Category: Political

Last week, ACLU-Texas and Jon Lebkowsky sued the Texas Secretary of State’s office, demanding that the SOS comply with the Open Meetings Act, and hold meetings to review voting systems for certification in public.
On Friday, the Secretary of State’s office backed down, postponing the upcoming meeting til further notice. We hope this means that they are evaluating how best to hold these meetings in public.
We especially hope that the public scrutiny will encourage the Secretary to insist on a reliable, secure, and transparent voting process.

from Comments to Lessig Blog
To Adina:
Thanks for responding. Emails from a member

Over the weekend, I’ve been reading the draft of a once and future book on emergent democracy. The thesis is that many-to-many network communication is transforming human political and social organization. Theorists of emergent democracy draw on metaphors of self-organizing in networks, termites, flocks of birds.
The argument has truth and explanatory power. All changes in communication affect the nature and organization of human society. Networked communication facilitates network behavior patterns that can be described with network math.
There is also something profoundly unsatisfying about network determinism, where current forms of government are inevitably replaced by ad hoc swarms of citizens. There are two items that are missing in the ant metaphor — the nature of the nodes, and the nature of the ecosystem. In a human population, the nodes of the network are intelligent; the pheremones are ideas. The human self-organization takes place within a cultural ecosystem, with resources and constraints like money and laws, unlike termite colonies or flocks of birds, whose forms are shaped by food and weather.
Intelligence in the political network can be described along two related dimensions:
* coordinating action — in networked environment, the ability to draw groups in alignment, rather than in continual brownian bickering
* coordinating ideas — framing discourse to enable shared understanding
This frame makes the affect of the network easier to see: the network makes it easier to co-ordinate groups to take action, and makes it easier to spread ideas among groups.
By taking the environmental metaphor too literally, theorists of emergent democracy refrain from drawing models of the networked polity. After all, if the change is emergent and self-organizing, prediction misses the point. But the human environment is a built environment. Therefore, a theory of the evolution of a networked polity should take into account the constraints of the environment, and the adaptive paths from here to there.
Today, the elements of politics are election campaigns (mass marketing, fund-raising), and inter-election policy making, influenced by activist campaigns and donor money. Emergent democracy enables peer to peer get-out-the-vote activity and decentralized fundraising at election time; and enables groups of citizens to self-organize around issues in the creation and administration of policy.
Blogs, discussion groups, and “peer media” countact the centralizing tendency of mass media, and help provide greater visibility in local politics and particular issues. One chronic mistake made by the prophets of blogging as a political force is to see the conversation, opinion, and journalism in blogs as directly connected to political change.
Conversation, debate and deliberation is important in a democracy, but citizen conversation alone doesn’t make policy. There are two missing steps. First, citizens need to relearn to organize. The conversation needs to translate into action – effective advocacy for specific policy, or campaigning for specific candidates. Second, government officials need to learn how to listen. Today, politicians check polls to see what voters think. Tools like Technorati will give politicians a richer view of the opinion of particularly active citizens.
Yes, say advocates of emergence, but legislation and administration are passe in a networked age. Social decisions will just “emerge” as the sum of a million conversations. There is clearly room for greater decentralization and experimentation. However, as Stewart Brand observed in “As Buildings Learn”, buildings (and the civic infrastructure) consist of layers, with different lifespans.
One failure mode in underdeveloped states is the lack of a reliable legal system. Businesses need a stable foundation for contracts and dispute resolution, in order to conduct the shifting and fast-changing process of entrepreneurship and innovation. Roads, bridges, water and sewage systems are amortized over many decades. (Privatized decentralization is not a complete solution — if water and sewer systems are allocated to those with the ability to pay, epidemics will kill poor people and threaten the rich.) There will continue to be some stable organizational structure to create slow-changing rules, and and to choose, pay for and maintain longlasting assets.
There are other areas currently supported by government — education, health care — where there is some social agreement to spend common resources, but many opinions about how to do this, with competition between centralized and decentralized approaches.
The current geographical basis of governance — local, state/province, national, international — is shaped by geographic concentration of interests, and communication costs. As communication costs decrease, and it’s easier for citizens with common interests to band together across geography, jurisdictions will probably change.
It is useful to think about which aspects of social policy should continue to be set, funded, and managed by slow deliberative government process, which functions should remain but shift jurisdiction, and which functions should be handled by other social structures.
In sum, ideas of emergent democracy provide valuable tools for thinking about the networked polity. But a strong model of emergent democracy includes a picture of how people organize and deliberate, and how government functions in a networked world. Because the nodes of the network are intelligent, and the environment is built by people, it is not at all pointless to discuss a model of governance in a networked polity, and the answers are far from deterministic.
This essay can be found in live wiki form, here

Washington DC closes streets, puts up security checkpoints.
In the words of a taxi-driver interviewd by the Washington Post: “During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, you didn’t see this kind of thing,” the 49-year-old Nigerian immigrant said. “Fear shouldn’t grip the nation like this. It’s demoralizing that a few people could cause a wall of change that affects the city’s character and image of this country.”

