The Emerging Progressive Majority Must Get Immediate Control of Government

by: Nancy Bordier

Sat Jul 11, 2009 at 13:00

Introduction

The purpose of this diary is to argue that the U.S. is on the verge of economic and financial disaster as a result of its lawmakers' acts and omissions over the past several decades. Because the legislation that lawmakers have passed has been driven by the corporate special interests that fund their electoral campaigns, they have lost sight of the common interest.

A prime example is their failure to carry out their constitutionally-mandated responsibility to "promote the general welfare" by ensuring that the real economy produces enough jobs paying living wages to give American consumers the buying power needed to sustain the economy.

By favoring special interests over the vital interests of their constituents, our lawmakers' policies have enabled quasi-monopolistic mega-corporations, like oil and gas companies, to charge unfair and unreasonably high prices for their goods and services. Their price gouging has driven middle class and working Americans with stagnant incomes into such indebtedness that their purchasing power has plummeted, plunging the real economy into a recession so severe that many fear it may turn into another Great Depression.

To avert further calamities following the collapse of the nation's banking and financial system, which was largely due to lawmakers' refusal to regulate it, I outline revolutionary strategies that the emerging progressive majority can use to  wrest control of America's faltering democracy from the self-serving political partisans and corporate special interests that now control it.

By taking advantage of these strategies to launch a 21st century Progressive Revolution, the emerging progressive majority will be able to elect representatives at all levels of government, including the presidency, who will "promote the general welfare" by enacting policies that meet the urgent need of the American people for a sustainable recovery of the real economy.

A sustainable recovery will build a real economy from the "ground up" rather than the "top down". It will leverage the grassroots wealth-creating capacities of all local communities working in partnership with the public and private sectors to produce the locally-owned businesses and jobs with living wages that American workers and the economy need in order to survive and flourish — businesses and jobs that will not be outsourced.

These strategies include my patent-pending Internet invention, the Interactive Voter Choice System, which is described in my book, Re-Inventing Democracy.

My invention empowers voters across the political spectrum to set the nation's policy priorities for the first time in history and elect representatives who will enact them into law. It gives voters the power to end the current special interest-driven political party system by taking over existing parties or creating new ones.

The free web-based consensus-forming and coalition-building tools I invented empower U.S. voters to:

• Directly set their policy priorities across the board and use them to reset the nation's priorities by publicizing them in nationwide public opinion polls, whose results can be disaggregated down to the local level;

• Identify and contact like-minded voters with similar policy agendas so that they can join forces to build political networks, coalitions and winning voting blocs of any size at local, state and federal levels;

• Use their political networks, coalitions and winning voting blocs inside, outside or across party lines to run and elect representatives at all levels of government whom they can hold accountable for enacting their policy agendas into law;

• Use their political networks, coalitions and winning voting blocs to rejuvenate existing political parties or build new political parties.

The invention is designed around a unique consensus-building mechanism that empowers voters not only to create self-organizing political networks that can function as voting blocs, but also self-organizing federations of networks/voting blocs that can nominate and elect candidates at any level of government, including the presidency.

Empowering A Progressive Movement-A Web-Based Tool For Bottom-Up Self-Organizing

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Jul 11, 2009 at 13:00

In broad strokes, Nancy's diary argues that

1. "[T]he U.S. is on the verge of economic and financial disaster as a result of its lawmakers' acts and omissions over the past several decades."

2. There is an emerging progressive majority, driven by the growing voting block of Millennial generation voters, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in the last election.

3. Still, the entrenched system of money-dominated special interest politics that created our problems in the first place is largely immune to the majority will as things presently stand.

4. This can change if we're able to take advantage of and supplement the bottom-up democratizing aspects of new technology, to allow people to engage in networked agenda-setting from below, which is the purpose of the interactive tool Nancy has developed.

Nancy feels it is important to first discuss the current economic crisis, whose depth and severity the political establishment continues to deny, in order to clearly establish the context and political motivation.  She does a good job of this, but I suspect that most Open Left readers don't need much convincing on that score, so I'm not going to stress that part of her diary in this overview.  Instead, I want to begin quoting a passage where she summarizes what her invention is all about....