noosphere

mikehudack:

“To hear Jon Corzine tell it, Meg Whitman is either deceiving us or deceiving herself. Like Whitman, the former eBay CEO who’s vying for California’s Republican gubernatorial nomination, Corzine is one of the few people in America who has tried to make the leap from running a business (in his case, Goldman Sachs) to running a government (the state of New Jersey). He can only scoff when he hears Whitman arguing that deficit-ridden California desperately needs her corporate skills. Corzine also thought “the managerial skill set would be helpful,” he tells NEWSWEEK. But after four grueling years as a Democratic governor—ending in a humiliating defeat by an uninspiring Republican opponent—Corzine no longer believes that being a CEO prepares anyone for the day-to-day grind of governing. “The idea that you’re accountable to a bottom line and to a payroll in managing a business—it gives voters the confidence that you have the right skills [to govern]. But it’s 20,000 people versus 9 million. I don’t think candidates get the scale and scope of what governing is. You don’t have the flexibility you imagined. There’s no exact translation.””

—

Romano/Hirsh on the rise of the CEO politician (via newsweek)

The MBA President (W) was a disaster.  Clearly the CEO politician is as well.

(via evangotlib)

Too little data to draw such a conclusion. Meg Whitman was not a great CEO. Running Goldman also isn’t traditional CEO experience — running a bank is different than running other types of businesses.

I agree with Mike:  too little data & does not cover range of CEO experiences.  Also, I think Corzine & Whitman are a bit foolish to think it translates as such, no matter the scale.  Citizens are not your employees.  Being governor is about running things yes, but it’s also about coalition building, cooperation, and ultimately customer service.

newsweek:

AQ writes on how the biggest task in politics is just getting everyone to pay attention:

At the moment the problem in Washington is us, not them, or at least how they try to figure us out. Good luck with that. One poll of former Obama supporters who abandoned the Democrats in Massachusetts showed that 41 percent of those who opposed the health-care plan weren’t sure exactly why. If elected officials are supposed to act based on the wisdom of ordinary people, they’re going to need ordinary people to be wiser than that.

Which strikes us as, well, fair enough; everyone is rightly praising Obama for countering meaningless talking points with reason in his appearance in Baltimore on Friday. But to be fair, the reason those meaningless talking points work is because many American citizens don’t know any better, and they should.

on the poll:

1) It would be nice to know a) what the other answer options for that particular question were and b) if the pollsters followed up that question with one about where people got their info on the healthcare bill.

2) I have a hunch that that 41% probably knew why but couldn’t articulate it within the parameters of the polling answer options.  I’d need the answer to 1) before I could say for sure.

on the healthcare bill:

A 2,000-page bill which carries even the remotest possibility of upsetting a system upon which many people depend is, to those very same people, frightening.  Should anyone be surprised at this reaction?

The plethora of opinions on the darn thing bewildered even me.  I decided to read the bill myself but got bogged down in incomprehensible references (with no links) to other legislation.

The lack of clarity surrounding the bill and the possible outcomes is, in essence, what made it such a hard sell to the American people.

Why was Obama so effective in that Q&A?  Clarity.  A strong voice cutting through all the GOP BS.

Healthcare reform, as is, lacks this comprehensibility.

on ordinary people & elected officials:

Who are these ordinary people?  You, me, everyone we know?  Is this usage an example of the liberal elitism which helped the GOP get GWB elected?

If you ask me, “ordinary” people are wise enough, wise enough to know when they should be afraid.

The problems lies in engagement — lack of civic engagement on the part of the people and lack of engaging ideas on the part of elected officials.

A thriving democracy is highly dependent on the relationship the people have with the gov’t and the relationship gov’t has with the people.  And while it’s difficult to establish relationships when interfering middle-men, like media outlets, muck up the debate with emotional hoopla, it’s not impossible.

Maybe .gov needs to get a tumblr, i.e. find new ways to communicate / share with and get feedback from the people.

[The DNC could’ve used it when looking for candidates in MA. I think that result was less about healthcare and more about giving people candidates they can believe in.  Voter turnout among 18-29 year-olds?  15%]

mikehudack:

“That is the American tragedy of the early 21st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent, and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. One thing I’ve never heard in my time overseas is “I wish we had a Senate like yours.” When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, he said again and again that America needed “a government as good as its people.” Knowing Carter’s sometimes acid views on human nature, I thought that was actually a sly barb—and that the imperfect American public had generally ended up with the government we deserve. But now I take his plea at face value. American culture is better than our government. And if we can’t fix what’s broken, we face a replay of what made the months after the 9/11 attacks so painful: realizing that it was possible to change course and address problems long neglected, and then watching that chance slip away.”

