California Free Press

Off the Top of My Head

Four Things That Would Make America a Better Democracy That Will Never Be Implemented

by John Lawrence

They are 1) Elect the President based on popular vote. Eliminate the electoral college. 2) Eliminate gerrymandering. 3) Eliminate the filibuster. 4) Eliminate the Second Amendment. These four things could all be done; there is nothing structurally standing in the way. It's just that the only practical way that they could be accomplished is to scrap the whole Constitution and start over. Many other countries have done just that. Sometimes that's accomplished by having a revolution, but a revolution is not always necessary. Numerous countries change their constitution each year. Already this year we have observed new constitutions in Fiji and Zimbabwe and constitutional amendments in Brazil, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Hungary, Mexico, Switzerland and Tonga. A typical constitution lasts only 19 years, which means that, on average, 5 constitutions are replaced and 30 are amended each year.

The US Constitution is 236 years old. Is it outdated? You bet. But the obstacles to amending it or replacing it are all but impassable, not to mention unthinkable. The result is that the US as a political system is getting to the point of being unworkable. Right now the government is planning to shut down as the Republican controlled House cannot come up with a budget. The two parties are completely at odds. Biden is seemingly the last person capable of constructing a compromise between the parties that has allowed the country to move forward at least on some levels. The US voting system known as first-past-the-post practically guarantees that there will be a two party system. Third parties, while almost never successful at electing their candidates, act as spoilers to the other two major parties. This distorts the democratic will of the people by electing the party least favored. Another voting system could rectify this defect, but the US will never implement another kind of voting system at the national level although some entities have done so at the local level.

The US Constitution is regarded by many as the political equivalent of the Bible. It is unthinkable that it should be revised or amended. Thomas Jefferson made an effort to revise the Bible. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, was completed in 1820 by cutting and pasting with a razor and glue numerous sections from the New Testament as extractions of the doctrine of Jesus. Jefferson's condensed composition excludes all miracles by Jesus and most mentions of the supernatural, including sections of the four gospels that contain the Resurrection and most other miracles, and passages that portray Jesus as divine. Needless to say the Jefferson Bible did not make the New York Times best sellers list or the eighteenth century version of that. There are various groups working on a new Constitution for the US, but there is no consensus that a new one is necessary just as there is no consensus that a new and revised version of the Bible is necessary.

Off the Top of My Head

Is the World Engaged in “A Battle Between Democracy and Autocracy”?

by John Lawrence

Joe Biden thinks so. Here's what he said: "But we emerged anew in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force." Politicians tend to look at the world in binary terms. It's all black and white. Their system is bad; ours is good. In reality there's a lot of gray; it's not simply black or white. If Biden were to be absolutely truthful, he would have to say that the US has a version of democracy and so does China. America's version would be decried by the founders who were totally against what they called "factionalism." Jefferson abhorred political parties. This is from history.com:

"Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.

"This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government."

The US' version of democracy is based on a two party system with a voting system called first-past-the-post. Neither parties or voting systems are mentioned in the Constitution. The first-past-the-post voting system essentially precludes third parties. The effect of a third party candidate is that of a "spoiler." He or she takes votes away from the party he or she is most closely associated with which tends to elect the least popular candidate if the third popular candidate were not running. This has had disastrous effects on American popular elections as it did in 2000 when Ralph Nader running as a third party candidate took votes away from Al Gore with the result that George W Bush, who subsequently lied us into the Iraq war, was elected President. Gore would have gotten the US further along the road of climate change mitigation.

The European parliamentary multi-party system is arguably more democratic than the US two party system because more parties with varied interests can be represented. Their head of government, the Prime Minister, equivalent to the US President, is not popularly elected but is elected by members of parliament. The US tends to identify heads of government not popularly elected with undemocratic systems yet Presidents in the US were not popularly elected until the 17th Amendment was passed in 1912. China has a version of democracy in which the President is not popularly elected but is elected by the highest legislative body - the National People's Congress. Yet the US keeps insisting that China is an autocracy but the parliamentary systems of Europe are OK as was the US before 1912. China has multiple political parties but is dominated by one party - the Chinese Communist Party. The question is to what extent is the Chinese one party system less democratic than the American two party system in the sense of which system most closely represents the needs and wants of its people.

Democratic elections are held in China at the local or county level. These Congresses elect officials at the provincial level and they in turn elect the National People's Congress. The people vote democratically for officials only at the local level. Officials at higher levels are only indirectly democratically elected similar to the US system before 1912 or the parliamentary system. Voters have selected U.S. senators in the privacy of the voting booth since 1913. This system of “direct election” was not what the framers of the U.S. Constitution had in mind, however, when they met at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Article I, section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, as written by the framers, provided for election of senators by state legislatures, something Donald Trump sought to exploit. Election of officials by the democratic vote of a body that was democratically elected by the people is arguably democratic in some sense just as the election of head of government by a parliament is arguably democratic. Therefore, it can be argued that China has some version of democracy. Moreover, eight minor political parties in addition to the Chinese Communist Party exist.

One can quibble about how democratic a political system is. The point is that there is no absolute version of democracy so different systems have to be judged on their own merits. A one party system is not necessarily less democratic than a two party system which is not necessarily less democratic than a multi-party system, all things considered. How well the system functions to meet the needs of its own people, the historical evolution of the present system and how well established is the rule of law which exists in conjunction with the democratic election of leaders and representatives should also be considered. For instance, in China stability is a primary value whereas in the US freedom is a primary value. According to Keyu Jin in The New China Playbook, the Chinese people don't mind video surveillance in public because it minimizes street crime. On the other hand in the US video public surveillance is considered an infringement of freedom even though much street crime has been solved by both public and private video cameras .

Off the Top of My Head

Should the President Be Popularly Elected by Direct Vote of the People?

by John Lawrence

In the US the President is popularly elected by the people after having been filtered through the archaic electoral college. In a parliamentary democracy the head of government equivalent to the US President is indirectly elected by the parliament not by a direct vote of the people. In China the president is also elected by a majority vote of the National People's Congress, the highest legislative body very similarly to how the heads of government are elected in parliamentary democracies. In Russia the President is nominally elected by a popular vote of the people similarly to the US although the system has been manipulated in such a way as to keep Putin in power. So what are the drawbacks of a popularly elected President by a vote of the people? The main drawback IMHO is that in the US an incompetent but popular boob like Donald Trump can be elected to the most powerful office in the land and arguably in the whole world. The election for President of the US is a popularity contest, and there is no requirement of experience or competency. In parliamentary democracies as well as China, supposedly the indirect election of President or its equivalent, "head of state," is an election by a meritocratic body of lawmakers. Therefore, it is more likely that a competent President or head of government will be elected.

