Ashton Kutcher… in Russia
Actor and web savvy actist Ashton Kutcher is stirring things up in Russia. He says he will “crowd source” questions about The Kremlin’s push to develop a Russian Silicon Valley to his 4.5 Twitter fans. Kutcher has become a very active part of the US delegation of technology and social media team in recent months and is one of the leaders that arrived in Moscow as part of the White House efforts to improve Russia.
The actor has goals to “translate the Russian voice to an American audience” to help Russia build its own high tech center. The Kremlin is in agreement and would like to develop a Russia’s own Silicon Valley to help modernize their struggling economy that depends mainly on energy exports.
The US delegation strongly urged the Russian government, businessmen and students to use social media to tackle problems like human trafficking and corruption.
I remember when Ashton Kutcher’s show Punk’d came out and no one took him seriously, and now he is travelling to Russia with the Whitehouse to help a struggling government. We all have to grow up sometimes I guess. But in all seriousness, I love what Ashton Kutcher is doing, he is a man who understands the power of social media and technology and is using his knowledge, experience and popularity to really make a difference.
Wanna Skype Tonight?
The ongoing war in Iraq does not appear to be coming to an end anytime soon. Our troops have been out there risking their lives and fighting for our country and their loved ones. Many of the men and women stationed out there are away from their families, boyfriends girlfriends and friends for at least a year a time with maybe one or two weeks of leave to visit, definitely making it hard on the soldier and his or her loved ones. But our soldiers now are in a different league then the men from World War II, Vietnam and even the Gulf War, they have the internet at their disposal. Social media allows them to keep in constant contact with their family and friends.
It may seem insignificant to you and I- we see our friends and family all the time, and may take Facebook and Skype for granted, however, for our troops overseas, it keeps them in the loop. they can see their children grow, they can make Skype dates with their girlfriends and wives and have an instant chat on Facebook or AIM with their friends. The thought that social media was keeping our troops sane and happy never crossed my mind until last week when a friend of mine sent me an instant chat on Facebook. He is stationed in Iraq and will be there for another 10 months, yet we were able to chat and catch up as if he was just around the corner. He was telling me that he Skypes with his wife once a week and loves to see new pictures that she uploads; often times that is the best part of his day. To talk to my friend, and to hear him tell me how much he values social media really hit me hard. It reminded me to not take the information that is passed and the conversations had for granted. It also reminded me of the power that the internet has and how social media is breaking so many barriers that once existed.
From Jack and Diane to Senate Seat?
Obama and Politics 2.0: Documenting History in Real Time
In July of 2008, Nancy Scola wrote a really insightful post documenting a critical aspect of the Obama Social Media Campaign – Video. Enjoy!
I’m taking a crack at liveblogging an event tonight [ed. -- now last night] at NYU featuring Arun Chaudhary, director of video field production for the Obama campaign, in conversation with Ellen McGirt, senior writer at Fast Company and author of magazine’s April 2008 cover story “The Brand Called Obama.” Arun left his job as an adjunct film professor at NYU to produce video that pulls from public events, behind the scenes, and one-on-ones — unique creative content that populates BarackObama.com and a YouTube channel. Let’s get started.
Asked about the new media team, Arun describes at least 50 people crammed into one corner of an office building floor with with “pictures of JFK and graph paper tacked up on the wall.” Arun says the new media team spends a fair amount of money, but they’re buying fishing poles rather than fish; the broadcast quality footage they capture, for example, can be used for advertising in addition to online video. Asked about past campaigns he tried working with, Arun says they saw media as “too precious” to take creative risks with.
Arun explains his hire by the campaign by saying ‘you can learn the politics. You can learn how to navigate these worlds. But you can’t really learn the trades very quickly.’ The campaign has been attracting successful people that way, he says, naming Facebook’s Chris Hughes, who came on to handle social-networking. Arun then screens a well-crafted mock movie trailer calling people to a rally in New York’s Washington Square Park that features Obama in slightly goofy situations. Ellen: “We’ve never seen anything like this before”:
Ellen asks if the technology was in place three years ago to make video like this. “The technology was there three years ago, but I don’t think the right audience was,” says Arun. Back then, he jokes, there were just six hundred of the same people commenting on political blogs and that’s it; online participation today spans a wider segment of the population.* Ellen ask how he managed to get approval for the trailer video from the campaign and the candidate. Arun laughs a bit nervously, “I don’t know if the candidate saw it,” but says that it made its way, he believes, to the level of campaign manager.
