Open Source Democracy 2.0

[JeremyLerner]

I’m relatively new to DU, but I'm hopeful that a few established DU'ers will take some time to explore my proposed 'next generation' application of open source democracy:

Open Source Democracy 2.0

If you do, you'll learn how a new Web-based mechanism, the “No” Vote Pledge Campaign, can radically re-align the political landscape in the US in a way that will advance the progressive goals of the DU community. In this realigned power structure, an organization such as DU could easily evolve into -- or perhaps beget -- an Issues-Only Political Party (“IOP”, as defined in the essay) that would wield influence on a par with the major candidate parties of today.

I’m actually a normal person, so I understand how grandiose this all sounds. It continues to startle me as well, but so far no one has been able to logically explain to me why this doesn’t make sense or won’t (in theory at least) be effective. I welcome any/all feedback.

Credential: for what it’s worth, I am the author of the current novel The 28th Amendment, an election/political thriller that explores the potential for conflict between entertainment and politics in a media-defined age. On another level the book is also a chilling parable of the Bush administration’s relentless stoking and exploitation of our nation’s post-9/11 Osamaphobia, so it should appeal to most DU'ers.

[arendt]

1. "I’m actually a normal person, so I understand how grandiose this all sounds." - been there...

I will take a look tonight. I understand how frustrating it is to want to work in this "field", but to see it be the plaything of hacks and corporate fascists. (Check out "electronic government" - funded by our biggest corporations, researched at our top universities, and nothing but a fig leaf for more privatization, more reduction of voter input - despite the pretentious title.)

Would you care to peruse some equally grandiose ideas of mine?

Part 1: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/arendt/75

Part 2: http://journals.democraticunderground.com/arendt/74

arendt

[JeremyLerner]

2. Open Source Democracy 2.0

Thanks for responding! Happy to take a look at your items. I claim no monopoly on innovation ....

[arendt]

3. I took a fast look...

One question:

It seems you are relying on the honesty of the politician - that he will keep the pledge he has made. What's to stop him from coming up with some bullshit excuse ("conditions have changed", "I got new information when I got to office", etc.)

Does this "no" pledge have any legal teeth?

arendt

[JeremyLerner]

4. Fast Look Response -- have also beenreading your essays.

Your inquiry about politician integrity, will they actually do what they say they'll do, points to a flaw (perhaps), but not a fatal one.

1. Most would follow through on their commitments. The flaw relates to what is probably a small minority of circumstances.
2. Worst case scenario, in the case of a 'faithless elected official', would be that they would be thrown out of office at their next regularly scheduled election.
3. If the breach were grievous enough, the electorate could use existing Democracy 1.0 (what I call "closed source") legal tools for recourse: a recall referendum, for example. It wouldn't be too hard to convert the NVP pledge list on a particular issue into a recall petition.
4. The underlying 'architecture', as it were, of Open Source Democracy, is that it doesn't try to directly interfere or conflict with existing institutions. My concept of OSD (similar to your Democracy 2.0), is that the electorate will create its own new political structure alongside the existing one, and this structure will achieve the electorate's will by applying pressure to the existing, traditional closed-source institutions.

I have finished reading Part One and have been making notes in a MS Word table. There is a lot we have in common. I will follow up when I've finished Part Two. Is there a way to send attachments through DU?

[arendt]

5. I tried dragging attachments into both posts and PMs. No luck.

If you want to send attachments, send me a PM, and I will send back an email address.

I will be interested in the comparisons in your table.

Nice to find someone with similar interests.

arendt

[arendt]

6. Here's a link worth looking at. (Mark Newman, the cartography & social networking guy)

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/pubs.html

Check out Pub #7:

Community structure in the United States House of Representatives, Mason A. Porter, Peter J. Mucha, M. E. J. Newman, and A. J. Friend, Physica A 386, 414–438 (2007).

arendt

[JeremyLerner]

7. completed First Read of your essays

To my way of thinking, we have an astonishing amount that's common in our thinking. I have made some relevant notes in this chart which I converted to pdf and put up as a web page (private)
http://www.amendment-28.com/final/responsetoArendt.pdf

The bottom line, we agree on everything except the near term solution.
Your idea of specializing the legislatures is fine and may (I'm by no means sure) the best way to 'marketize' politics so that the democracy really reflects the will of the people. I would want to think on that and discuss it with a lot of people before becoming fully convinced.
But in order to implement this radical change in the structure of Democracy 1.0, you literally have to tear apart the existing system and rebuild it at its most fundamental level. Great idea, but in practical terms it's not going to happen (as we both agree, the status quo has zero interest in changing the existing system, and they're the ones that would have to effect the change. It's the same reason there's never really any effective campaign finance reform -- incumbents benefit way too much from the current system to see it materially changed in any way).

My proposal, to establish an Issues-Only Party that will sponsor and promote winnable No Vote Pledge Campaigns, is intended as a practical next step that can actually effect a change. The reason my IOP might work, when your's would not, is because the structure I'm proposing doesn't require that anything else be torn down and replaced. My OSD2.0 is intended to grow alongside Democracy 1.0 and through issue-oriented politics force incremental changes in the existing democracy.

I'm very curious to know what flaws you may see in that proposition.