In recent history in the US, the least competent but most popular person has been elected President based more on their personality and charisma than on their competency or knowledge of the job. It is more likely that a guy who "you would like to have a beer with" is elected President than someone who is more experienced and/or intelligent. Adlai Stevenson was branded as an "egghead" which effectively ended his political career. The leading Democratic figure of the 1950s, Stevenson was known for his wit, intellectual speeches, and liberal political convictions. For many Americans in the mid-twentieth century, he symbolized conscience in politics. Stevenson lost the Presidential election twice to Dwight Eisenhower, the World War II war hero. In 2000 Al Gore lost the election to George W Bush who promptly lied the US into war with Iraq. Gore, who was a staunch advocate for climate change mitigation, presumably would have employed government resources in that direction rather than fighting a fruitless war. Gore actually won the popular vote but was defeated by a combination of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court.

Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House that were then taken down by Ronald Reagan. So much for science taking precedence over popular ignorance and prejudice. Reagan also ran up the national debt substantially as did George W Bush and Donald Trump. Then when Democrats are elected President, Republicans cry bloody murder over the national debt while doing their best to prevent Democrats from spending any government money to actually help people. Fortunately, Joe Biden has been very successful in getting legislation passed to mitigate climate change among other accomplishments. But, his popularity as a candidate in 2024 in on the line as a majority of the American people don't want him to run again. Trump, despite 91 criminal indictments, is running neck and neck with Biden, one of the most accomplished Presidents in American history. One wonders whether the sclerotic American electoral system can withstand the challenges brought by popular but unscrupulous candidates for the Presidency by those you'd "like to have a beer with." Finally, the electoral College has all the disadvantages of indirect elections and none of the advantages.

Off the Top of My Head

Does China Have Some Version of Democracy and Capitalism?

by John Lawrence

The Chinese Communist Party in reality is just the Chinese Party. It is communist in name only. Kishore Mahbuboni in the book, Has China Won, says "...is America making a fundamental error of perception when it views the CCP as a Chinese Communist Party? This would imply that the soul of the CCP is embedded in its communist roots. Yet, in the eyes of many objective Asian observers, the CCP actually functions as the Chinese Civilization Party. Its soul is not rooted in the foreign ideology of Marxism-Leninism but in the Chinese civilization." China has had a capitalist economic system ever since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in about 40 years mainly due to the component of its system that represents private enterprise. It also has state owned enterprises but they have not been mainly responsible for China's rapid growth in GDP.

Xi Jinping has been President of the people's Republic of China since 2013. He is not popularly elected by the general public. Instead, he is elected by the National People's Congress (NPC), constitutionally China's highest state body, which also has the power to remove the president and other state officers from office. Elections and removals are decided by majority vote. This is not dissimilar to how the head of parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is elected. The British head of government is not elected by a popular election of the people either. He is elected by members of Parliament similar to most other parliamentary democracies. The US also originally had a system in which the President and Senators were not elected by a popular election of the people. Passed by Congress on May 13, 1912, and ratified on April 8, 1913, the 17th Amendment modified Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution by allowing voters to cast direct votes for U.S. Senators and the President. Prior to its passage, the President and Senators were chosen by state legislatures. The Chinese government has been based on a meritocratic bureaucracy for thousands of years. The popular vote elects the first representative body who elects the next higher body until the National People's Congress elects the President.

The cleavage between communism and capitalism is basically an historic artifact. Capitalism won. Almost all nations of the world have capitalistic economic systems including China. None of them have systems that are identical to the US. They all have some versions of capitalism and democracy. Prior to 1912 the US had a system similar to China's in that the President was not popularly elected but was elected by a vote of the states' senates. Today in order to maintain international tensions, US politicians keep up the dichotomy between the US and China by insisting that China's leaders are not elected democratically and that China has a communist economic system. The truth is that China has a version of democracy and a version of capitalism just as the US does. Vested interests in the US are responsible for maintaining the fiction that Chinese is communist and autocratic. In fact US democracy is vulnerable to being overthrown by a demagogue like Donald Trump which almost happened on January 6, 2020. The US is still vulnerable as a near majority of Americans prefer Trump to Joe Biden, a man who has passed landmark legislation like only a very few American Presidents have accomplished.

US democracy is also vulnerable in the sense that its first past the post voting system almost guarantees that third party candidates will be spoilers as happened in 2000 when Ralph Nader took votes away from Al Gore. Despite that Gore won the popular vote. If Nader had not been in the election, Gore would have overwhelmingly won the popular vote. However in the electoral college, which is an outdated feature of American democracy, it came down to who won the popular vote in Florida. The Supreme Court stopped the hand recount giving Bush the Presidency. There is still controversy over who would have won if that hadn't happened. In any case the Bush administration lied us into the disastrous Iraq war, something Gore probably would not have done. Also Bush was a fossil fuel guy while Gore was knowledgeable about global warming and would have pursued that agenda . History might have turned out differently, and more importantly the future history of planet Earth might turn out differently if Gore had won.

Chinese philosophy is based on Confucianism which emphasizes duty to family while the US is based on individualistic ethics emphasizing individual freedom. Keyu Jin writes in The New China Playbook, "According to the World Values Survey, which explores people's beliefs and values in more than 100 countries, 93% of Chinese participants value security over freedom, as compared to only 28 % of Americans. Such differences can be fully understood only by taking culture and history into account. In China, an interventionist state is rooted in paternalism, a hallmark of government in China since Confucian times, more than 2500 years ago;..." Although China's private enterprise capitalism has resulted in the fact that 800 million people have been pulled out of poverty in 40 years, GDP growth is not the sine qua non of Chinese capitalism. Under Xi China is turning a corner and reining in certain aspects of unbridled growth in order to mitigate certain unsalutary aspects of unfettered enterprise while emphasizing producing economic benefits for the 13% of the Chinese population still in poverty. So China is much more apt to put its finger on the economic scale while the US has more of a hands off policy on private enterprise. The downside of this is the unregulated growth of toxic social media and potentially artificial intelligence in the US. The US could mitigate the spoiler effect of third party candidates for President by adopting a different voting system. The current first past the post voting system practically guarantees that there will be a 2 party system with third parties acting as spoilers, something which could result in a second Trump Presidency despite 91 criminal indictments. Replacing first past the post with a voting system such as approval voting would eliminate the spoiler effects of third parties. It could be implemented simply by a vote of Congress since it would not violate any aspect of the Constitution. However, in the sclerotic American Congress it is unlikely that there will be any major changes in the US Constitution which is well past its "use by" date.

The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way.

 

Aug. 21, 2023, from the New York Times

 

Credit...Photo illustration by Boris Zhitkov/Getty Images

By Adam Grant

Dr. Grant, a contributing Opinion writer, is an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the author of “Think Again” and the host of the TED podcast “Re:Thinking.”