In case you were wondering about the point of the party convention: here’s one of the main reasons. In addition to an infomercial, with delegates as “cheer track”; and a celebration for rank and file party faithful, it’s about “donor maintence.”
Even as John Edwards gives a rousing speech about “Two Americas”, here’s who’s looking down on the populace from the Fleet Center Sky Boxes (as reported by Michah Sifry)
Level 9 boxes
902 DLCC
903 IAFF
904 B04/IBM & Verizon
905 DNC Vice Chairs
906 Kerry Faithful
907 Mayors
908 Trial Lawyers
909 USSS
910 MA Cong Delegation
Level 9 boxes:
901 DNCC Operation
916 B04 Org Labor/AFSCME
915 B04 Org Labor/SEIU
914 B04 Org Labor/AFT
913 New Balance and Simon Properties
912 Boston Foundation and Fidelity
911 B04 Org Labor
Like the Republican machine (Enron, Halliburton), the Democratic party machine is currently about raising millions of dollars for television ads.
Money buys access. A partial list of those being feted in the “Mayor’s club” includes: Daimler Chrysler, Diageo’s, DTE Energy, Faulker USA, Hinton, Communications, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, KNP/Dutko, Microsoft
Here are the advertised benefits for participating in the “Mayor’s Club”, for a $5000 donation. “an opportunity to share ideas and interact with the nation’s Democratic mayors

The Washington Post has the first articulate explanation I’ve seen for declaring war on “terror.” I don’t agree with the explanation, but at least I understand it.
Caleb Carr, a professor of military history, describes terrorism in the same category as slavery and piracy — practices that were once common, but have been rendered unacceptable.

It’s true that both slavery and piracy are still practiced, but only in remote corners of the world; certainly genocide is still with us, but its employment is now cause for immediate sanction and forceful reaction (theoretically, at any rate) by the United Nations. Banning such tactics and actively stamping out their practice has been the work of some of the great political and military minds and leaders of the past two centuries. Now it is time — past time, really — for terrorism to take its place as a similarly proscribed and anachronistic practice.”

The trouble with this argument is a Robbean one. Guerrilla warfare is an ancient tactic used by rebels to fight more powerful foes, using tactics of sabotage, assassination, and terror. Contemporary terrorists are fighting guerrilla wars, using modern techniques of organizing networks, and disrupting modern infrastructure.
Slavery and piracy could be banned because they were mainstream. They were practiced by states, which could be persuaded or compelled to obey laws. In England, abolitionists used political persuasion to outslaw slavery. The US fought a civil war, and the slave states were defeated. Piracy was once a common technique of interstate warfare and extralegal taxation (see wikipedia on Privateering. In the mid-1800s, nations signed treaties to ban privateering, and the tactic faded away. Meanwhile, criminal piracy appears to be on the increase.
Guerrilla groups behave the way they do because they cast themselves as outsiders. They don’t have empathy for the civilians of the enemy, so abolitionist-style appeals to morality won’t work. They’re using military tactics that are effective when you don’t have access to an army.
Carr damns explanations of guerrilla tactics as misplaced moral relativism. But you don’t have to sympathize with rebel groups, or morally justify killing civilians, in order to see that these tactics can be perceived as a rational way of fighting a war, for groups who see enemy civilians as infidels or occupiers.
It is possible to defeat particular guerrilla groups. But you can’t just dissuade groups who see themselves as outsiders from using the the tactics available to them. Some argue that terrorist tactics are a sign of desperation. Some groups may be desperate. Others are just calculating and smart. It is a very efficient way of using minimal resources to create maximum damage and distress to an enemy.
Terrorist groups aren’t states that will sign treaties and then abide by them. Getting involved in every guerrilla war on the planet is a way of ensuring perpetual warfare, and creating more enemies.
The September 11 commission suggests that we should give up trying to fight a war against a tactic, and should instead focus our efforts against Islamic militants, especially Al Qaeda, who have declared war on us.
Carr thinks that this will confuse Muslims, who will believe that we’re fighting a Crusade, in the medieval sense. I think this is bogus. If we don’t actually declare that we’re fighting a Crusade, and don’t make as if to invade and occupy
multiple Muslim nations, most Muslims will understand that we’re fighting particular groups of radicals.
I think the September 11 recommendation is sensible. Identify and defeat an enemy that has declared war on us. Build alliances around the world to help defeat a global network.
But the US shouldn’t storm into every guerrilla conflict from South America to South Asia, just because a given group of outsiders decides to bomb a power plant or a restaurant.

