The ongoing torment of things as they are...

...is not salved by OWS or any of the really great and true sounding stuff I find as I check things out on the Web. All of what needs to be seen and said is "out there" in the ether and to a less easy to discern extent, in the real world. The progressive Democracy advocates are organizing and working and writing and "speaking truth to power" as good as they are able. And so far, sadly, and to the peril of all of us bozos on this careening out of control bus of a massive ongoing "right wing backlash", it's not good enough. We are at a tipping point. The possibility of meaningful change in a way that is for the better and good of us all and all- it's getting more and more remote with each passing election cycle, with each new season of American idol... with each new brilliant incite into what freedom really is expounded on by one of the four remaining Repube Presidential candidates. Very inspiring leaders, them boys...

Gearing up to get this whole pro democracy movenment in the USA started...

Not that there isn't a whole lot of work in this very area being done by a whole lot of people... and I am not proposing to be inventing the wheel here. What I am planning to do, though, is communicate with everyone I have ever come across in my reading, education, Web travels, and regular old real world life that I think might be a potential ally and collaborator in trying to build the kind of pro Democracy movement I will be constantly and probably, knowing me, repetitively calling for in the U.S.- our own country- as I develop and promote my Web presence that describes, advocates, and seeks support for what I am proposing. Ultimately the goal is not for me to just have a successful Web presence or Blog or Twitter following- or even a successful independent Web Site that, you know, allows me to- quoting Bruce Springsteen now: "Get a little something for myself..." Though Lord knows, that would be nice.

But the goal is to actually be a part in helping to organize enough of my fellow American citizens to actually make changes in the direction we are going as a nation and a society that I feel if we don't make- and soon- it will be too late and our Democracy, along with many of our now taken for granted freedoms and opportunities in life will become little more than elite and corporate spin doctoring and PR (not to mention a nice Citizen United windfall for mainstream media at election time) about how the "Free Market" and our "Job Creators" are the source of all we should be collectively thankful for.

For Coffee Club Forum Topic... Constitutional Amendment Level Campaign Finance, Electioneering, and Lobbying Reform...

...
A Call For Constitutional Amendment Level Campaign Finance & Electioneering Law Reform
A Political Action Committee that calls for a Constitutional Amendment on Campaign Finance and Electioneering Law Reform is bedrock to the Call for an evolutionary, progressive, grassroots, and Democratic transformation of our politics, economy, society, and culture. Such a focused movement is needed because:
The overwhelming corrupting influence of money in our politics- along with the radically increasing concentration of wealth among the upper few per cent of our citizens- has created a critical and fundamental crisis in our Democracy and by extension in our domestic, foreign, and military policy.
Elections and campaigns have largely deteriorated into competitions in fundraising, which inevitably leads to the interests of disproportionately wealthy individuals and corporations being best represented- almost to the point of exclusively so- in the political arena. Campaign spending turns into just a tidy little windfall for private media empires. Hey, that’s no way to use the “public” airwaves.
There is ample evidence that "our" media and news information sources- vital cornerstones to any meaningful freedom of speech and press, not to mention Democracy itself- are more and more dominated by ever fewer mega merged "media empire" conglomerates. The result being that “our” public dialog and political debate is largely being framed by “their P.R.” agenda for privatization, low taxes for them, weak to non-existant public sector democratic governance of "their" shenanigans, and free market fundamentalist corporate libertarian globalization.
That these truths are ongoing, worsening, and self evident should be (but are not) a part of every news story and deeply imbedded into our political dialog and debate. Instead we have increasingly narrow discourse dominated by infotainment, celebrity obsession, and political spin doctoring- which all contribute to the acceptance as legitimate of devolving and self serving extremist hard right macho careerist posturing among complicit “mainstream” politico hacks along with the dominance in government at all levels of a Corporate and Business Culture which brings consistent and predictable results:
Ever more to those with the most: a steadily spiking disparity between rich and poor even as working and middle class people have struggled to maintain any kind of secure quality in their work, families, and communities.
Plenty of scuffling, antisocial stress and dysfunctional life for those at, near, or in fear of slipping closer to the bottom.
The operation of government mainly as a subsidy, service, and spoils system for the wealthiest individual and corporate "citizens", while everyone else is encouraged to believe that a favorably unregulated climate for the resultant corporate "Owner of Everything" class will create enough of a "trickle down" effect so all will be right in this “best of all possible worlds”.
All of which is of course pretty much entirely disingenuous smokescreen and hollow hoodwinking. While there is no one simple quick fix to these complex circumstances a good start might be for:
The American people to take responsibility for where this “drift” has been and is still taking us;
“We the people”, acting as informed citizens, start to reassert genuine Democratic control over our country in order to change the fundamental direction we are headed.
Nothing short of Constitutional Amendment level reform is needed to address this ongoing and worsening crisis at the heart of our Democracy so that we can re-determine what our vital national security interests are or not.
We need major Constitutional Amendment level Reform of our Campaign Finance, and Electioneering, and Lobbying Laws to address the growing rigged dominance within our Democracy by an ever narrowing elite segment of our citizenry.

