If There Is to Be a Sustainable Recovery of the Real Economy
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.
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.
Coming out of last weekend's discussion in my diary "Progressive Populism--Some Basic Questions Moving Forward", I invited Nancy Brodier to write a diary introducing her concept of a web-based coalition-building tool. She did so, and you can read the result here. I urge everyone to read it, but at around 8,000 words, I think it could use a push. So this diary is going to discuss some of the major points she makes, including a few long excerpts. I think there's great merit and potential in her idea, and one purpose of Open Left is to be an incubator of new ideas, new approaches, new strategies and new alliances. So hopefully this is just the beginning of an ongoing discussion-and more, if people are inspired to dive in and help Nancy move this project forward to implementation.
In broad strokes, Nancy's diary argues that
"[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."
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.
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.
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....
I'm impressed with Scott Kleeb. This Nebraskan Senate candidate takes progressive stances, isn't afraid of offering intelligent answers and is giving a real run in a red state. He also likes to drink liberally.
Scott joined us in New York last night, and demonstrated pitch perfect how a politician can connect with a Drinking Liberally crowd...which also says something about how to connect with people in general.
He didn't give a long speech. He didn't ask everyone to stop what they were doing to listen to him. Instead, after a brief introduction, he hung out for 2 hours having real conversations.
I was being interviewed by a radio station about a snarky article I'd written for a paper-and-ink (and also online) magazine, and they referred to me as "journalist Amanda Milstein." This struck me as clearly false (although far be it from me to argue with them, given it sounds better than "part-time job-holding, part-time interning, soon-to-be grad student Amanda Milstein") - and it looks like I'm not the only one who thinks so. One of the arguments made by Clay Shirkey in his new book Here Comes Everybody (which Matt mentioned here yesterday ) is that the title "journalist" is increasingly meaningless when anyone can write a blog post about an issue and publish it - and even if they are blogging about an issue as trivial as a lost phone, it is possible for them to get a large audience.
Shirky begins by describing a Gutenberg-era pamphlet written in defense of scribes, whose jobs were being taken over by the printing press. The pro-scribe argument was printed off on a printing press for maximum efficiency - it's always bad if your chief defender can't even be bothered to use your services. All much like how my childhood best friend's instant messenger screenname was something like luddite77; if you're bothering to have a screenname, you're clearly not devoting yourself to smashing machines.