I could imagine in possibly 100 years our OSD2.0 may have advanced enough to tackle something like the restructuring you are proposing.

I will look at the links you just sent me.

[arendt]

8. Just leaving work. I skimmed what you put on your website...

I will think about this on the drive home (and the subsequent chores). I will try to post something later tonight.

I am trying to integrate IOP into my concept.

BTW, what I am proposing is not as complete a break as it seems. I am proposing that we elect the bureaucrats that are now appointed by Congress-critters. That change is no more radical than the Amendment to elect Senators, back in 1920 (or thereabouts). Also, my proposal is really nothing more than a re-scaling of the current committee system.

Here is (an UNFINISHED version of part 3 of my essay):

------------------------

In Part 2, I motivated the number and size of a dynamically-reorganizable set of legislatures. In this section, I will describe how the connections between these legislatures are designed and remodeled.

As mentioned earlier, there is nothing sacred about the model of bicameral legislatures. In fact, it perpetuates a kind of aristocratic/commoner paradigm that is long out-of-date. The interaction of two (or more) legislatures is not the only component of the system of checks and balances in a three-branches-of-government model. For any given law, all that is required is that some subset of the multiple legislatures has the power to override an Executive Branch veto. With the issue of vetoes set aside, we can describe the interconnection of legislatures in a non-bicameral way.

1. Management of the committee system of Congress

At first, you might think that connecting a system of multiple legislatures would be very hard to do. But, the existing Congress already manages to do something similar, as part of its daily business, in the process of assigning new bills to appropriate committees for consideration. It is all done by the system of "jurisdcition", which is well known to those familiar with Congress:

Statutory Jurisdictions

Most committees have 10 to 15 specific issues listed under their jurisdiction in the rules... {cf MY NOTE after this excerpt}

Common Law Jurisdictions

When jurisdictionally ambiguous bills are introduced, they still have to be referred to one committee (or sometimes several committees) within 24 hours. As will be explained, House and Senate parliamentarians - unelected but powerful clerks - refer bills and resolve jurisdictional ambiguities. These referrals establish binding precedents for all future bills on the same subjects, thereby resolving jurisdictional ambiguities...

The comparison between statutory and common law jurisdctions parallels the distinction lawyers and judges make between statutory and case law.

Almost all jurisdictional change happens in "new" areas or in old areas that are being recast in the light of new events...

Multiple Referrals

Since 1975 in the House (and informally, many years earlier in the Senate), it has been possible for one bill to be referred to more than one committee. In recent years, 15-20% of all House bills have been multiply referred...There are, in practice, two types of multiple referrals: joint and sequential. Joint referrals, in which one bill is sent to more than one committee at the same time, is the most common, comprising more than 94% of all multiple referrals in the 99th Congress, 1986-7. With sequential referrals, additional committees may get a chance at a bill only after (and only if) it is reported out of the lead committee.

At first, it might appear that multiple referrals could lead to jurisdictional free-for-alls, with identical bills going to multiple committees...In practice, committees have most assuredly not surrendered autonomy. Though not specified in the written rules, the practice under joint referrals is that committees are limited to working only on issues within their established domain. To do anything else welcomes challenges at the Rules Committee and on the floor, something most committees are eager to avoid. Jointly referred bill reinforce, rather than tear down, jurisdictional walls.

- David C. King, "The Nature of Congressional Committee Jurisdictions", The American Political Science Review, Vol 88, pp 48-62 (1994).
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-0554%28199403%2988%3A1%3C48%3ATNOCCJ%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

MY NOTE: The list of statutory jurisdictions of House committees can be found in its Rule X, which is online at: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/hrm/browse_110.html. The list of statutory jurisdictions of Senate committees can be found in its Rule XXV, which is online at: http://rules.senate.gov/senaterules/rule25.php.

2. Computer equivalents to the parliamentarians

If you look at Congress as a system for parsing bills into Constitutionally correct and rationally implementable laws, there is a strong architectural similarity between the committee system and a modern multiple-function-unit CPU. (Sorry for the computer terminology, but it is a very good analogy.)

2.1 Modern CPU architecture

In a CPU, instructions are read from a buffer and partially decoded. That is, enough information from the instruction is parsed to decide what type of instruction it is. (Sometimes, one "complex" instruction decodes into multiple "reduced" instructions.) With that information, it is possible for a hardware unit called an "instruction dispatcher" to route the instruction to a "functional unit" (FU) that is capable of performing that instruction. In a modern CPU, functional units are specialized. Some perform only multiplications, some perform only additions, some perform only logical operations or memory accesses. Often, one unit can perform all instructions of one type and a few common instructions of a different type.

There are multiple hardware units in a single CPU, sometimes multiple copies of the same type of FU, e.g., several multipliers in a CPU that is used for math-heavy applications. Each FU has a queue of instructions waiting for execution. Each instruction has a tag on it, to allow it to execute when the FU is ready (and when all the inputs to the instruction, which might only be available as outputs from another FU, have arrived). These tags allow instructions to execute "out of order" (OOO), which is necessary due to the multiple FUs and queues. After execution, the results are put into a "re-order buffer" that maintains the sequential consistency of the original program.