The next video was crafted to call people to the pre-Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, as, Arun says, showing organizational strength was the key to getting attention and momentum in that state. Ellen asks if there was a concern that Obama and guest attendee John Legend were the only African-Americans seen in the clip. Arun pointed to the Internet Archive’s Prelinger Archives as the source of the overly white footage. (At the actual event, the video team had five cameras and five videographers in place capturing footage.):
Next video. An Iowa call-to-caucus piece, says Arun, is a campaign classic. It both asks Iowans to caucus for their particular candidate and educates voters on how to actually go through the confusing caucusing process. Both the Obama campaign and the Edwards campaign went the route of a dated instructional-style video, he says. (Arun praises the Hillary Clinton campaign’s call-to-caucus video which featured Bill Clinton eating a cheeseburger and saying something along the lines of “exercising is hard, but caucusing is easy.”):
It was the campaign’s “traditional media” team, says Arun, that whipped together a quick response to the Clinton campaign’s 3 a.m. phone call ad. But the new media team tracked down the young girl in the stock footage, Casey Knowles, an Obama precinct captain in Washington State. In the one-minute video, Casey deconstructs the techniques in the Clinton ad — the blue tint to the footage, the “scratchy voice” — and slams the “politics of fear.” An ad like that, says Arun, would never make on air, but works well online:
The candidate was in Terre Haute, Arun says, when the news broke that Obama had earlier made remarks in California concerning “bitter” Americans. Obama inserted a response to the incident in his Indiana speech. The new media team, says Arun, edited, packaged, and released the candidate’s own words within 19 minutes of the speech’s delivery. A lesson learned, says Arun, is that people are actually interested in the “sound blast,” and will watch long clips in their entirety:
He also cites Obama’s speech at their Chicago headquarters.The 14 minute clip shows the candidate addressing his staff, both in person and through a conference call (which creates a few minutes of less-than-thrilling footage when the call goes dead and Obama has to stall while it’s reconnected). It wasn’t deliberately shot low-fi for an extra dose of authenticity, Arun says, as some people suggested. There was no intention to create some sort of “Tanner 88″ moment. It was just, he says, that there was an intern manning the camera:
Asked by Emily about what an Obama administration might bring, Arun says that the role of video in an administration would be even more powerful than in a campaign. He mentions the broadcasting of health care meetings — creating a broader base of people who are able to keep an eye on the proceedings. The idea, Arun says, is not ‘telling people who tell people to tell people,’ but to use video to tell people directly. The role of video in governing, he says, is to achieve the goal of “cutting out the middleman.”
Q&A
Question: There’s a discontinuity in your work with high video quality and no sound mixing. Why?
Arun: We shoot as high quality as we can because it might be used for broadcast, but get used to it — a lot of the networks are going so broke that they’re getting rid of their “sound guys.”Question: What role with user-generated content play in presidential campaigns?
Arun: Using voter-generated content while probably remain “an unrealized ideal.” Much of the content that gets sent to them is “a little strange.”
Question: Why is new media going to make young people come out and vote?
Arun: It isn’t. Barack Obama is what is going to make people come out and vote.
Question: If you embrace an interactive politics 2.0, how do you avoid politicizing governing?
Arun: I think we’re ready for 1.5. We’ll [ed. -- a clarification: "we" here is a reference to political campaigns in general, and to the tools that might come into common use -- not a reference to the Obama campaign in particular] have virtual townhalls, for sure.
* Updated to correct: The original line referenced political blogs; in making the joke, Arun was referencing hard-core blog commenters.
EU politics 2.0: Getting the citizen into European democracy
Julien Frisch, September 3, 2009 – Personal Democracy Forum
The European Union is a proto-democratic polity, focused on the city of Brussels, dispersed over 27 member states and 500 million citizens, based on a story of overcoming centuries of violence and held together by complex administrative procedures and a small number of Europeanised elites willing to invest time and effort in bridging the gaps that are still obvious.
Genuine European Union politics are limited to politicians, officials, and diplomats within the core EU institutions like the European Commission (the supranational political administration of the EU), the EU Council (where the 27 member states are represented), and the European Parliament, which has been newly elected in June and just re-started its activities.
Outside Brussels, these EU politics have always been low key, hardly noticed by anyone not involved in European administrative co-operation, EU-related lobbying, or rare transnational meetings of political associations with a European agenda. The best example was the European Parliament elections this year that passed almost unnoticed by the larger public.