---

On the eve of the first debate of the 2024 presidential race, trust in government is rivaling historic lows. Officials have been working hard to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity. But if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether.

If you think that sounds anti-democratic, think again. The ancient Greeks invented democracy, and in Athens many government officials were selected through sortition — a random lottery from a pool of candidates. In the United States, we already use a version of a lottery to select jurors. What if we did the same with mayors, governors, legislators, justices and even presidents?

People expect leaders chosen at random to be less effective than those picked systematically. But in multiple experiments led by the psychologist Alexander Haslam, the opposite held true. Groups actually made smarter decisions when leaders were chosen at random than when they were elected by a group or chosen based on leadership skill.

Why were randomly chosen leaders more effective? They led more democratically. “Systematically selected leaders can undermine group goals,” Dr. Haslam and his colleagues suggest, because they have a tendency to “assert their personal superiority.” When you’re anointed by the group, it can quickly go to your head: I’m the chosen one.

When you know you’re picked at random, you don’t experience enough power to be corrupted by it. Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility: I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well. And in one of the Haslam experiments, when a leader was picked at random, members were more likely to stand by the group’s decisions.

Over the past year I’ve floated the idea of sortition with a number of current members of Congress. Their immediate concern is ability: How do we make sure that citizens chosen randomly are capable of governing?

In ancient Athens, people had a choice about whether to participate in the lottery. They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties. In America, imagine that anyone who wants to enter the pool has to pass a civics test — the same standard as immigrants applying for citizenship. We might wind up with leaders who understand the Constitution.

A lottery would also improve our odds of avoiding the worst candidates in the first place. When it comes to character, our elected officials aren’t exactly crushing it. To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., I’d rather be governed by the first 535 people in the phone book. That’s because the people most drawn to power are usually the least fit to wield it.

The most dangerous traits in a leader are what psychologists call the dark triad of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. What these traits share is a willingness to exploit others for personal gain. People with dark triad traits tend to be more politically ambitious — they’re attracted to authority for its own sake. But we often fall under their spell. Is that you, George Santos?

In a study of elections worldwide, candidates who were rated by experts as having high psychopathy scores actually did better at the ballot box. In the United States, presidents assessed as having psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies were more persuasive with the public than their peers. A common explanation is that they’re masters of fearless dominance and superficial charm, and we mistake their confidence for competence. Sadly, it starts early: Even kids who display narcissistic personality traits get more leadership nominations and claim to be better leaders. (They aren’t.)

If the dark triad wins an election, we all lose. When psychologists rated the first 42 American presidents, the narcissists were more likely to take reckless risks, make unethical decisions and get impeached. Add a dash of Machiavellianism and a pinch of psychopathy, and you get autocrats like Putin, Erdogan, Orban and Duterte.

Eliminate voting, and candidates with dark triad traits would be less likely than they are now to rise to the top. Of course, there’s also a risk that a lottery would deprive us of the chance to select a leader with distinctive skills. At this point, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. As lucky as America was to have Lincoln at the helm, it’s more important to limit our exposure to bad character than to roll the dice on the hopes of finding the best.

Besides, if Lincoln were alive now, it’s hard to imagine that he’d even put his top hat in the ring. In a world filled with divisiveness and derision, evidence shows that members of Congress are increasingly rewarded for incivility. And they know it.

A lottery would give a fair shot to people who aren’t tall enough or male enough to win. It would also open the door to people who aren’t connected or wealthy enough to run. Our broken campaign finance system lets the rich and powerful buy their way into races while preventing people without money or influence from getting on the ballot. They’re probably better candidates: Research suggests that on average, people who grow up in low-income families tend to be more effective leaders and less likely to cheat — they’re less prone to narcissism and entitlement.

Switching to sortition would save a lot of money too. The 2020 elections alone cost upward of $14 billion. And if there’s no campaign, there are no special interests offering to help pay for it.

Finally, no voting also means no boundaries to gerrymander and no Electoral College to dispute. Instead of questioning whether millions of ballots were counted accurately, we could watch the lottery live, just as we do with teams getting their lottery picks in the N.B.A. draft.

Other countries have begun to see the promise of sortition. Two decades ago, Canadian provinces and the Dutch government started using sortition to create citizens’ assemblies that generated ideas for improving democracy. In the past few years, the French, British and German governments have run lotteries to select citizens to work on climate change policies. Ireland tried a hybrid model, gathering 33 politicians and 66 randomly chosen citizens for its 2012 constitutional convention. In Bolivia, the nonprofit Democracy in Practice works with schools to replace student council elections with lotteries. Instead of elevating the usual suspects, it welcomes a wider range of students to lead and solve real problems in their schools and their communities.

As we prepare for America to turn 250 years old, it may be time to rethink and renew our approach to choosing officials. The lifeblood of a democracy is the active participation of the people. There is nothing more democratic than offering each and every citizen an equal opportunity to lead.

Off the Top of My Head

How Trump and All His Co-defendants Will Win

by John Lawrence

In a nutshell: get one Trump voter on the juries. You need all 12 jurors to agree that someone is guilty. You need only one Trump voter on the jury to acquit. Who wins? The lawyers who will make millions. The media who will be transfixed with this legal circus. It'll end up being much ado about nothing. If Trump happens to be found guilty and actually faces jail time, he will probably leave the country. Why should a billionaire or semi-billionaire, who has assets in other countries and probably money stashed away off shore, willingly go to some sleazy jail or even some country club jail when he could live well in some other country? Trump is not exactly a loyal American citizen who adheres to the rule of law and playing fair. He can declare from abroad that he is some sort of President in Absentia and his loyal followers will still probably send him money. He will say he is prepared to come back to America as soon as his followers take political power and he can come in riding on a white horse.

Trump and his lawyers like constitutional scholar John Eastman who set up the fake electors scheme will work the system, and, if they can't convince one juror of their innocence, they will get themselves pardoned by the next elected Republican President which could be in 2024. American voters are nothing if not fickle. They have one of the best Presidents in American history who, despite great odds, accomplished more than anyone since Lyndon Johnson. Biden's popularity is in the tank despite his accomplishments. Why is this? Maybe because of his age. Maybe because he's not "charismatic" enough. Trump voters seem to be impressed by his charisma first and foremost. I guess charisma and popularity, not competence, is what gets you elected President in this country. Even as he faces 91 criminal indictments, on the TV it's all Trump, all the time. Just like the movie Trump is everywhere all the time all over the place.