From the above description, it is clear that the dispatch of instructions to an appropriate functional unit is a non-trivial task. Nevertheless, it is a rational task that is straightforward to accomplish. One should also notice that even "general purpose" computer designers go for specialized FUs.

2.2 Parliamentarians as analogous to instruction dispatchers

The statutory and common law jurisdictions are the rules of the "instruction dispatcher" for new bills. If the bill is "complex", the parliamentarian may divide it into parts (multiple referrals). Those "reduced" parts may execute in parallel (joint referral) or one committee (FU) may wait on the results of another committee (FU) (sequential referral).

Parliamentarians are much more resourceful than a hunk of computer hardware, though. Parliamentarians do not simply "crash" when presented with a bill that has ambiguous jurisdiction. They make up new dispatch rules on the spot, and add them to their rules table. As noted in the passage from King, rules tables change slowly and usually only at the periphery. Nevertheless, there can be major revisions of statutory jurisdictions from time to time.

2.3 The internals of Congressional committees

Just to complete the analogy, individual committees (like FUs) have all the capbilities they need to complete the processing of bills (or parts of bills) of their "type". For the moment, we will leave the details of bill processing for later, and move on to the interconnections between committees implied by multiple referrals.

3 Networks in Congress

The Internet has spawned a new kind of mathematical specialty: Social Network Theory. Research in this area creates algorithms that attempt to find clusters of or connections between people, based on their interactions. The connections are deduced from hits on websites, "buddy" lists, and other social information collected from "clicks".

While these algorithms have been oversold - especially in the anti-terrorism community, as ways to track potential perpetrators and "cells" - there is a strong foundation of statistical theory that is capable of defining such networks, given enough data of good enough quality. In fact, there is even literature on the networks in the U.S. Congress. In the paper:

"Community structure in the United States House of Representatives", Mason A. Porter, Peter J. Mucha, M. E. J. Newman, and A. J. Friend, Physica A 386, 414–438 (2007).
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0602033

Figure 4 shows a graph of interconnectivity of the committees and subcommittees of the 108th HR. Figure 11 shows that interconnectivity rearranged into a hierarchical set of neighbors.

3.1 From Community Structure to Legislative Connectivity

The preceding sections show that there are straightforward rules for managing multiple jurisdictions and that statistics can be extracted from the legislative process to indicate how those jurisdictions have interacted historically. These facts, therefore, already demonstrate the feasibility of designing a form of democracy with a large number of legislatures, each with circumscribed jurisdictions.

This demonstration needs to be traded off with the numbers generated in our quick analysis of 30k legislatures, so that appropriate numbers of legislators and legislatures are assigned. But, all that is a dynamically changing problem, which the techniques just mentioned have shown themselves to be capable of handling. Multiple legislatures are just a reworking of the existing committee and parliamentarian system.

3.2 Dimensionality reduction

about num legs to assign to, and muscling in, and questions of general interest

committee of the whole (budget, war, important)
http://thomas.loc.gov/home/votes/whole.html

The next level of connectivity is between the committees and the elected Cabinet officers.

4 Cabinet Coalitions

As Abraham Lincoln allegedly said to his cabinet:

Seven nays and one aye; the ayes have it.

It has been my contention from the start that the historical usurpations of the Executive Branch, especially in times of war, have proven to be the greatest threat to American democracy. Parliamentary systems have weaknesses of their own, but they are better able to deal with executive malfeasance, via no-confidence votes. None of the extensive machinery of impeachment; just a simple vote on any old issue.

4.1 Election of Cabinet Officers

In Part 1?2?, I noted that Cabinet officers are appointed, and usually for reasons more personal and political than governmental. It is high time for the voters to have a say in the selection of these important officials. Witness the damage done by religious lunatics like James Watt of the EPA, or ideologues like Donald Rumsfeld at the Defense Department. Indeed, the Congress was supposed to "advise and consent" on these appointments; but, in reality, they have been a rubber-stamp except in rare cases where the appointees politics are already notorious to the general public.

[JeremyLerner]

9. Unfinished part 3

The number of areas in which we share common thinking/agreement is interesting:
(1) abuse of the executive branch; lack of accountability even in checks-balances environment
(2) analogies between computer operating systems (or CPU's) and the democratic processes.

I also might agree theoretically with the direction of your proposal -- to re-engineer down to the foundations the structure of our democracy. However, notwithstanding the fact that your proposal derives from our existing committee/sub-commitee structure, I still see it as far too radical a step to be given serious consideration by the people who can make the change.

Related Question: if we have a democracy with thousands of specialist representatives, how are those people going to fund their political campaigns? It seems to me that if the issue of campaign finance reform has to be fixed first. If not, in your proposal we'd end up with a giant 10,000 person legislature that is still owned by the corporate interests that fund the elections.

I advocate that there are numerous, perhaps dozens, of incremental changes that need to be made in our society before the great leap you're describing can be effected.

[arendt]

10. Related question - funding

Funding must be leveled, or we have a money-ocracy. (on edit: ) it goes without saying that I want total public financing. No more "a million buys a billion" campaign donations. Public financing is way less expensive because there are no kickbacks and pork needed.

I think that campaigning might be doable on the net - the equivalent of posting YouTube videos. Also, there is plenty of Cable TV bandwidth, if the government had any backbone about demanding that it be used for the public good, instead of lining the pockets of the Corporate Media (and allowing them to gatekeep politics).