Back at it : Internet and Blogging potential to effect meaningful Progressive Re-Democratization...

...
Th07Jan10, 4:25 PM.

“Blogging and Internet Potential to Effect Meaningful Progressive Democratic Change”

More and more as I gear up, ramp up, amp up my blogging toward real world real time right here right now “JDI just doing it y’all time” I think- where this all can lead has to be something more than what it’s doing so far. There seems to be two main camps on the “Potential” democratizing effects the Internet in general and the roll of blogging specifically might or should have on things. Meantime if you look around the Internet and read blogs of various partisan stripes you will find that everything under the sun is “out there”. One can pick and choose from all manner of quality and partisan niches.

So just because something is being blogged about don’t really matter. It don’t mean squat. But the big thing is the potential for a different kind of “Citizen Journalism”- yeah sure that- to evolve but also along with it new kinds of capabilities for citizen activism to emerge which might ideally level the playing field and ultimately take money out of the ultimate equation enough so that the interests of the American people might be put first rather than marginalized in the interest of serving the needs of the biggest players in Imperial Global Capitalism.

Somewhere somebody once said that if only the people who actually benefited and thrived under the policies of Ronald RayGun’s administrations had voted for him he’d have gotten maybe 5% of the popular vote. Now I think that may be a wee bit of an exaggeration but still… even if 15% could be argued the fact is that the conservative majority has been built on a foundation of duplicity, false advertising, election stealing, wholesale crooked and anti Democracy gerrymandering, and buying elections with their almost unfathomable material resource advantage. Which is only worsening as the “Income Divide of this New Gilded Age” (formerly linked here to dialogD Web Page on Unequal Wealth) gets worse with every newly occurring shakeout or adjustment in the “Global Economy”.

When will it become obvious enough that there can be no meaningful Democracy, economic justice, or much of a civil society (outside of the gated communities and corporate green zone bunker communities of the one percenters) when the wealthiest 1% of a country owns or controls 60+% of the wealth? Or at least obvious enough for the American people to wake up from there delusion that we’re all in this together and that our National elites are operating in the best interests of all of us out here who are just scuffling to get by? And by waking up I mean taking the kind of civic and Democratic action necessary to get us onto a different path with significantly more heart than the one displayed by Faux Macho Neocon insanity or their other side of the aisle, complicitous, limp wristed, “bipartisan opposition”- the incrementalist mainstream Democratic Party.

That’s where the potential of blogging and the internet and more efficient and coordinated progressive grass roots organizing can come into the mix in a more profound way than ever in the history of the Union. Because, as Martin Luther King once said:
"Those who love peace must learn to organize as well as those who love war."

Excerpt from an old interview of Noam Chomsky conducted by former Ca. gov. Jerry Brown...