In this centralised, Brussels-focused context, participation of individual citizens in EU politics was close to impossible. Yet, web 2.0 is offering new channels for involvement of ordinary citizens – and we are ready to use them.
When I say “we”, I am referring to a small but growing group of European citizens inside and outside Brussels using blogs, online social networks, and Twitter to communicate, discuss, and organise activities that are not born within the institutional setting of the EU – but still related to questions of pan-European interest.
Most of us are part of the Generation 2.0, but in the end this is more than a generational issue. We don’t want to accept the old top-down politics and we are trying to overcome a European perspective that doesn’t treat us as citizens but as simple beneficiaries of policies made in our so-called “best interest”.
Over the last year, there has been a rising amount of interaction between us, and especially the use of Twitter has finally brought some dynamics into EU politics that appear very static from an outsider perspective.
A good example was the European Parliament election night (7 June 2009): On that night, despite the lack of general interest in these elections, a significant number of people from most member states discussed the election results under the #eu09 and #ep09 hashtags (that a smaller circle of people like us had been using already before) in all major and many minor EU languages – still unthinkable at the 2004 elections.
What we see is the development of a slowly growing Euroblogosphere (summarised on the still developing platform bloggingportal.eu) complemented by a Eurotwittersphere that involves even more individuals (political citizens, journalists, scientists, EU officials, lobbyists, and politicians) who do not write blogs.
Together, we are trying to create a (hyper-)linked European public sphere, researching and spreading information that remained unnoticed so far, thereby creating publicly visible European debates that go beyond the old-style closed-door politics that still rule the Brussels world.
But I don’t want to create a false image:
These developments are still very young, they are not straightforward, and they include a very limited number of people that are already part of the Europeanised elites I have mentioned at the beginning of the article. We are starting what needs to become bigger, we are testing in how far modern technologies are able to spice up EU politics, and we are creating a basis that might be helpful in the future.
This is nothing but a beginning. What we will have to do is to figure out ways to get more citizens into the European democracy, extending our limited circle by creating communication networks and communities in which European politics can be both debated and influenced.
However, one of the major obstacles compared to the USA is the existence of 23 official languages within the European Union. Creating transnational and translingual debates around political processes – that in addition are also largely opaque and poorly communicated – under these conditions is not trivial; the evolution of common blogosphere hardly possible.
So we will have to find creative ideas and creative individuals to overcome these obstacles. But many of us are ready to accept the challenge, and already over the coming year I expect several initiatives in this regard.
From now on, I will use the possibilities of the Personal Democracy Forum blog to discuss with you such issues related to European politics 2.0; I will present my own ideas and the ideas of others, looking forward to input from you who are reading inside and outside Europe!
(The author is a Euroblogger writing about EU and European politics on his blog “Julien Frisch – Watching Europe”.)
Has Politics 2.0 arrived in Portugal?
Sergio Bastos wrote a insightful post on September 3, 2009, on the integration of Politics 2.0 into Portugal.
Portugal is living an Elections year. During 2009, European Parliament elections took place on the 7th of June. The Legislative elections will be held on September 27th and on October 11th the Portuguese people will choose their representatives of local governments.
Despite interest that “Politics 2.0” has been generating on media and online, there aren’t many significant developments in political technologies for and by the people. As in rest of the world, Barack Obama’s elections strategy was a closely watched case study that inspired great interest here. Indeed, there were reports saying that Blue State Digital was hired by PS (Socialist Party in government) to implement actions online, a fact that was soon revealed to be not really true. The national and Brazilian spin doctors are still in charge of political marketing strategies.
With a month or so to Legislative Elections 2009, parties have been doing some online actions, but for the most part prefer the old way to interact with public: gatherings, outdoors, travelling on the street to talk with citizens (and TV cameras). Their main actions online have been:
- Meetings with bloggers and Web influencers by major parties (PS and PSD, the opposition party);
- Although there are many politicians and parties with accounts on Twitter (check Twitica), taking a look at the most popular parties’ Internet sites, we have an impression that they don’t use social networks at all. The better practices are from minor new parties like MEP and MMS, and the legislative elections portal created by PSD (Politica de Verdade). This is perhaps not surprising, as upstart parties have more to gain from going online, while the major parties may fear the inevitable loss of control that comes with the territory.