Also, the electorate for each candidate is targeted at 30k voters. That is so small that mass advertising should be wiped out as a vehicle for campaigning (hooray). I want to get back to more personal campaigning. (Of course, those voters may well be spread over a big geographic area because of the non-geographical nature of specialized voting. So electronic means of TWO-WAY communication between candidate and dispersed, but small, specialized electorate are essential.)

------

Also, I understand about phasing change in. But, I think we agree that this system can be brought on-line on the Internet, in such a manner as to influence (and eventually, control) conventional politics. Once there is control, the changes can be enacted into law.

arendt

[arendt]

12. More background material

This is my journal entry #73, the one just before the two part Democracy 2.0 entries.

---------

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[JeremyLerner]

13. financing sub-threat

We again are in agreement on the the need for public financing, which my proposed amendment incorporates. Public funding is not a radical change, however: all of the various iterations of the FECA laws (1974 ff) provided for public funding in exchange for voluntary compliance with spending limits. This is a concept that is well established, and was working with at least some degree of effectiveness until recently. So I chose not to make it the center-focus of my proposed Amendment, even though it provides for substantial public financing. The real change being proposed in the 28th amendment is the cap on spending -- which addresses (and fixes) directly, at the constitutional level, Buckley v. Valeo and its succeeding rulings.

Bear in mind that if you're going to have a legislature of 30,000 people, there may be well 60,000 or more campaigns being conducted. Even if no one's paying cash for advertising (cf. below), that's still a lot of campaigns and a lot of money.

I agree the cash outlay could be reduced substantially by reclaiming bandwidth for public/electoral use outside of the framework of the commercial media conglomerates, or simply using eminent domain to use seize some of their bandwidth for the public good.

Your last comment here about phasing in ... will pick up with next post.
NR

[arendt]

17. "if...legislature of 30k people, there may be well 60k or more campaigns being conducted"

First, my current working number is closer to 20k elected bureaucrats, but that's just a quibble.

The point is that each of those campaigns only has to reach 30k voters. The scale changes everything. First, it makes broadcast TV a non-starter, because, out of a TV audience of millions, you are only targeting 30k people. So, immediately, campaigning moves to some other medium. Now, given the distributed geography of voters in a "district" or a list-voting legislature, door-to-door campaigning doesn't seem poised to make a big revival. But, internet-based videos and interactive internet events could easily assemble several thousand voters at minimal costs.

Look at the current Presidential campaign cycle. Hillary and Barack have spent close to $500 M so far. That is close to $30,000 for each of 20k campaigns. That is $1/vote. I don't have the current spending per voter statistics, but I think that is in the ballpark. And that money, today, is largely spent on expensive TV advertising.

I simply do not see a money problem with campaigns targeting only 30k voters.

arendt

[JeremyLerner]

15. Next Objective for OSD 2.0

I am trying to remain as focused as I can on taking next, practical steps.

As I see it, the next step needed to advance my concept of an Issues-Only Party, is to find some public figures, someone like Stephen Colbert, to learn about OSD2.0 and give it public visibility. The entire concept can be launched and proven in a matter of months, if we could just find the right public advocate to embrace it.

I of course have sent my book and my essay to all of the most likely candidates for this role, and have not heard back from one of them (for all I know my information never reaches them).

So if you happen to know any one (who knows anyone) who can get the attention of a Colbert, or Jon Stewart, of Keith Olbermann, or Oprah Winfrey -- it doesn't matter, any public figure who has an interest in progressive politics -- please put them in touch with me.
NR

[arendt]

18. Sorry, can't help. I don't know any media celebrities. In fact, I find the whole concept...

part of the demolition of democracy. It is all part of the cult of hyper-individualism that is eating the heart out of community in this country.

And, as I asked in another response, what STRATEGY is IOP in pursuit of? NVP is a TACTIC. Assume that NVP works as you say. What do you want to accomplish with this TOOL?

arendt

[arendt]

11. Your "no vote" pledge seems to be a simple way to operationalize part of specialized voting...

but, it still needs another pledge - namely a pledge that each voter limits himself to a certain small number of specialized topics.

The acceptance that having the right to vote on ALL issues is a monkey trap is at the center of my proposal. People are finite, and our society is too complex to allow such a fantasy to exist. That is not to say that everyone doesn't get to vote for Executive-like officials (i.e., the Cabinet secretaries at the top of the multi-level legislature pyramids).

To repeat, I need to add things to NVP to get to my form of government:

1) a pledge to limit your individual NVPs to a small number of legislatures (as determined by the rules/parliamentarians - this data can easily be obtained by getting the committee referrals for a given bill from Thomas).

1A) Of course, this begs the question of how voters are officially and verifiably assigned to specializations. Some kind of lottery+seniority+real-world career metric needs to be created and centrally administered by some open-source but cryptographically-secure web site.

2) I also need a way to get voters to focus on SPECIFIC congressional staffers. (Remember that this voting district of 30k votes for the equivalent of one single staffer.) The specializations and/or bill assignments of those staffers should be a matter of public record, if they aren't already. I'm sure lobbyists have this info. I want those guys to feel as much heat from the voters as they do from the corporate lobbyists that are wining and dining them and offering them lucrative revolving-door jobs.