— James Fallows, in a devastating piece on American decline. He seems to be saying that what we think are the real problems are just mirages that distract us from more insidious structural decay and a calcification of the democratic institutions that got us this far - but may not have the agility to get us much further. Sobering stuff. (via aatombomb)

Okay, I read the whole article this time.  Lots of good ideas for rebuilding in there and to be found by reading between the lines.  This struck me tho’:

A viable third party? Attractive in theory. But 150 years of failed attempts by formidable campaigners, ranging from Robert LaFollette to Ross Perot, suggest how unlikely this is too.

Of all the solutions Fallows suggests, this is the most realistic to attempt and he pans it in two lines by basically saying we’ve tried alot and failed and some other smart / popular guys tried and failed so we should just give up too.

What, what, what!?  What if someone told you (entrepreneurs in general) that about your ideas?  Would you give up?  No!

Also, what Fallows fails to consider is time and place!  Where we are now and where were then are vastly different.  He even says so in his article but fails to continue with that logic in analyzing the possible success of a third party.

Granted he also says things are much the same as well.  However, as analysis of any evolving multivariable, time-dependent, nonlinear system will tell you, the system state at one point in time is never the same as it was at a point previous.

[The links, with the exception of centrist party posts due to recency, are mostly bookmarks for myself (and for the time stamp).  I’ve pulled most of the relevant information and put it here.]

The newest (or oldest — have been thinking about it for a long time) is the formation of a centrist party, as I’ve tumblred about here, here, here, and here.

re: my last post on Path101 + DC:  legislation to incentivize more directed giving - tax breaks for helping out in sectors that they (corporations) helped wreck - minor tax break for helping out, major tax break for correcting bad behaviour.

Some other ideas I’ve shared via tumblr:

Domestic

Simple things like putting links into bills on the floor or in committee so citizens can get a better idea of what they are reading.

Undo for-profit prison structure.  Make use of the restorative justice model.

Get more women involved in governance.  Here and around the world:  “If more women were involved in running nation-states, would the machismo of saving face still cost lives, time, and energy?”

Resurrect / redefine civil service.  Put the unemployed to work in their neighborhoods, use the infrastructure already in place, Habitat for Humanity, local charitable orgs, build homes, mend fences, plant gardens, beautify, take some lonely seniors out for walks, whatever it takes.  There may be no jobs but there are things to do.

Use the data to help people build jobs.  Chief Information Officer:  This position is not about tech, it’s about data:  where to find it, how to mine it.  With enough machine-farmed, human-interpreted data, and a smidge of creativity, the .govs might actually be able to perform wonders.  I would love to get my hands on the demographic data behind the unemployment stats, start building micro-industries out of the skill sets observed to serve targeted niches, answering need and providing stimulus.  People on welfare:  polling for skill sets, again, help people find their happy place, and create neighborhoods where that can happen, things like localizing, things like HelloHealth and the return of the neighborhood clinic

Re-define ROI.  Money is not just some abstract thing.  At the furthest extreme from the wages we hew out of time with our bodies, we are abstracted ourselves; we are faceless stakeholders, shareholders, statistics, a parcel of our time & our tears mingled in one vast pool of funds totalling billions, leveraged to eke more blood & guts out of someone else’s misery or joy or any number of places in between.

Redistribution of wealth:  No, don’t run away screaming you fiscal conservatives, it’s an exercise in logic.  Let’s start with first principles:  the foundation of a well-governed society is a well-educated populace, ergo its children.  No pre-k, elementary, junior high, and/or high school should be without.  Where does the money come from?  Well, who’s got it?  Who can afford to ‘give’ it away?  Let’s make it a transparent “tax”, give people (people here includes corporations) a chance to offer it up as a sort of “tithe” to the state & civil society.  This works almost locally with inner city schools but there are rurals schools facing similar shortages, wealth being concentrated in key geographic areas … The fed gov should provide channels and analysis of the data… i.e. where corps are getting their money from.  If so and so made millions because many people in certain locales bought, manufactured, lost jobs to outsourcing, etc., so and so’s state taxes get distributed accordingly.  Algorithms should help people on the hill decide where the money goes…

Send police to pre-K / kindergartner training.  Everything a person needs to know about handling people peacably, they learn when they learn how to work with a group of young kids.  Those who can’t handle it, well, we don’t want people like that walking around with guns.