- Most major online campaigning is being done by youth or “independent” citizens linked to the political parties in blogosphere, Twitter and other social networks. For example, Papa MyZena (linked to PSD) and SIMplex (linked to PS) both say that are not affiliated to parties but discuss right and left political views and some persons have relations with parties;
- Vídeo and audio sharing is part of the latest campaign innovations. PS has created MovTV, PSD and minor parties have a Youtube channel. In rare occasions there have been streaming video from events and even some interactions with online questioners;
- PS has a kind of social network called MyMov, where people can, for example, expose their ideas.
- Some political parties also have actions on site to recollect private funds for campaigning. Political parties are public finance in Portugal.
The press, TV and radio media have been covering Politics 2.0 topic with some debates and reports. A good media initiative is Eleições 2009, a blog from Público newspaper that brings together various bloggers with all kind of political perspectives and expressing different political views.
Besides Twitica, another site is an interesting tool for citizens. Through a questionnaire, Bússola Eleitoral predicts the political party that fits best with the person who answers a series of questions.
Bottom line: politics 2.0 in Portugal is an early stage. Technically, there are innovations but there are no trends or viral behaviours that have really been embraced by large numbers of citizens. After all, trust matters and online networks are only a tool that political parties have to guarantee with actions while on power positions.
Twitter Amplifies Obama’s Muted Iran Policy
Twitter got an interesting tech support call from a highly unique customer today: The Obama Administration, via the U.S. State department, which reportedly asked the microblogging service to delay a system upgrade in order to maintain the tsunami of history-making tweets about and emanating from Iran via Twitter’s #iranelection topic in the wake of the country’s highly disputed presidential election. It’s unclear if high-ranking members of President Obama’s team were directly involved in this Twitter request; given that this is by far the country’s most Web 2.0-centric Administration, however, it’s possible they were. (Last April, the State Department included Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey in a sponsored delegation of technology executives to neighboring Iraq, in order to show, among other applications, a spokesman explained, how “new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts.”)
In any case, it’s fascinating to contrast this behind-the-scenes activity with the official statements coming from the White House. President Obama’s first public statement on the Iran turmoil yesterday was muted and highly cautious, taking pains (in light of historic U.S. interference in Iran) to emphasize that his Adminstration respects Iranian sovereignty and self-rule. (Critics have instead urged him to condemn Iran’s repressive tactics.) At the same time, however, his State Department is actively working with the central conduit of protest against Iran’s government: Twitter. As the President put it yesterday, “[W]e do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.”
Politics 2.0’s beach reading list
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By ANDREW RASIEJ & MICAH L. SIFRY | 7/24/08 5:11 AM EST
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We’ve been writing this column for only a year, but lo and behold, it’s time again for our annual summer reading special. Since the temptation is to unplug, we thought this was as good a time as any to share some of our favorite carbon-based information tools (i.e., books) that you might want to take with you to the beach or the countryside. Here, our favorite poli-tech books of the past year:
If you have time for only one book, our top recommendation goes to Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.” At the Personal Democracy Forum, Shirky jokingly told the audience that his book could be summarized as, “Group organizing just got a lot easier. … And I just saved you $25.” That’s true, but if you want a stunning and easy-to-read guide to how the Internet is fostering a societal change as big as those spurred by the invention of the printing press and movable type, “Here Comes Everybody” is for you. Shirky has a sharp eye for examples, and his discussion of how new group-forming behavior is becoming a mass phenomenon will change how you think about the future of politics.
The next book we would add to your pile is Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.” If Shirky’s main focus is how the Net is fostering a creative explosion of self-organization, Zittrain’s goal is to warn that this very openness could also be the Net’s undoing. Thanks to the inclusive nature of personal computers that will run any software you load onto them, and to open protocols for Web development, we’re living in a golden age of what Zittrain calls “generativity.” But we can’t take it for granted, as spam, malware and other malevolent entitites online are pushing people toward shiny, closed appliances such as the iPhone; the owners of the Net’s pipes, the telcos, want to start discriminating among content online and end the practice of Net neutrality. Whatever your political leaning, if you’re a tech-politico, Zittrain’s book makes for sober reading.
There has been a bumper crop of recent books on the more prosaic side of Net politics, starting last year with Matt Bai’s “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics” and Garrett Graff’s “The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web and the Race for the White House.” Both books hold up pretty well in terms of analyzing the broad contours of the forces affecting the 2008 presidential contest, even though they were written well before Barack Obama’s insurgent, Internet-powered campaign took off.