-----------

I am still doing this in between other tasks. So, please pardon the lack of focus.

arendt

[JeremyLerner]

14. NVP simple way to operationalize . . .

If I understand correctly (please confirm), your new democratic methodology would require that voters self-select themselves into constituencies of 30K people, aligned along some area of specialized interest/expertise. If that's the proposed model, I'm afraid that's where it breaks down for me.

Which is not to say your organizational structure might not be the best or most efficient or most effective in terms of translating the will of the people into governance -- you may be right. I just don't think that the average voter, whose mind is so oriented towards geographic politics, will ever make this switch. The departure from existing norms is just too radical. As previously noted, maybe in a hundred years our society will advance to a point where all of its highly educated, net-empowered citizens could embrace this kind of concept. Your proposal 1A is indicative of how advanced this society would have to be.

I'm confused by (2). If the voters were assigned to a specialization, they would know who the candidates were in their 'district'.

Continuing with new post ....

[arendt]

16. Most abstract issue 1st: don't think that..average voter..geographic politics will make this switch"

I will talk about your posts on details second; but I really want to defend my POV first. (Just as I am sure you would defend yours.)

----

First of all, in my proposal, there are still local governments (i.e., state and city level) for "geographically oriented" voters. Everyone still gets to vote for a representative for their locale.

But to the point of geography, somewhere in what I wrote, I said that (paraphrase) it is issues that excite people, not candidates. However, "candidate bundling", huge district sized, and gerrymandering have made it impossible to focus on issues, except through single-issue organizing groups. My proposal, then, is to align the governmental structure with the single-issue organizational structure and eliminate the mismatch between the strucutres.

I also contend that, after seven years of GOP/DLC rule, everyone knows the current system is broken and that fundamental repairs are needed. People are sick of lying media, campaigns that are about fund-raising instead of issues, celebrities instead of candidates, and revolving door government. I have based my proposal upon "exposing" a lower level of goverment to the "compiler" of voting. The people, not the corporations, need to be in control of the staffer/apparatchiks who are writing the laws today. I think that my proposal is no more "radical" than the current situation of corporate rule through political puppetry.

When you say that " the departure from existing norms is too radical", what about all the people TODAY who do become single-issue voters and pick their candidates on that one issue? Are they all "radicals"? Its my assumption that issue voting is what drives all committed politically-aware people, and that focusing political offices in that manner will actually increase participation in politics.

Think about it. Right now, I get to pick among two suits who are driven by bullshit issues like gay marriage, when I want to express my opinion about who will do a better job running the agriculture department (e.g., I'm a farmer). Why should some irrelevant (even if not BS) issue bear on my vote about farming?

Anyway, that's my position. I think this change is do-able WITH CAVEATS. It must be done on-line first as a shadow government, to get it up and running with people who want it to succeed. There must be public financing and free air time and/or free internet/youtube space. NVP can help to operationalize this change. But, it is only a TACTIC. I am time-limited, or I would study your writing in detail. Can I impose on you to spell out for me the STRATEGY that you propose to implement with NVP. That is, what votes on what issue do you see as minimally necessary for restoring democracy to America?

----

> Your proposal 1A is indicative of how advanced this society would have to be.

The tricky part of 1A is the crypto and the website, not the picking itself. Picking a selection will be about as hard as downloading an MP3 for your iPod. The statutory jurisdictions of all legislatures would be posted; and people could lookup which legislature voted on bills that they are concerned about. This choice of specialties is no harder than picking a brand of automobile.

> If the voters were assigned to a specialization, they would know who the candidates were in their 'district'.

There are two ways to do this: the European "list" system, and a geographic "district" system.

In the list system, all the candidates for a given specialty/legislature from a given party are ordered in a list (most favored ones at the top). Votes for entire "lists"/parties are tabulated and winners are selected from the lists in proportion to the votes received, with the top of the list picked first. This is a Proportional Representation system, based around parties. But there could be as many parties as there are legislatures.

In the district system, once all the voters in the country had picked/been assigned their specialties, the voters in that specialty would be grouped by geography into districts. This grouping would facilitate these voters actually getting together. But, the "district" could be disjoint. For example, if the specialty were urban planning, you might expect that a district could encompass NYC, Chicago, and LA.

Once the voters are assigned to districts, a "seat" is assigned to that district. Candidates can then run for that seat. This is a winner-take-all system. But, because there are hundreds of legislatures, ticket splitting is not suicide. A "third-party" position on an issue in one legislature may be a "majority party" position in a different legislature.

Either way, the organization is around issues, not politicians.

----

I will respond to your other posts later. I have some weekend chores to do. Thanks for responding.

arendt

[JeremyLerner]

19. Limits of abstract ideas . . . continued.

.Picking up your statement: "Its my assumption that issue voting is what drives all committed politically-aware people, and that focusing political offices in that manner will actually increase participation in politics."
That's my assumption also -- and that's why I think NVP campaigns have the potential to work (for the right issue). NVP campaigns allow voters to wrest control of specific issues directly from the politicians.