Military

Find better ways to wage war.  Here and in places like Afghanistan, elsewhere in the Middle East, anywhere where people are murdering each other in the name of religion, greed, & the state:  less guns, more words; benign but viral infiltration; searching for weak links in the psychology of the fundalmentalist believer / tribal warlord and exploiting them; in-depth psycho-affective analysis of villages & tribes; playing on simple human dynamics. (With this caveat.)

Work to “culturize” military forces on the ground.  Though we might say we aren’t there (Afghanistan) to wage war but to wage peace and to put hard questions to an extremist way of life which promulgates the repression of half its population, the language used by some in relation to the mission smacks wholly of imperialism and is, frankly, stomach-turning.  In these types of conflicts, language and rhetoric are weapons as effective as any smart-bomb in the arsenal.  We misuse it to our misfortune.  Wars of culture are never won through force of arms; we see it again and again as expansionistic nation states fall apart and centuries old conflicts re-emerge as micro-cultures struggle for hegemony.

On torture / enemy combatants in war on terror:  Create a holding facility in New Mexico, give members of the Muslim-American community an opportunity to speak to these stray sheep.  Those that don’t respond to this are the sociopaths.  There are specialists to deal with that.  There are many ways to the truth.

State Dept

Africa (& other places):  Create an org to provide consultations to resource-rich democracy- & infrastructure-poor nations specifically geared toward the promotion of a better governmental/business model, i.e. promulgating the idea that an educated citizenry is the only way to compete in today’s technological world, it really is better to be loved than feared.

A bit on the fun & silly side:

Presidential candidate simulator tests:  Wouldn’t it be great if we could put candidates into a giant simulator which held a number of scenarios, i.e. major natural disasters, serious international incidents like nuclear launch out of the Middle East, severe economic crises, extreme shortages, and of course the Kobayashi Maru, and push various buttons and watch and score their reactions, reaction times, likely outcomes, etc. etc.

Fantasy government:  Build a cabinet, randomize the legislature and judicial branches based on current events, solve a set of problems.  Gov could use winning scenarios (i.e. good ideas) as basis for change.

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note:  I realize some of these things are beyond fed gov jurisdiction but perhaps not beyond influence.

note2:  Some of these ideas are old, i.e. from 2008 and 2009, hence the link/time stamp.

note3:  These are notes, not a platform.

jayparkinsonmd:

topherchris:

Lawrence Lessig outlines why money + politics ≠ democracy for his Change Congress group back in 2008. After searching for news and opinions in the wake of the Citizens United v. FEC decision, I’ve found that this speaks to me more than anything else. (I love Lessig’s presentation style, so I’m already predisposed to like this.)

Like I’ve said in the past, Lessig is one of my heroes. Solve the first problem before you can solve anything else. And that first problem is money buying votes in our legislative branch of government. Our legislative branch is supposed to represent the people of our country. When that fails, and the people lose trust in Congress, power shifts to the Executive and Judicial branches, which don’t by nature reflect the interests of the people. And when money from the few controls the interests of the many, democracy fails.

First, I agree wholehearted re: campaign finance laws.  Reform is critical.

I almost disagree re: first problem tho’.  The first problem is binary grouping, i.e. two party system (moderates in either party stuck with extremists on either end).  But, part of party loyalty is safety in numbers, a part of which equates to support during campaigns.  While GOP/Dems aren’t special interests as defined by Lessig, certainly SIs push one party or the other depending on the issue…

It almost seems like the campaign financing issue is a node or root on this particular decision tree (fixing things in DC), not quite under the binary issue but tangled up with it in interesting ways.

Which leads me to think that it’s not just c.f. or two-party systems, it’s democracy itself.  Can we truly say we live in a democracy when less than 65% of eligible voters participate?  & This is for presidential election data only.  The number is less for the Senate (from the recent MA vote: 15% of 18 - 29 year olds, 57% of 30 and older).

Next question:  Why?  Who knows for sure.  My guesses:  apathy, cynicism, lack of information.  Campaign finance reform may help alleviate the former two, but it leaves us with a question.  Will campaign finance reform help get people in office who are willing to buck their parties to get things done?

I’m just not comfortable with taking that as a given.  Hence my interest in shaking up the two-party paradigm.