Trump and his lawyers had a scheme for replacing electors, but it was not all that far fetched. Until 1913 state legislatures had control over electors. Passed by Congress on May 13, 1912, and ratified on April 8, 1913, the 17th Amendment modified Article I, Section 3, of the Constitution by allowing voters to cast direct votes for U.S. senators. Prior to its passage, senators were chosen by state legislatures. So Eastman and others were just trying to argue that there was something unconstitutional about the 17th Amendment. The Supreme Court might have been convinced that he was right and the state legislatures should have the final say in which case Trump would have been elected, not Biden. Republicans have used the Supreme Court before to get George W Bush elected in 2000 despite the fact that, when all the votes were counted, Al Gore really won the election. Bush convinced the Supreme Court to stop counting the votes. The result was the disastrous George W Bush administration in which he lied us into the Iraq war.

Republicans have been using dirty tricks for years to get themselves elected including gerrymandering and doctoring voter rolls to eliminate black voters. Black politicians and activists say that Republican lawmakers have used racial gerrymandering and voter suppression to secure those majorities and are using their political might to further consolidate power among mostly White Republicans. Republicans have been busy removing black voters from registration lists. According to Mother Jones: Fifty-five percent of the registration notices were sent to municipalities where Hillary Clinton had defeated Donald Trump, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and nine of the 10 areas with the highest concentration of voters on the purge list were big cities and college towns that had voted for Clinton. Milwaukee and Madison, the state’s two Democratic strongholds, accounted for 14 percent of the state’s registered voters but 23 percent of the names on the removal list. Voters in predominantly Black neighborhoods or areas with large student populations were nearly twice as likely to be flagged for removal, The Guardian found.

Trump and his lawyers just took dirty tricks to a whole new level. Now they will win in court just by the process of jury selection. It only takes one to find any of the myriad of defendants not guilty.

Off the Top of My Head

Contrasting the Chinese, EU and American Economic Systems

by John Lawrence

Since 2001, China has pursued a “going-out” investment policy. At first, the PRC (People's Republic of China) mainly encouraged SOEs (state owned enterprises) to invest overseas but in recent years, China's overseas investments have diversified with both state and private enterprises investing in nearly all industries and economic sectors. After Deng Xiaoping came to power in the late 1970s, China opened up its economic policy with the result that approximately 800 million people were lifted out of poverty in about 40 years. This turned China into a capitalistic nation ruled by the Chinese Communist party although the word "communist" is largely an anachronism at this point. China developed a unique economic system comprised of state owned enterprises and private enterprise. It has been the private aspects of China's system that have mainly driven the huge increases in GDP to the point where China is likely to take over the US as the world's largest economy in terms of GDP in a few years.

There are 4 components of GDP: consumption, investment, government spending and profit from exports. Some of the reasons for China's becoming an economic powerhouse are that consumption is only 38% of GDP whereas US consumption is nearly 70% of GDP. While Americans consume, China produces, exports and invests. I would characterize the US as having a Taylor Swift economy, an economy based on consumption of entertainment and other disposable items with no lasting value. It has been reported that Taylor Swift and the Barbie movie have been at least somewhat responsible for keeping the American economy afloat. When you add in social media and professional athletics, much of American consumption is immediately disposed of as soon as the event is over. In the EU consumption is about 52% of GDP so somewhat larger than China's but much less than the US.

Chinese investment is 43% of GDP while The US' is about 16%. EU investment is about 25% of GDP so midway between the US and China. At 21.4% EU government spending is larger than either the US (17.6%) or China (16%). Like the American government the Chinese government doesn't spend a lot of money on welfare. Chinese families are basically savers and provide a lot of the same services to their own intergenerational extended families which are provided by EU governments. The American ethos is largely individualistic and so many family members who can't provide for themselves fall through the cracks. This is one reason for the homeless crisis in the US.

The Chinese economy is bolstered by the fact that it is a net exporter (2.5% of GDP) while the US (-2.7%) and the EU (-2.7%) are net importers which subtracts from their GDPs. China also exports capital and manpower in the form of the Belt and Road Initiative. Announced in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims to strengthen China’s connectivity with the world. It combines new and old projects, covers an expansive geographic scope, and includes efforts to strengthen hard infrastructure, soft infrastructure, and cultural ties. As of October 2019, the plan touches 138 countries with a combined Gross Domestic Product of $29 trillion and some 4.6 billion people. Supporting a diverse array of initiatives that enhance connectivity throughout Eurasia and beyond could serve to strengthen China’s economic and security interests while bolstering overseas development. 

The Chinese political system, nominally communist, has the same elements of democracy that the early US political system had which is that locally elected bodies select the next higher political body with 3 successive iterations so that the National Assembly is chosen by the provincial assemblies at the next lower level. The original American Constitution had a similar feature in that the Senate was not chosen directly by the people but by state legislatures. State legislatures continued to elect senators until adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 which provided for popular election of senators. The Chinese system tends to meritocraticy with the best and brightest ascending to the top levels whereas the more democratic American system has within it the possibility of electing complete idiots like Donald Trump whose ascendancy served to prove how vulnerable the two party system really is. By contrast the Chinese emphasize harmony and stability which are attributes of their main philosophical inheritance: Confucianism.

Off the Top of My Head

The Best Democracy May Not Be One Achieved by Elections

by John Lawrence

For a truly democratic system we would have to go back to ancient Greece and the system developed by Aristotle: sortition. Sortition is the selection of a legislative body randomly by lot. If the American House of Representatives truly represented the American people it would be chosen in this way. There is no more representative way of choosing a democratic legislative body. In the ancient Greek legislative body known as the Council of 500, each representative was chosen by lot. If the American House was chosen in this way, it would a) eliminate the need for money in American politics and b) eliminate the need for political parties in American politics. People have been brainwashed to believe that only a government in which there are elections for the representatives is a true democracy. It's not the only or even the best way. Representatives chosen by lot are more representative of the American people than representatives chosen by election. So at least for the purposes of selecting this body, with sortition the two party system would go by the wayside.

So what would this say about the relative merits of a democracy in which the representative body was chosen by lot and a one party system such as the Chinese government. In other words how would a no party system compare to a one party system , and is a no party system more democratic than a one party system. Yes, certainly it would be. But is a two party system such as the US currently has necessarily more democratic than a one party system. In the Chinese system the lowest deliberative body is voted on by the people. Then there are 3 levels of elections. The first is for the municipal people's Congress which elects the people's congresses of provinces which elects the highest level the National People's Congress. If the National People's Congress were to be selected by lot, then the Chinese system would be truly democratic just as the American system would be if the House of Representatives were selected by lot. Based on this analysis one could argue that the Chinese one party system is just as much a version of democracy as the American two party system and that if both systems used sortition instead of elections by vote, both systems would be arguably more democratic. Whether a system is a one party system, a two party system or a multiparty system such as they have in Europe, the various systems should only be compared on the actual results the system is capable of manifesting and how much their various bodies reflect the wishes of the people.