> Tactics v. strategy.
I don't have the same erudition or training that you (and apparently many other people) do with respect to these terms, and therefore tend not to get hung up on defining them. I'm sure what I think of as a strategy you will label a tactic, and vice versa.

I'm not pleading ignorance or trying to patronize you: Whenever someone throws this contrast at me, I universally -- 100% of the time -- end up arguing about the form and the definition. No interest in going down that path. If that makes me intellectually unworthy, so be it.

My "strategy" is well defined in the essay: the object is to have the electorate contruct its own new "open source" democracy alongside the existing "closed source" establishment structures. This new democratic structure (I think it will emerge as these IOP's -- issues-only parties) will derive its power from its capacity to reliably influence the outcome of traditional, establishement elections. The "strategies" of these new IOP's will be determined by the platform committees and other governance structures of the IOP organization. The NVP Campaign is the tool that will allow IOP to wield power.

>Limits of abstract ideas
The reason I can't get behind your massive legislative re-engineering proposal is that its too complicated to express in an NVP. Or let me put it this way: if you can define your revamping proposal in the framework of an NVP Campaign, in such a way that people can read it and in one or two sentences understand the entire proposition, then maybe I could get behind it. But i don't see how that's possible.

The 28th Amendment itself is over 1000 words long, but the proposition is clear in a few words: it puts a cap on spending for Federal general elections.

Rant as you (and I) may about the incapacity of the average citizen to act in their own interest, the realpolitik is that most Americans are far too simple minded, and far too conservative (with a little c) to aborb any massive change in legislative structure.

[arendt]

20. Goals versus methods (or ends versus means)

I don't want to get "hung up" on definitions, but they are needed when strangers try to discuss things.

Let me put it another way: "strategy vs tactics" makes the same distinction as "goals vs methods". I sure hope you don't object to those common-sense words.

Case in point as to why I am sensitive about these particular definitions: the "War on Terror" bullshit. Terror is a tactic, a method. You can't declare war on a tactic. Everyone uses terror (we blow people up from the air or kidnap and torture them - same result, the target population is terrorized). It is the goals of the organization (i.e., the strategy, and the people espousing the strategy) that we oppose/declare war upon. This very distinction, which you don't want to get hung up on, is at the heart of the disinformation campaign which is ruining our country.

----

You have clearly stated your goal:

> to have the electorate construct its own new "open source" democracy
> alongside the existing "closed source" establishment structures.

And that is where your goal ends. Your goal is the construction of a value-neutral political method (i.e., IOP/NVP). You say it is the organizations/IOPs (which the electorate will SOMEHOW construct) who will determine the political goals:

> The "strategies" of these new IOP's will be determined by the platform committees
> and other governance structures of the IOP organization.

Fine. I understand your position. Think of me as a member of an IOP. My single issue is to create a FORM of government that works for people and the environment, instead of for corporations and billionaires. As I stated in my essays, the current system is already a for-corporations-only, talk-directly-to-the-staffers, specialized legislatures system.

You will not control that current system by creating a thousand UNCOORDINATED IOPs. (Below I give two ways to disrupt uncoordinated IOPs.) You will be defeated in detail. That is, each individual IOPs agenda will be crushed/bamboozled, at a moment chosen by the corporations, via the legal (harassment/outlawing/corrupt DOJ) and financial (bribery/lobbying) means available to the massively coordinated corporate government.

My proposal is a FORM/strategy of government that tries to coordinate all these IOPs, so as not to be crushed one at a time. I would use your tools to construct my own political pressure group, just as you want.

----

You say you "can't get behind (my) proposal (because) its too complicated to express as an NVP".

Did you ever hear the saying "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."? I do not see that saying the magic word "NVP" fixes our current problem any more than the magic word "Instant Runoff Voting".

Yes, I do want my gun to fire when I pull the trigger, and I want it to shoot where I aim it. But, that isn't going to win the battle if my general and all his officers are incompetent idiots. So, I can support NVP; but it is no more than a tool.

> if you can define your revamping proposal in the framework of an NVP Campaign,
> in such a way that people can read it and in one or two sentences understand the
> entire proposition, then maybe I could get behind it. But i don't see how that's
> possible.

In two sentences:

1) vote for the IOPs you think are important.
2) accept the decision of a majority of voters about which set of IOPs to focus upon.

Here are the details:

STEP 1: Write an NVP for your IOP.

STEP 2: Send that NVP to a Website, where it is posted along with all other NVPs.

STEP 3: Ask everyone involved in any of the submitted NVPs (that is, any voter who buys has joined any IOP) to vote for the XXX most important IOPs. Where XXX represents the number of specialized votes per voter, decided upon for the implementation of my idea.

Of course, this voting happens after some well-publicized time period on some well-publicized date by some cryptographically-secure means.

STEP 4: Rank the IOPs according to the number of votes received.

STEP 5: Declare the top YYY IOPs to be official IOPs. Ask the other IOPs to merge their issue into one of the official IOPs. Where YYY represents the number of specialized legislatures in my idea.

STEP 6: Where there is overlap, members of the involved IOPs meet to draw up formal jurisdictional rules as to who gets to work on which issues.

From there, you can proceed to have the IOPs organize communications with each other, via the kind of social networking software that I referred to in my incomplete third essay. Then, IOPs can and should target specific Congressional staffers.
----

Tell me if that sounds too difficult.