“If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child,” Obama said. “If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper — that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.”

“The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats,” he said. “But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

I hate speechifying most of the time, and reading that had me teary. Here’s the transcript, and video.
Appealing to common feelings and ideas, from the heart. Reaching for the good part of American patriotism – tolerance and community, entrepreneurialism and political freedom – rather than the bad part – arrogance and self-righteousness.
Politics and policies through people. His stories don’t sound like a politician’s theoretical concept of the common man – trekking to a supermarket for a photo-op, trailing camera-men and handlers. He sounds like a guy who talks to people.

You know, a while back, I met a young man named Shamus at the VFW Hall in East Moline, Illinois. He was a good-looking kid, 6-2 or 6-3, clear eyed, with an easy smile. He told me he’d joined the Marines and was heading to Iraq the following week. And as I listened to him explain why he’d enlisted, his absolute faith in our country and its leaders, his devotion to duty and service, I thought this young man was all that any of us might hope for in a child. But then I asked myself: Are we serving Shamus as well as he was serving us?

And he’s not an anchorman — doing a bit of background research, Obama has the policy details, enjoys the game, and has guts. From a New Yorker profile

In Springfield, Obama led a campaign for death-penalty reforms that resulted in unprecedented legislation, requiring the police to videotape all interrogations in cases involving capital crimes…. When he talks about the maneuvering it took to line up the state

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Farhad Manjoo at Salon wonders whyreaders of political blogs make campaign contributions.
That is the silliest question ever.
Why do wealthy people put on uncomfortable clothes, eat mediocre food, and listen to boring speeches, sitting around white tablecloths with their friends, while giving thousands of dollars to political candidates?
People like to gather in groups to reinforce shared opinions. They like to make a difference, to further a cause they believe in. It’s more compelling to give $20 when you see that it helps create a $20,000 joint donation that will make your candidate more viable.
Sure, there’s some e-bay like psychological re-inforcement when you see others give. But not necessarily more than when a wealthy person gives $10,000 to match the $10,000 contribution of a wealthy neighbor.
Same game, there’s just more of us playing.

I hear a piece of conventional wisdom that the Republicans are the party of the Heart, and the Democrats are the party of the Head.
Oddly, because days gone by, the smear was “bleeding heart liberal.”
In the glory days of liberalism, heart and head went together. Rivers were burning, and enviromentalists wanted to clean things up. Black kids weren’t allowed to go to school with white kids, neighborhoods were zoned “whites only.” Tensions were very high at the time, but the liberal position had the emotional and intellectual advantage.
The conservative critique attacked excesses of liberalism – identity politics that read small insensitivities as major discrimination, civic spending that exceeded ability to pay, belief in hedonism as self-fulfillment, leading to drug abuse and endemic divorce.
There’s a good letter to Andrew Sullivan’s blog saying that so-called conservatives aren’t making sense anymore. Big deficits instead of fiscal reason, imperial adventurism instead of strong defense, big-government in our bedrooms and snooping on our library checkouts and credit cards, crony capitalist corruption.
So, maybe its true that Republicans are the party of the heart, but if so, it means what “bleeding heart liberal” used to mean — that an ideology that once had head and heart together has gone over the edge — they’re not making sense anymore.

So, my colleague Rick Klau has been invited to speak on the blogger’s panel at the Democratic National Convention.
Very very cool. Something is inching toward change. Though rumor is they don’t have wifi.
Hmm…. I wonder what they do at party conventions, other than schmooze and put on a TV show. I wonder what a party convention would look like, if a large part of communication was done by bloggers talking to people who talk back? What would a political convention look like if it caught theCluetrain?
p.s. good explantion, via David Weinberger of how conventions became tv shows, and how the media is part of the show