The American system is currently on the brink of systemic failure due to the fact that there is such a great divisive split between the two parties.The American system notably does not always elect the best and brightest candidates. The Chinese system arguably is more merit based than the US system. In the US a clown and no nothing like Trump can be elected and cause great havoc. In fact he almost instigated a complete overthrow of the American system of democracy. People with money or financial backing stand a better chance of being elected than people of merit or good will. The First Amendment allows candidates to lie about virtually anything, and, if they can convince enough voters that their alternative facts are the true facts, they can win elections. While the Chinese system does not represent the ultimate democratic form of government, neither does the American system. Both systems could be reformed to allow more truly representative government and more successful and capable government. In fact in the US if the House of Representatives were formed by sortition and the Senate were formed by voting or sortition based on a pool of candidates that had at least minimal background, experience and educational requirements, the American system would be quite a bit more democratic than it is right now. The ideal system might be one that approaches as closely as possible to a no party system.

Off the Top of My Head

Is Voting a Necessary Component of Democracy?

by John Lawrence

Many people consider voting the sine qua non defining characteristic of democracy. However, the inventors of democracy, the ancient Greeks, did not. Their legislative body, the Council of 500, was chosen not be voting but by lot, in other words randomly. Arguably, random selection is more democratic since it guarantees a legislative body which actually represents and reflects all of the people. Voting, at least in the US, does not result in a legislature that reflects the actual composition of the electorate because the candidates need a lot of money even to get on the ballot. Random selection requires no money, just a complete list of all citizens. A legislature which reflects the actual composition of the electorate is more democratic than one that reflects only the composition of the moneyed class. Therefore, voting must be disassociated from democracy in the larger sense. So let's ask the question how is the Chinese legislature, the National People's Congress, chosen? It is chosen by the people by voting although the nominees are chosen by the Communist Party. It could be argued and debated how well the National People's Congress reflects the actual composition of the electorate. It could also be argued which system, the American system or the Chinese system is more democratic in the sense that the national legislative body represents and reflects the actual composition of their respective electorates. My guess is that the American two party system is only slightly more democratic than the Chinese one party system. Someone should do a study and comparison.

In addition to getting money out of politics, random selection, which is also known as sortition, would end the districting system and gerrymandering. The House would reflect the composition of the US electorate. Instead of an elaborate system of voting and majority rule, all you would need is a data base of all 330 million Americans and a program for random selection. Voting systems in and of themselves are controversial (which of the several available voting systems should be used), and majority rule is notorious for leaving out minorities.  The US system know as first past the post practically determines that the US will be a two party system. Third parties contribute the "spoiler effect," which we've seen all to often in Presidential politics, for example, when Ross Perot and Ralph Nader ran as third party candidates. They just take votes away from the party that they are closer to on the political spectrum helping the other party to win. The Chinese have a one party system and the US has a two party system which is probably only somewhat more democratic than the Chinese system if the measure of democraticness is that the legislature represents a reflection of all the people. The European parliamentary system is a multiparty system where minorities are better represented than in the US or Chinese systems, and hence, is more democratic than either of them. A further benefit of random selection us that extremists and extreme parties are unlikely to be over represented in the outcome. In fact political parties would have no reason to exist if the legislature was chosen by sortition.

Rousseau says in The Social Contract, " 'Election by lot,' says Montesquieu, 'is of the nature of democracy. ' I agree , but how is it so? 'The lot,' he continues, 'is a mode of election which mortifies no on; it leaves every citizen a reasonable hope of serving his country.' "Montesquieu , by the way was one of the chief architects of society that the Founders took as an example in their design of the US Constitution. Sortition was used in the Athenian democracy. With few exceptions, all magistrates were chosen by lot, beginning with the archons in 487–486 BC; likewise the Boule (council) of 500 and the juries of the law courts were chosen by lot. Sortition is used in the American system for jury selection.

My reform of the American system would be #1) The legislature should be chosen by sortition to serve 4 year terms. Pay would be high enough to induce the average person to want to serve. The only requirement would be US citizenship. #2) The Senate would be chosen by sortition among the people who met certain educational and experiential background requirements. The term would be 6 years. #3) The Supreme Court would be chosen from among the people with even more stringent background requirements especially in law and government. The term would be 8 years. #4) The President would be chosen by means of an electoral system with an advanced method of voting like approval voting. The electoral college would be abolished. The President would serve for 4 years with the possibility of serving two terms if the people elected him again. At any level of political participation people could opt out of the pool of which otherwise they might be randomly selected. We have already seen in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump how extremists can be elected by purveying false information and outright lies creating a cult following. The elimination of political parties altogether would transform politics from the Chinese one party system, the American two party system and the European multiparty system to in fact a more democratic no party system.

Off the Top of My Head

The Dystopian American Democracy

by John Lawrence

As set up by the Founding Fathers, the mechanics of the American electoral system inevitably lead to a two party system. This is as opposed to a parliamentary democracy as exists in most other democratic nations. Third parties never make it in American democracy precisely because they take votes away from the party whose views they most closely resemble. Example: the Presidential election of 2000. Since with the American voting system, a voter can vote for one and only one candidate, voters waste their votes voting for a third party candidate who has no chance of winning. Ralph Nader ran as the Green party candidate and won almost 3 million votes, votes which most assuredly would have been cast for Gore if Nader weren't running. As it was, Gore won more popular votes than George W Bush who eked out a victory because of the antiquated electoral college system. If Gore had also won the 3 million votes that Nader received, he may have had enough electoral votes to tip the balance. These voting mechanics have enshrined what is called plurality voting or the first past the post system into law. If the approval voting system had been in effect in 2000, Gore would have won. Approval voting is a system in which a voter can cast votes for all candidates he or she approves of. That means that all those who voted for Nader would also probably have voted for Gore giving Gore 3 million more votes.

Why the two party system, which is the inevitable result of plurality voting, is so toxic is that it leads to a government like we have today in which the two parties are diametrically opposed to each other. Instead of working in the best interests of the American people, the two parties end up fighting each other for power. This produces gridlock and a seesawing back and forth regarding policy depending on which party controls which branch of government. The dystopia that results from this winner take all system is that compromise becomes impossible. All the energy goes into winning and making the other party lose. It is all about the competition between the two parties and not about finding solutions to societal problems that benefit the American people. Another factor is that the plurality system of voting at best leads to majority rule. That means that at best each party represents a majority of the American people and not minorities at all. Certainly neither party needs to seek the votes of the poorest Americans who usually don't vote anyway, and, if they did, their interests need not be served by the winning party.