My point is that you need a mechanism to limit and focus IOPs, or you have the classic liberal political problem of "herding cats". Even with unlimited numbers of IOPs, you could have fights from almost identical IOPs over who is in charge of a given issue. (In fact, that would be a great false-flag operation to disrupt NVPs.) How do you propose to deal with such an attack?

I do NOT need my concept completely implemented in order to begin. The legislature setup can be also be flexible. You can have new votes on the winning IOPs on a regular basis. Communication between IOPs/legislatures can be worked out as we go. My proposal is completely a shadow government.

On another point, I think that your idea to only hold the 535 elected Congress critters responsible will not stop horrible items from being inserted into bills by ANONYMOUS staffers in the dead of night. Then, the Congress-folk can say "but if we honored all these NVPs, no legislation whatsoever would be passed, since all legislation is polluted with these anonymous insertions". Then, they either shaft the NVPs or they let the Congress come to a halt and blame the NVPs. If the populace is as ignorant as you fear, this tactic could easily scuttle NVP.

Back to you,

arendt

[JeremyLerner]

21. Sorry for Delay - back again.

Arendt,
I have read your last comments and am reading them again. I started to comment back, but there is a lot there, and I'm trying to sort it out and not be dismissive. give me some more time.
NR

[JeremyLerner]

22. strategy tactics goals ends

I am much happier with ends vs. means. Amen.

Part of the reason this took so long is that I went back and re-read your 2-part proposal. The picture you paint there of 100 specialized legislatures, each of which is elected by (if I understand it correctly) voters who have been pre-selected (or self-selected) to vote in only one (or perhaps a selected few) such elections -- this is the fundamentally new structure I'm referring to that I think people will find too radical to embrace (or even to understand). I'm not saying your proposed structure wouldn't work, I'm saying it's too complex for Joe Average to wrap his mind around and support.

That's all from your original essays. Now I see in your most recent post:
>I do NOT need my concept completely implemented in order to begin. The >legislature setup can be also be flexible. You can have new votes on the >winning IOPs on a regular basis. Communication between IOPs/legislatures >can be worked out as we go. My proposal is completely a shadow >government.

So let's go with that later perspective -- that your entire specialized legislature idea doesn't have to happen all at once (I'm not sure what you mean by shadow government). I'm with you so far.

>You will not control that current system by creating a thousand >UNCOORDINATED IOPs. (Below I give two ways to disrupt uncoordinated >IOPs.) You will be defeated in detail. That is, each individual IOPs >agenda will be crushed/bamboozled, at a moment chosen by the >corporations, via the legal (harassment/outlawing/corrupt DOJ) and >financial (bribery/lobbying) means available to the massively >coordinated corporate government.

>My proposal is a FORM/strategy of government that tries to coordinate >all these IOPs, so as not to be crushed one at a time. I would use your >tools to construct my own political pressure group, just as you want.

In this respect I now see why you call my proposal a means (tactic) as opposed to an end (strategy). That's fine with me -- that's all I'm proposing, is the tool. I think we are now both at the point where we are asking the question: how best to wield this tool so that it can actually defeat the corporate-political complex?

I agree that we would get nowhere by having an endless universe of one-issue IOP's. At the conclusion of my essay I note that I think it's likely that only one organization (political party) will emerge as a successful IOP -- and that will be the party that identifies and implements viable (achievable) NVP Campaigns.

I think it will be impossible to stop other non-affiliated NVP campaigns from being launched, because there will always be people passionate about their cause -- whatever it is -- and they will raise their flag and man their battlements as any zealot would. But that won't get them anywhere because their NVP propositions are so partisan that they'll never gain any weight (i.e. majority, bi-partisan support).

However, a group of progressive, open-source minded individuals could create an IOP, start it off with one or two very credible NVP campaigns (I myself like the "No Child Sent to a Phony Front" proposition -- referred to in my essay -- because I think it would attract attention), gain traction from one or two successes, and then expand the menu of issues embraced by adding additional NVP campaigns.

What you describe in your STEPS 1-6 description sounds to me like a methodology/mechanism for the IOP to identify and promote the most important issues (expressed as NVP campaigns). Your method strikes me as being very systematic; I've not thought of it in those terms -- but I'm open to idea. My thoughts with respect to how an IOP would be organized I have enclosed below (I wrote this one page description about two months ago).

where I think we are likely to differ is that I think the IOP should only promote (in public, at least) those NVP campaigns that are likely to achieve the needed bi-partisan support. We could be planning, plotting future NVP's out of the public's view, but to launch a whole slew of NVP Campaigns allat once -- many of which would have no hope of quickly attracting majority support -- would dilute the overall effort. Remember, the party's power will derive from its ability to influence the outcome of closed-source elections.

here's my one-page blurb on IOP formation and governance:

NVP.ORG

The Issues Party

To qualify for Party membership and voting privileges:
(1) You must be a registered voter (checked by sampling and validation)
(2) You must pledge your vote for at least one of NVP's "No" Vote Pledge campaigns
(3) You must fulfill your pledge(s) (honor system)

If you do these three things, you can register with NVP to vote on nominations to, and elections for, the party's Campaign Committee.