If you’re interested in the sociological side of politics, Morley Winograd and Michael Hais predict a generational tidal wave for Obama in November. Their book, “Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics,” makes a cogent case that we are on the cusp of a “civic generation” and that this demographic and cultural tide will favor progressive Democrats who offer a new way of solving society’s problems. One of those young activists, Michael Connery, makes the same case in his compelling call to arms, “Youth to Power: How Today’s Young Voters Are Building Tomorrow’s Progressive Majority.” Maybe, but perhaps John McCain’s lifetime of public service will resonate with these voters, as well. (But that book has yet to be written.)
If your taste in political reading is more down in the trenches, where campaigns are actually fought and won, two books are worth your attention. The first, “Mousepads, Shoe Leather and Hope: Lessons From the Howard Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics,” was edited by Zephyr Teachout and Thomas Streeter, two veterans of that seminal 2004 effort. It features first-person essays from nearly all of the key players on the Dean campaign, and it is a must for anyone who wants to understand the nuts and bolts of merging a classic long-shot bid with the heady madness of the nation’s first Internet-powered presidential candidacy.
The second is called “Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics,” by Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox. Drawing on their own experiences in 2004 (with Dean and the Draft Wesley Clark movement) and the 2006 rise of Jim Webb, the authors update the story told by Teachout et al. Its core is a firsthand description of the Virginia Senate race, where Feld was Webb’s director of online fundraising, but the authors use that microcosm to make larger arguments about how politics is being upended by a combination of grass-roots activism and do-it-yourself technology.
Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t suggest our own book, “Rebooting America: Ideas for Redesigning American Democracy for the Internet Age,” which we edited with our colleagues Allison Fine and Joshua Levy. We asked contributors: What if our country’s Founders had all of today’s technology and tools for communication? How would they change the ways things work? The resulting ideas, from people such as Newt Gingrich, Craig Newmark, Glenn Reynolds, Joe Trippi, Jeff Jarvis, Esther Dyson and Beth Noveck, will surprise you. You can download the book free as a PDF at rebooting.personaldemocracy.com or join in the conversation about the essays by adding a comment.
Or you can take it to the beach, where it will make a very nice pillow.
Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry are, respectively, the founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, an online magazine and annual conference on how technology is changing politics.
Lessig Launches Change Congress: Political Reform a la Creative Commons and Wikipedia
Here is a post from Andy Carvin on Politics 2.0….
Today at the National Press Club, Professor Lawrence Lessig launched the Change Congress project. Created in conjunction with Joe Trippi, the project intends to employ the strengths of the Internet to end the impact of PACs and lobbyists on congressional policymaking. What’s really fascinating about this initiative is that he’s taking the lessons learned from creating the Creative Commons copyright initiative and applying it to political reform in a way that’s never been done before.
In his speech, Lessig gave several examples of policy changes that should have taken place but didn’t because of the influence of money, such as combating global warming or limiting the recommended allotment of sugar in our diets. These are policies that should have been no-brainers, but industry influence upended the process. He noted that when the country’s forefathers talked about independence, it wasn’t just about independence from Britain, but independence from improper influence as well. In that sense, he argued, their goal of achieving independence has failed.
But Lessig thinks it’s still possible to remove this dependence between Congress and money once and for all. The Change Congress project will take a three-step approach to the issue.
First, he wants members of Congress and the public to go online and pledge their support for up to four different goals: no longer accepting money from lobbyists and PACs; banning earmarks; supporting public financing of campaigns; and achieving total transparency of how Congress works. Users will be able to do this in the same way you select a Creative Commons license for your website. Their website will have a form that lets you select which ones you support, and it’ll generate a code you can put on your own site. This code will contain metadata driven by the semantic Web – essentially, a collection of URLs, each defining which of the policy goals you support. (update, 4:20pm: when I wrote this paragraph, the site’s badge generator wasn’t up and running yet, but now that it is, it seems that the code generated for users doesn’t contain Semantic Web metadata yet. Update 4:37pm: I’m now told that Semantic Web metadata might be rolled into the badges very soon, possibly later this evening or tomorrow; a volunteer is working on the code and hopes they’ll use it. -ac)
Embedding this code into your website, whether you’re a policymaker, a candidate or a member of the public, will let them reach step number two: tracking who supports what. In the same way that search engines can pick up websites that employ different Creative Commons licenses, Change Congress will be able to pick up which sites support each of the four policy goals. They’ll then be able to map out where support is strongest and where it’s weakest. Then, they’ll deploy crowdsourcing, just like on Wikipedia, to get an army of volunteers delving into the details to see who’s just pledged support and who’s actually supporting the cause in measurable ways. This information, too, will be mapped for all to see and scrutinize.