The American system has become a dystopia precisely because one party is only interested in winning, and, if the other party is in power, in making that party lose the next election. They do this by denying insofar as possible that party from making any constructive changes which might benefit the American people. As the American people get disenchanted with the ruling party because it can't bring about constructive change, they inevitably vote for the other party hoping that they can do what the ruling party wasn't able to based on their campaign promises. In a multi party system such as a parliamentary democracy, a party whose only purpose is to deny the ruling party the ability to bring about constructive change and thereby gain power for itself is less likely to be able to pull this off. A center party is more likely to win. The two party system is more likely to breed two extreme parties diametrically opposed to each other with each party vying for power.

Fortunately, because of his skill and dexterous maneuvering, Joe Biden has been able to bridge a lot of gaps in getting things done for the American people. However, it wasn't without the other party's determinattion to make him fail. Republican leader Mitch McConnell said this about President Obama: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." How they endeavored to do this was to make Obama fail at everything he promised in his campaign to do for the American people. If Obama wasn't able to accomplish his campaign goals, the American people would become disenchanted with him and put Republicans back in power. This is why Republicans never compromise with Democrats in the best interests of getting good things done for the American people. They only see these things as "wins" for the Democrats and hence "losses" for themselves. On the other hand, Democrats are somewhat more magnanimous in that they will vote with Republicans some times when they are in power. Example: Democrats voted 3 times to raise the debt ceiling when Trump was in power even though they objected to the $7 trillion that Trump added to the national debt by giving tax breaks to the rich. The only reason Biden was able to accomplish anything or any American President is able to accomplish anything is when their party controls all 3 branches of government. Even then the other party can filibuster making a mockery of the idea of democratic government.

Off the Top of My Head

Is Democracy Doomed by the Constitution Itself?

by John Lawrence

According to the Constitution, state legislatures have complete control over their state's electors so, even if the popular vote is for a Democrat, a Republican controlled state legislature can choose electors dedicated to the Republican candidate for President. The electoral college was established by Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution and modified by the 12^th and 23^rd Amendments. Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution states:

"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."

The 12th amendment is irrelevant to our discussion as it has mainly to do with how electors should deliberate and the number of which are chosen by each state. The 23rd amendment gives citizens living in DC the right to vote. The Constitution makes clear that state legislatures have complete control over the selection of electors, and, therefore, that state's control of its votes for President regardless of the popular vote in that state. In fact the following is true:

"Currently, all states select electors through a popular vote (although how that vote works can differ), but that was not always the case throughout American history. In many states, the state legislature selected electors, a practice which was common until the mid-1800s."

Many "battleground states", those where the popular vote is close, have Republican controlled legislatures. When the same party holds both legislative chambers and the governorship, that party has state control. Republicans have state control in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Florida and Ohio as well as 19 other states mostly in the south and midwest. State legislatures that are Democrat controlled are mostly on the west coast and northeast. In the next Presidential election red states that have state control of their legislatures and governorships could change the rules about how they choose electors and decide that they will choose Republican electors regardless of the popular vote. Of course they would be sued and the suit would wind up in the Supreme Court which is majority controlled by Republicans and conservatuves. One of the tenets of conservatism is a strict interpretation of the Constitution. They are called "strict constructionists." There is absolutely no doubt that a strict interpretation of the Constitution gives state legislatures complete control over the selection of electors. If rules need to be changed in those states to allow for the selection of electors not to be made by popular vote, that can easily be accomplished in states in which both the Houses of the legislature and the governorship are in Republican hands such as in the battleground state mentioned above.

So while the US Congress has been concerned over the years with voting rights such as the 15th and 19th amendments to the Constitution which gave voting rights to African Americans and women, respectively, and the Voting Rights act of 1965 which prohibits racial discrimination in voting, the real test for nondiscriminatory election of the President of the U.S. will come up in the 2024 election in which many red states will avail themselves of their rights as states to select electors. In the final analysis expanding voting rights legislation such as the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act are irrelevant to the outcome of the election. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would make illegal voting rules that discriminate on the basis of race, language, or ethnicity and empower voters’ to challenge discriminatory laws. The Freedom to Vote Act (S. 2747) is currently in the Senate and would solidify comprehensive voter protections, including a minimum of 15 days for early voting, mail-in ballots, and making Election Day a national holiday. It would require eliminating the filibuster to get these laws passed in the Senate.

If states pursue what is their right according to the Constitution to change electoral law to allow them to choose electors not in accordance with popular vote, it will precipitate a Constitutional crisis in 2024. If Trump runs and is elected due to these changes at the state level, the Supreme Court will uphold the election results and Trump will be elected despite the popular vote. This is the scenario that Trump clumsily tried but failed to succeed with in 2020. Next time it could succeed and be perfectly legal. All this goes to show that the U.S. Constitution is fundamentally flawed. Minimal changes that would bring it into the modern world would be elimination of the electoral college so that Presidents are elected by popular vote, the elimination of the filibuster so that the Senate operated as a democratic institution and elimination of the Second Amendment so that every nut case doesn't have the right to own firearms.

Off the Top of My Head

Snake in the Grass Kyrsten Sinema Sells Out to Corporate Lobbyists

by John Lawrence

Corporations, especially the pharmaceutical, can thank Kyrsten Sinema for selling out to them. The least objectionable parts of Biden's Build Back Better plan are the ones Sinema vetoed. Biden's plan would have been much better if corporate lobbyists hadn't gotten to her. But not to worry. She's set for life with probable promises of corporate board positions paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few hours "work." With Democrats like her, we don't need Republicans. She's a Republican wolf in Democratic sheep's clothing. But never fear. Biden's Build Back Better Bill will eventually pass within the next couple of weeks, and it's still truly transformational. Too bad that every Democratic Senator had effectively a veto over any provision of it. Joe Mancin was at least up front with the public about his concerns, some of which were at least plausible. Sinema sprung her demands on Biden at the seeming last minute forcing him to renegotiate the whole deal and delaying the whole process. While pundits quibble over Biden's ratings, I don't think he's too concerned about that. He knows he has a BIG DEAL or a BIG FUCKING DEAL as he once whispered to Obama. He'll go down in history as a transformational President.

So what do the Republicans have to offer? Election denialism and insurrection denialism. It wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that they could spring back to life in two or maybe four years. Too bad for the rest of the world's confidence in America. Although the US decries Soviet and Chinese authoritarianism in which one leader can remain in power for a number of years, while the whole US relationship with the rest of the world could change every four, what about Angela Merkel, who remained in power for 16 years, in a putative democracy. Longevity of intent is not a function necessarily of type of government. The US is back? Biden would like to convince others it's so. But Trump has a different perspective which is that Biden's version of the US is back until he, Trump, takes over again in 2024. The US could veer wildly back and forth without any continuity whatsoever. While Democrats are doing their best to help families and bring the US into the modern world, Republicans offer warmed over conspiracy theories aided and abetted by social media. The US needs to get serious about denying Trump a chance of ever running again. In fact he should be in jail for attempting to overthrow a legitimately elected US government which is treason. Yes, the T word applies to him. The S word, sedition, as well. Yet as of now he can run again and possibly win in 2024.