The Role of the Campaign Committee is to decide which newly proposed "No" Vote Pledge (NVP) Campaigns are to be embraced by the Party and included on the party's Web site. Once Campaigns are approved by the Campaign Committee, they are added to the list of open campaigns on the NVP Web site, but each individual Campaign must still-based on its merits--garner its own "substantive majority" of "No" Votes in order to become effective as a political lever.

The by-laws that control the operation of the Campaign Committee (including such issues as the size of the Committee, how its members are chosen, and how long approved Campaigns can continue to run if they don't develop a majority), the operation of the Web site (including the continuous and independent sampling and validation of the various Campaign results), as well as the Party's management, fundraising and leadership activities, are to be controlled by an Executive Committee comprised of nine members of the Campaign Committee, as selected by their peers, every four years.

NVP.ORG is not a traditional political party in that it does not ordinarily sponsor or draft candidates to run in scheduled elections. The Party's mandate and mission is to identify "No" Vote Pledge campaigns that have the potential to attract a substantive majority of "No" Votes in a given election or jurisdiction, and to promote those Campaigns on the Party's Web site and through other means.

In a general election where an NVP Campaign issue is not supported by any of the candidates registered to run, the Executive Committee of the Party may, in its sole discretion, nominate by simple majority vote an individual to run in that election. Nominees approved by the Executive Committee are then confirmed or rejected by a majority vote of the entire Campaign (Issues) Committee.

NR

[arendt]

23. You have party machinery; I have legislative/cabinet machinery...

The last time I had a thread about specialized legislatures, someone suggested that the first place to try it out would be inside a single party. So, the two ideas seem to have some inter-relationship.

> If you do these three things, you can register with NVP to vote on nominations to,
> and elections for, the party's Campaign Committee.

> The Role of the Campaign Committee is to decide which newly proposed "No" Vote Pledge (NVP)
> Campaigns are to be embraced by the Party and included on the party's Web site. Once Campaigns
> are approved by the Campaign Committee, they are added to the list of open campaigns on the NVP
> Web site, but each individual Campaign must still-based on its merits--garner its own "substantive
> majority" of "No" Votes in order to become effective as a political lever.

But, this is exactly the problem with the current form of government - these nasty, easily hijacked bottlenecks in the process. I spent the better part of my essays explaining about laws of scaling and communication, about the limits to rationality and expertise; and you want to decide all the issues out of a SINGLE committee.

> The by-laws that control the operation of the Campaign Committee (including such issues as the
> size of the Committee, how its members are chosen, and how long approved Campaigns can
> continue to run if they don't develop a majority), the operation of the Web site (including the
> continuous and independent sampling and validation of the various Campaign results), as well
> as the Party's management, fundraising and leadership activities, are to be controlled by an
> Executive Committee comprised of nine members of the Campaign Committee, as selected by their
> peers, every four years.

Nine people to run an continent-wide party with hundreds of issues? Its more heavily bottlenecked than the existing system!

Not to mention, that this one committee has way too much power. It essentially gets to decide (based on the votes of its few members, not on the total vote of the entire party membership, as in my example procedure) what the other specialized legislatures are. Its a complete executive branch within the legislature. The other legislatures are like cabinet departments, created and destroyed at the whim of the executive committee.

If I wanted to hijack your party, I would do everything I could to get onto this Campaign Committee (and eventually onto the Executive Committee). With membership on those committees, I could subtly discourage people whose viewpoints I disliked. By voting against NVPs full of people whose ideology I don't like, I could perform ideological purges of the party.

I'm sorry. Your idea suffers from the same homuncular centralization as the existing system. It is way too hijack-able, decapitate-able. That is why I never let my system come to a narrow peak at the executive. Each cabinet department will retain a large amount of autonomy, so that executive decision making (i.e., a prime minister and his cabinet) will have to be by consensus. In my concept, the cabinet secretary can lose a vote of confidence within his department if he joins an executive decision that the membership of his department at large considers to be not in their self-interest. (Now you may argue that my cabinet is the same size as your Executive Committee; but my cabinet does not get to re-arrange the set of legislatures as it sees fit, with no input from down below.)

Even if you don't agree with me, could you please tell me if you understand the point I am making?

--------

Maybe you are right. If someone as committed and intelligent as you goes right back to the centralization and bottlenecks that I have been arguing against, then what hope is there that a less committed and intelligent electorate will object.

OTOH, if people allow themselves to specialize at work, the concept of specializing at voting is not too hard to comprehend. The issue seems to be the "monkey trap" of giving up the fantastical idea that one voter should have a say on EVERY single issue, but do that only by voting for "candidate bundles" over which he has NO control except at the next election. Your NVP idea goes halfway. It cuts through the candidate bundling; but a voter can vote in as many IOPs as there are distinct candidates.

--------

Hmm. Question: what happens when there are two candidates in a race; and candidate A is in violation of an NVP on issue X, while candidate B is in violation of a different NVP on issue Y? Do voters in your party vote for nobody? Does your "deus ex machina" Executive Committee make a decision (which would imply that this one committee is THE power center in the party)?

In other words, lay out how NVP works when there are, say 20 NVP issues and only 2 candidates (a D and an R) running for one specific office.

Back to you,

arendt