on our conscious rules of logic or rational thought.
Each in its own way, both rational thought and gut feeling are subject to complex combinations of biases.
Because rational thought is represented in language, problems of language spill over into problems of thought. A given set of facts can often be woven into very different, sometimes diametrically opposed, narratives. Said another way, a given set of dots can often be connected in multiple ways that suggest different interpretations.
The biases involved in gut feelings are programmed into our nervous systems by eons of evolution and are not generally open to our casual self-examination. Science (as in evolutionary psychology) is gradually teasing out some of the common biases in our gut feelings, but what little is yet known is not yet known very widely.
Ultimately, rational analysis and gut feelings must serve as mutual cross-checks (reality checks) on one other.
But how does a reality check process relate to OWS specifically?
For example, there are numerous historical and cultural variations of the consensus process. The appropriate reality check has to do with making sure that the OWS version of consensus process actually works out well in practice. It means measuring actual facts or results (typically before and after activities, projects, or actions) and adjusting actual practices over time and across local conditions. It means continuous observation, adjustment and improvement– that is, continuously revising theory, ideology, and methods to fit the facts on the ground, not the other way around. (Note: That does not in any way mean “the ends justify the means”. )
Image by ArtistJ via Flickr
Reality Check: what does the latest phase of the “Arab Spring”, the “Arab Autumn”, especially the Egyptian “Second Revolution” against their military establishment, mean for the OWS movement?
Gut feeling: don’t go home (leave the streets) before the revolution is really over. As soon as occupiers leave the streets the old rats start sneaking back into the halls and the seats of power.
Rational analysis: Moderate, mainstream, middle-class-leaning people are not really comfortable in the street for long. They aren’t all that comfortable with open social (class) conflict, much less civil disobedience. So the tendency may be for Occupy coalitions to weaken and unravel around effects of prolonged physical occupation and the status-quo backlash which may include police or military violence and other reprisals. The evidence seems to show that it is easier to mobilize an oppositional coalition against a corrupt and unjust status quo than to maintain a proactive coalition in support of a specific set of reforms or prescriptions.
Therefore, to maintain the broadest coalition for the longest time, OWS should limit the specific reform proposals to the lowest common denominators across 99% coalition communities. Adopt narrower ideological agenda items only if and when those opposed to them have already left the coalition, not before.
I think we should reconsider and perhaps pare down the OWS reform agenda in this light.
In my opinion, the lowest possible common denominator for OWS is opposition to political corruption. No other specific reform of social or economic injustice is possible until the general level of corruption is drastically reduced. But getting money out of politics is fairly complicated and controversial in its own right, and that may already be a bigger reform bite than a 99% coalition can chew.
GOP, Tea Party (TP), and Libertarian Party (LP) objections to campaign financing reforms, election reforms, lobbying reforms, and ethics reforms center on conflating money and speech and on an excessive and indiscriminate objection to “regulations” of any kind on any thing. That extreme ideology is unrealistic and incompatible with a 99% coalition.
Its time to concentrate on populist narratives that justify regulating political corruption as a lesser evil to rampant, unfettered corruption in and out of government. Every single law ever established, including each of the Ten Commandments, is a regulation. The GOP/TP/LP ideal of a tiny government and an unregulated free market economy is based on a premise that all market failures are caused by government regulation or interference. The reality is that unregulated markets also fail for a variety of reasons including information asymmetry (as in the principal-agent problem), game theory dilemmas, externalities, economic irrationality and behavioral idiosyncrasies; and they produce excessive concentrations of wealth and power in weak or failed states as well as in strongly regulated ones. The fact is that corruption, concentration, and abuse of power are problems that cross all public/private sector lines and all ideological lines. Limiting the corruption, concentration, and abuse of power to tolerable levels cannot be implemented simply by reducing the size of government. It requires a fair, balanced, and organic body of law, an impartial judiciary, and a strong but restrained arm of enforcement.
Furthermore, the issue of systemic political and judicial corruption is one that fully justifies the tactics of non-violent civil disobedience.
The question is not whether we should have laws/regulations or not (that was generally settled several thousand years ago despite the persistence of a cranky minority), but what those laws should be.
Ultimately I agree with FDR: economic security is just as much a basic a requirement for liberty as is the security of our property and our persons.
But for the present, it will be a miracle if we can all just agree that:
“The subjects of every state ought to contribute toward the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state ….[As Henry Home (Lord Kames) has written, a goal of taxation should be to] ‘remedy inequality of riches as much as possible, by relieving the poor and burdening the rich.'” — Adam Smith
(
Church of Reality
Critiques Of Libertarianism
Evolving Thoughts
Inquiry into Inquiry
P2P Foundation
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Stone
Poor Richard's Almanack 2.0 