I think that, after the twin Build Back Better bills finally pass, Democrats will turn their attention to voting rights. Will Sinema and Mancin go along with holding the filibuster in abeyance to get voting rights passed? That's the big question. If not, Democrats are sunk in 2022 and 2024. And so is the US as a world leader. The US will become a backwater and a latter day banana republic with an outsize military, corporate lobbyists run amuck and a fast fading US dollar as the world's reserve currency. Runaway global warming will be a given if Trump is elected again in 2024. The US will become a billionaire's paradise with unrestricted limits in economic inequality and a burgeoning homeless population that neither Republicans or Democrats seem to be able to do anything about. Rents will soar out of sight as more people live in their vehicles and on the streets without adequate sanitation. The rest of the developed world will leave the US in its dust, but they alone will not be able to solve the problem of climate change which will eventually make parts, if not all, of the earth uninhabitable. So there is a lot riding on a Federal voting rights bill overriding the Republican state efforts to gerrymander and restrict access to the ballot in order to favor the electability of Republicans.

Off the Top of My Head

If Republican Voters Want the Infrastructure Bill, Why Don't Republican Lawmakers?

by John Lawrence, April 12, 2021

Is this a failure of representative democracy? Polls show that a majority of Republican voters support Biden's infrastructure plan including the "care" components thereof. Yet Republican Senators are dead set against it, and the bill will probably not garner one Republican vote. It can still pass the Senate based on budget reconciliation which only requires a majority vote as long as all Democrats vote for it. Other Biden proposals involving voter's rights and gun control would require at least 10 Republican votes in the Senate under the current rules which involve the filibuster for non-budgetary items. In a representative democracy, a party should represent its voters. Otherwise, you don't really have a representative democracy which the US purports itself to be. So at present the US is in the position of being a government swerving back and forth from a representative democracy as long as Democrats control both Houses of Congress and the Presidency and a dictatorship of an elite when Republicans control either party or the Presidency.

The same applies to other issues like gun control, voter's rights and immigration which aren't subject to budgetary reconciliation and must garner 60 votes in the Senate. One of the minimum elements of democracy is majority rule. Because the filibuster is anti-majoritarian, this leaves the American democracy in the position of not really being a democracy at all in terms of non-budgetary items. So the US is on its way to being an authoritarian regime if Republicans control the Presidency and both Houses of Congress. All that would be necessary is a President like Trump with authoritarian tendencies. Then the US government becomes a government that's all about the use of power to get its way internationally and domestically, not about making the world a better place. Unfortunately, this leaves the US in the eyes of other nations as being untrustworthy since there is no consistent policy going forward. Other countries have more consistent leadership and hence are considered more trustworthy.

China, on the other hand, has very consistent policies going far into the future. China isn't perfect but most of the Chinese people and the leadership are on the same wavelength. US leadership likes to make a big deal of the plight of the Uyghurs, a Chinese minority that represents less than 1% of the Chinese population. So it's pretty remarkable that the only problem China seems to have with a minority that resents Chinese leadership  is with a minority that composes 0.31% of the population. The US should be so lucky yet the US harps on the Chinese over this situation of which little is actually know by the western world. China has pilled 800 million people out of poverty since 1990, one of the outstanding feats in human history, yet the US leadership continues to harp about the Uyghurs while giving no credit to China on poverty reduction. During the same time period the wages of US workers has stagnated. Kishore Mahbubani, author of the book, "Has China Won" writes: "In contrast to America's stagnation, China's culture, self-concept, and morale are being transformed at a rapid pace - mostly for the better." Rather than China's recent success being an assessment of the comparative values of Marxist-Leninist doctrines vis a vis American democracy, The Chinese Communist Party could more appropriately be called the Chinese Civilization Party since it reflects the 2000 year history of China more than it does Communist ideology.

So the response of the US to the progress of China in the last 30 years, instead of congratulating them on their remarkable accomplishments, is to be fearful that China is getting ahead of us. Well, duh, if you compare a society that is mostly all on the same wavelength and making remarkable steps forward with one that is divided and experienced a certain segment almost accomplishing a coup d'etat in a recent insurrection which threatened the lives of lawmakers in the seat of democracy itself. However, rather than viewing the world situation as a competition between the US and China, a more fruitful approach would be to cooperate with China with regard to climate change and pandemics, two things that affect the whole world and which require fast action, not a lackadaisical approach in which maybe we'll cooperate down the road, but in the meantime we have to compete. There's no time for that. The planet earth has almost passed an inflection point after which there will be no more time available.

Off the Top of My Head

Biden's Agenda

by John Lawrence, March 27, 2021

Biden has a definite agenda and a time table for putting it forward. His first two massive bills, COVID relief and infrastructure will go forward as planned because they can be passed with only a majority in Congress due to the budget reconciliation process. Other bills like voting rights and immigration are more dicey because they are subject to the filibuster. It's clear that Democrats will not get even one vote in the Senate for any bill subject to the filibuster. Biden will keep alive the meme that he "wants to work across the aisle" even though he knows that is impossible because he wants to at least appear moderate and cooperative. He doesn't want to alarm anyone, but push will come to shove inevitably when it becomes time to get a voting rights bill passed which is absolutely necessary if Democrats ever want to hold power again and accomplish anything. The coming figurative Civil War will be over voting rights. If Republicans are successful in rolling back voting rights for the poor and minorities, they will continue to hold power. If there is a Federal voting rights bill that will not only expand the way people can vote as was put into place because of the pandemic but also eliminate gerrymandering, then Democrats will continue to hold power because of the changing demographics of the American electorate. That's why a voting rights bill is so critical.

Republicans have devised different methods for voter suppression over the years not the least of which is gerrymandering. If they control how the voting districts are drawn on the map, they can insure that a Republican will be elected from each district. So expanding the voting franchise in a fair way is absolutely critical. If that is done, Democrats will hold and gain power for the foreseeable future. If not, Republicans will continue to hold power even as a minority party. So the stakes involved are huge. Biden has his timetable laid out. Do the easy stuff first. Two massive trillion dollar bills are the easy stuff because they can be passed in Congress with just a majority and without any Republican votes. When it comes time to pass a voting rights act, Democrats will have to attack the filibuster, and Mitch McConnell will go apoplectic. Be prepared for all kinds of threats from Republicans because they know that their time in power and the time when white people have controlled American politics is passed. America is becoming a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and very diverse society and American political power will reflect that if democracy and majority rule holds sway. Republicans and white people in general will do everything they can to hold onto power. American history demonstrates that.