CONCLUSION:  These issues go hand in hand.  CF reform will help centrist party candidates to get elected and will encourage people currently in office to make the switch.

mikehudack:

“We are now 200-plus years past Jefferson’s wish for permanent revolution and nearly 30 past Olson’s warning, with that much more buildup of systemic plaque—and of structural distortions, too. When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Giving them the same two votes in the Senate was part of the intricate compromise over regional, economic, and slave-state/free-state interests that went into the Constitution. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it’s unchangeable. Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the “saucer” George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might “cool,” into a deep freeze and a dead weight.

— How America Can Rise Again - The Atlantic (January/February 2010) (via rafer) (via tedr)

1.  As useful as analogies are, they are no stand-in for reality.  Government is neither business nor military. That said, let me offer my own:  Do you trash an entire public transit system because people keep throwing garbage on the floors of the buses and pissing in the subway stations?  Because a few dispatchers decide they want to stop trains in their tracks for no good reason?

2.  Our founding fathers created a very balanced system of governance.  I truly believe that the basic mechanics of the structure are sound.  Again, it’s the people in it that are causing the jams.

Attempting to tweak the Constitution will do nothing but create more chaos and divert attention from the pressing issues at hand.  Whatever their personal foibles, I believe our FFs were people whose vision we in these dystopian times can barely hope to match or replicate (Think about what they were fighting for and compare it to the impulses which drive of us now.  Yeah, it would be a stinking, rotten mess.)

Take it from a scientist-in-training & wanna-be engineer, simple and elegant is best.  Simple and elegant is what we have.

3.  If we base governance on population alone, we might as well all be California because they would be running the show.

marco:

We’ve been taught that our government, ostensibly a representative democracy, is effectively neither. We’re powerless. We’ve had the civic engagement beaten out of us. Friedman’s assumption that we think our job is done is condescending and incorrect. We’ve been shown by all three branches of the federal government that they’ll do whatever they want regardless of popular opinion, that common sense and the people’s best interests don’t matter, and that there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it.

Don’t give up, Marco!~  It’s not over yet!

After all the brouhaha, I’m more convinced than ever that real change comes from the ground up.  Orgs like HelloHealth, blip.tv, B Corp, to name a few, + the work of social entrepreneurs all over the globe sustain me and give me real hope.

& While Barack did a great job mobilizing grassroots orgs, he did it for an entrenched party at ‘war’ with another entrenched party.  We were overly naive in expecting true change to come from this.

My brilliant (and admittedly naive) idea to address this issue is the creation of a centrist third party.  To do that however, we’d need enough money & support to win over moderate Dems & Reps, i.e. give them a safety net and the freedom to do what needs to be done.  Obviously to do this requires a lot of work on the ground with constituents + running the funding circuit.  We can’t give up until we’ve tried though, can we.

[After spending 2009 unemployed & unable to find work, I’ve returned to NYC to start a career as a social entrepreneur, beginning with nothing but a pocket full of dreams and some really great ideas.

Plan of action?  Establish a rep as problem-solver/facilitator, create relationships, starting asking for money to take to DC & hire grassroots organizers, etc.

Despite a few set-backs, I’m not giving up — just rebuilding and learning from my mistakes.  Remember what that’s like?]

If we want government for the people and by the people, we’re going to have to work to make it happen.

mikehudack:

squashed:

It looks like the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, more commonly known as Captain Underpants, (which means some of us will need a new secret identity), was questioned for a number of hours and provided valuable information. After he was belatedly read his Miranda rights, stopped talking.

It’s a little backwards to first question Capt. Underpants without Miranda warnings then read him the warnings five hours later. Apparently there is an exception to the Miranda warnings for an effort to end an immediate threat to public safety. But, once they determined that there were no other bombs, the Constitution requires a suspect be read Miranda warnings.

Does anybody think this was mishandled (in either direction)?

An excellent question, and I don’t know the right answer. Can’t claim to know the right answer. It makes sense to me that you’d want to interrogate a suspect sans Miranda if there are potentially imminent threats out there. I’m also partial to the idea that this guy — Captain Underpants — is an enemy combatant and not a common criminal.

I agree re: status as enemy combatant.  After reading the article, my main concern is the lack of coordination/communication between the FBI and the military.  Combating terrorism is, at its most basic, fighting a war with no discernable fronts; there should be clear interdepartmental guidelines for handling situations such as this.