Step number three will be to employ these tools for raising money. The public will be able to make small donations – even just five or 10 dollars – to candidates that share the same policy reform beliefs as they do. This will allow for grassroots fundraising to take place, not unlike Emily’s List or the Obama campaign. Taken all together, he describes his project as a “Silicon Valley approach” to policy reform.
Lessig admitted there will be naysayers, particularly those who feel there are other problems more important that reforming Congress and the flow of money. To them, he gave the example of the alcoholic. An alcoholic faces many problems – loss of family, employment, health, etc – but none of them can be solved until the underlying problem – dependence on alcohol – is addressed first. To Lessig, before we can solve all the major policy issues of our day, we must first eliminate Congress’ dependence on money and outside influence. Once this can be done, the real work of implementing important policy solutions can take place. Harnessing the power of the Web and its seemingly endless community of concerned citizens, he may just be on to something here.
Politics 2.0 – Real Democracy is close
Here is a great post by Rob Paterson on Politics 2.0
I had one of those coming out of the shower aha’s today. I think I see how Obama might be able to get the changes that we have all dreamed of – both for right and left.
So first I ask why is it impossible to get any real change – real change being defined as something that has to overcome the establishment in any field?
To have a real change – there has to be a President who will risk political capital and a majority vote in the house. By design right now this is impossible. Why?
Because until now the President has needed a lot of money to get elected and to have a chance of a second term. Because until now Congressmen and Senators need a lot of money to get and stay elected.
Because until now, the electorate were largely ill informed, passive and often even helpless. Their only involvement was to vote every few years and, even then, many chose not to do even that. Why should they? They knew that the decisions were being made by another process.
Washington has been bought by lobbyists. The lobbyists represent the establishment. The phone rings in a senator’s office. It is you the voter. A second phone rings, it is a major lobbyist. Which call gets priority?
No wonder we are all cynical.
How could health care or agriculture be reformed when all the money is behind the status quo and money is what is needed?
That is until now!
By building a vast grass roots organization by using 2.0 principles, Obama was able to raise more money than by using the traditional lobby pools. He not only got more money but he is less attached than any president in generations to the special interest himself.
Is this organization going to go away now? No – there are signs that Obama intends to grow this organization. Here is the link to his new site, Change Gov, just released yesterday. It is clear that he plans to go around the Hill.
He is preparing for the war of the future – A People’s War – where the President has a direct ongoing relationship with the people of America.
Roosevelt started this. His use of radio in the 1930’s was a masterstroke of using the then new media – to talk in a conversational way with the people. Now the President can listen to our conversation and converse with us.
I expect that we will start to see a new electorate – an engaged electorate – that will grow out of the grass roots campaign network.
I hear rumours of a new “Peace Corps” not to be deployed in foreign lands but at home. I see that community development and engagement will become paramount in the years to come.
So where does leave the old power brokers on the Hill? Isolated!
The smart Congressmen and Senators had better follow suit and fast – they will have to catch up with the people and the President. The real money that they do need will come from their engagement in the betterment of those that they represent.
The voters will awaken. They will start to be active. They will seek to take back their power so that what affects them most – so that decisions that affect them the most having access to good work, to energy, to food to a good environment and to better healthcare to a better education will be made by them and not a by a few who care only for themselves.
So politicians will have to awaken too. It will be more than their voting record that will be watched. It will be their larger actions to help their people. The greater transparency of our time will shine on them all. Those who serve the people will be rewarded and those that serve the elect will be punished.
Where does this leave the lobbyists? The best lobbyist will themselves have more than a check book. They will have to represent groups of active engaged voters or leave town.
A real change in health care demands that the insurance companies, the drug companies and the doctors have to be taken out of the position of political control.
A real change in energy policy means that the oil and coal companies have to be taken out of their control position.
A real change in how we spend money and on what in defense has to taken out of the hands of the main suppliers and the senior officers who serve them.
A rel change in how our financial system is governed means that control needs to be vested fram the leaders on Wall Street.
A real change in food systems means that BIG Ag has to lose control.
Without going around the Hill. Without directly engaging the People both in the policy and in the action – real change is systemically impossible.
This is Martin Luther all over again. The system cannot be reformed from within. A new direct model is the only way.
This is possible. For the first time, real democracy is possible.
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