... originally in Spin Magazine Aug., 1993...
JB: But now, the economics profession is arrayed against local power because it puts the greatest value on increasing the size of markets--the larger the market, the more efficient the enterprise.
NC: Yeah, look: The economics profession is basically a tool of private power. They have a doctorate, which is kind of a theology, which points out, sometimes correctly, that you can increase output by moving to market arrangements. Market arrangements essentially give more power to the powerful. That's what it amounts to. It's like a parliamentary system where the number of votes you have depends on the number of dollars you have. Well, we know what kind of democracy that would be, and we know where it would end up.
For one thing, future generations can't vote with their dollars in the market. My grandchildren can't decide how they want things spent, but they're going to have to live with it--which means the environment.
Take other issues. Suppose the people around here decide that instead of having more consumer goods they'd like to have more leisure. The market system doesn't allow you that choice. It drives you to having more consumer goods because it's all driven to maximizing production. But is the only human value to have more and more goods you don't need? In fact the business world knows that it's not. That's why they spend billions of dollars in advertising, to try to create artificial wants.
JB: The economists have a word, "autarchy," which they use to denigrate the notion of local self-reliance.
NC: Yeah, they say it's bad What "autarchy" means is people in some area saying, "Look, we'd like our lives to be like this, not like you guys tell us." Take Japan. Part of the Japan-bashing now is because Japan protects, say, mom-and-pop-style stores, and that blocks big supermarket chains from the West from coming in and taking over. Well, suppose Japan would like to have a community where you have mom- and-pop stores. I can remember that from childhood. You go 'round the corner and you pick up a loaf of bread, and you talk to the grocer. It's a lot nicer than going into the supermarket.
Now it's economically inefficient by the economist's measures. It means that things cost a little bit more. But suppose people say, okay, I'm willing to spend a little more because I want a nicer life. The economists say you're not allowed to make that decision, because the only human value in the world is maximizing profit and efficiency. Who says that's the only human value?
Adam Smith didn't think so. You go back and read their hero. What he said, in fact, is that in any civilized country, the government is going to have to intervene to prevent market forces from destroying people and reducing them to creatures as ignorant and stupid as is possible for a human being to be. The natural effect of the division of labor, maximizing efficiency, is going to turn people into tools.
There's one well-known truth of economic history, and that is that every developed society has succeeded by radically violating these principles. You get this in the current negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). One of their prime elements is to increase protection on things like patents--it's called intellectual property rights. The idea is obvious. You want to make sure that the transnational corporations monopolize the technology of the future, meaning that U.S.-run biotech corporations or pharmaceutical firms will have all the capacity to produce food and drugs and India won't be able to produce drugs for itself at 10 percent the cost. That's protectionism, that's not freedom.
We've always had industrial policy, but ours was hidden behind the Pentagon. The Clinton people said, "The state has to become involved more aggressively in paying the welfare for the rich"--which is what industrial policy is. The Berkeley Round Table did studies which pointed out that just about every functioning aspect of the U.S. economy is publicly subsidized. You've got computers, agrobusiness, lasers, pharmaceuticals. Why do you have them? Because the public pays a lot of the cost.
JB: But subsidizing the growth of multinational companies continues the trend toward greater inequality and the growing assault on the environment. So something is going to have to give.
NC: The executives who live in Connecticut and go into New York where the big offices are and have a branch office in Zurich and have production plants in Poland and Mexico--they don't care what happens to this country. They care what happens to the part of the country that they live in. But that's protected. The suburbs of Greenwich, Connecticut are going to be great. There will be golf courses and police and they keep black people out and soon.
Walk through New York City now. It's beginning to look like San Salvador. You've got very rich people living behind walls. Once in a while a gate opens and a limousine comes out from this complex, and outside you have people starving in the streets. That's a third world country. You drive through LA, you see it. And the people who are behind the walls, their goal is to enrich themselves. For them, it's crucial that there be an attack on democracy, because if the general public becomes involved in these things, well ....
You take a look at polls. This is a very heavily polled society, because business wants to keep its finger on the public pulse. They know that over 80 percent of the public thinks that the economic system is inherently unfair. Half the population thinks both parties ought to be disbanded. Alienation from institutions goes up every year-like, two-thirds of the population thinks none of the institutions function. I think that's where Perot came from. People would have voted for Mickey Mouse if he came down from Mars and said, "I've got 50 billion dollars and big ears, go vote for me. Why not?
People are desperate. If this can be organized into a functioning democracy, wealth is in trouble. Serious trouble.
JB: Can you really have democracy when more and more power is lodged in distant private and public bureaucracies? Do we need to break things up, to decentralize?
NC: The Financial Times, which is the main international business journal published in London, had a lead article on this about a year ago in which they pointed out, quite accurately, that what's happening --they think it's great, of course --is what they called a de facto world government of executive agreements with its own institutions, like the IMF and the World Bank, the EC executive, G-7 meetings--and GATT and NAFTA would be part of it. This whole structure of executive power operates independently of public involvement. Even parliaments can't influence it. Who knows what's going on at IMF meetings? You can't subpoena World Bank records.

Our Democracy First is nearing its "real world" launch...

... and my role as launcher of said entity is to go out on the limb of trying to actually do, in my own small and humble way, what lots of people are calling for and saying is what we need to ever get the kind and depth and breadth of change we need for America the Beautiful to better live up to her/our/its potential to be a true beacon of:

• democracy, freedom, power in the hands of the many as opposed to the few etc.etc.
• reasonably equal opportunity structure and resultant access to: education, decent employment, health care, a safe environment to live and raise kids, and on and on and on...
• leadership in the world as the whole world has to move away from neo liberal globalization and toward undertaking the "Great Work" (with more than a nod to Thomas Berry's book of that title along with the rest of his thinking and life's work) of our epoch which is to find a way into our collective future that allows for the continued existance of humans on the planet along with the rest of the life forces on the planet along with us...

Evolutionary Progressive Grassroots Democracy Solidarity...

... Yeah old E.P.G.T.D.S.- a movement needed in this country to solidify and unite all of the progressive Democracy types out there and through doing that bring the Democratic Party back to or closer to actually representing the interests of the people in this country- and in delivering on what they claim to be "for" when they go before the people at election time and insist that they're Democrats. And now, with Obama having pulled off the shocking reality of getting himself elected- largely by appealing to the hope for change in many- but especially the progressive radical lefty types who have been most marginalized in "Mainstream" American electoral politics with the right wing pendulum swing we have been on since Nixon/Agnew (with a little help from speechwriting nabobs of business right libertarian hegemony)- now such a Solidarity Movement might be needed more than ever because Obama's win has galvanized the right into pulling out all the stops of an obstructionist "hoping he'll fail" campaign and the Democrats thinking they are safe to continue their incrementalist "Republican Light" appeasement, capitulation, working toward bipartisanship, and miscellaneous other weak kneed drivel that has definately helped things get this bad in the first place.