However, Democrats, who have the slimmest of majorities in the Senate, have the power in their hands to change the filibuster rule or to eliminate it altogether, and I'm sure they will do whatever is necessary to pass their agenda. Their only problem is with the two conservative Democrats in the Senate, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They will have to make sure that these two will come on board with whatever the Democrats decide to do. Biden has two of the best leaders on his side in terms of Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate. They will figure out a way to outsmart the Republicans and bring the American people to their side as well. Republicans will be furious, no doubt. Fortunately, they blew their wad with the failed coup attempt popularly known as an insurrection. Now the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security is focused on their case. It won't happen again.

Biden only has two years for certain in which to enact his agenda. The special election in Georgia which elected Warnock and Ossof was critical to the success of the Biden administration. Warnock only has two years to serve until the next state election in Georgia to fill his seat whereas Ossoff was elected to a 6 year term. That's why there is a furious attempt to change the voting laws in Georgia so that a Republican senator will be elected there in 2022 and Democrats will lose their majority in the Senate which will again be controlled by Republicans. It was a happy coincidence for Democrats that Ossoff and Warnock were both elected; it was an anomaly for the state of Georgia, and Republicans are determined that it won't happen again. The success of the Biden administration hangs on his first two years to get his agenda done, and, if he wants to get anything done in the last two years from 2022 to 2024, it is critical that Federal voting rights are established which will roll back the white supremicist Jim Crow voting legislation currently being passed in Georgia and other states.

So the critical issue really is the filibuster. If Democrats don't go all out and eliminate it or at least create carve outs for voting rights legislation, they will lose control of the Federal government in 2022, and Biden's agenda will be defenestrated. It's all about the future of American politics and who will hold power - the Democrats who will serve the American people especially the poor and the middle class or the Republicans who will serve the rich and the white supremicists.

Biden Must Get Manchin and Sinema to Fall in Line

by Robert Reich

 

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

America is at a turning point on voting rights – one that’s almost as critical as the mid-1960s when the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed. 

The present choice is whether to expand voting rights and strengthen our democracy, or allow the GOP to enact even more restrictive voting laws and partisan gerrymandering — cementing themselves in minority rule for years to come. 

Just as in the mid-1960s, presidential leadership will be a decisive factor.

Across the country, state Republicans have introduced over 250 bills restricting the right to vote. As a lawyer for the Arizona GOP recently admitted before the Supreme Court in seeking to defend the state’s voting restrictions, if they’re eliminated, “it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats.”

Democrats in Congress are fighting back against this anti-democratic agenda with their For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. 

These bills would automatically register new voters, outlaw gerrymandering, expand early voting, ban restrictions on mail-in ballots, reform campaign finance laws, and restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Mitch McConnell calls it a “power grab.” It is a power grab – grabbing power back for the people.

Yet although Democrats now possess a razor-thin majority in the Senate, these efforts don’t stand a chance unless Democrats overcome two obstacles there.

The first is the filibuster, a rule requiring 60 votes to pass regular legislation. The filibuster is not in the Constitution and not even in law. It’s just a Senate rule, which Democrats can and must end with their 51-vote bare majority.

The filibuster has historically been used against civil rights and voting rights. So it’s appropriate that Democrats finally end it in order to protect and expand these rights in the face of state efforts to restrict them.

Which raises the second obstacle. Two Democratic senators – West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema – have said they won’t vote to end the filibuster, presumably because they want to preserve their centrist image and appeal to Republican voters in their states.

Well, I’m sorry. The stakes are too high. We are talking about the future of civil and voting rights — critical to fighting racism and preserving American democracy. There is no excuse for two Democratic senators to allow Republicans to stomp on our democracy and entrench their minority rule for generations.

And there is no reason President Joe Biden should let them. It’s time for him to assert the leadership that President Lyndon Baines Johnson asserted more than a half-century ago.

When someone tried to persuade LBJ not to waste his time on civil and voting rights, he replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Johnson worked to break the southern filibuster – lobbying recalcitrant senators and pressuring their colleagues to do the same. As Senator Hubert Humphrey later described it, “the president grabbed me by my shoulder and damn near broke my arm.”

Historians tell us that Johnson’s efforts may have shifted the votes of close to a dozen senators, breaking the longest filibuster in Senate history and clearing the way for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

We are once again at a crucial juncture for civil rights and voting rights, one that will shape our nation for decades to come. Joe Biden must learn from LBJ, and wield the power of the presidency to make senators fall in line with the larger goals of the nation. Otherwise, as LBJ asked, “what the hell’s the presidency for?”

Off the Top of My Head

If Two Democratic Senators Were Not Elected in Georgia Run-offs, There Would Be No COVID Relief Package Under Biden

by John Lawrence, March13, 2021

It was crucial that the two Georgia Democratic Senators were elected. Not one Republican voted for Biden's $1.9 trillion bill. If there were one less Democrat in the Senate, nothing like it would ever have been passed. Republicans are the Party of No. Not one Republican Senator will ever vote Yes on any legislation put forward by a Democrat so that Georgia election was crucial. That's why Republican legislatures not only in Georgia but around the country are scrambling to put restrictive Jim Crow voting regulations in place on the belief that Republican operative Paul Weyrich was right. He said, "So many of our Christians have what I call the goo-goo syndrome: good government. They want everybody to vote. I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people, they never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

So now economist Larry Summers is worried about inflation due to the fact that trillions have been added to the deficit. So far, lawmakers have enacted six major bills, costing about $5.3 trillion, to help manage the pandemic and mitigate the economic burden on families and businesses. Even those economists know that the Federal government doesn't need taxes  in order to spend money. The Federal Reserve can create it with a few keystrokes on a computer just the way they did to bail out Wall Street banks during the Great Financial Recession (GFR) of 2008. Of course the public wasn't suppose to know about this "secret" bailout by the Fed. Authorities wanted you to believe that the $700 billion bill passed by Congress provided the bailout. In reality it was much more. Rolling Stone reported: "Washington Post “Fact-checker” columnist Glenn Kessler disputes the numerous studies showing the real bailout outlay was through the Fed, which the Sanders campaign had said was anywhere from $7.7 trillion (the number Bloomberg used in its coverage of secret Fed lending) to $29 trillion (the number the Levy Institute at Bard College calculated, including guarantees and other forms of aid).

So how is it that  Larry Summers was not so worried about inflation due to the Fed's trillions of dollars created and given to Wall Street? The answer is that that money was given to rich people which has caused no inflation because rich people are not going to spend money in ways that drive up the Consumer Price Index (CPI). They are mainly going to invest their money in ways that aren't included in the CPI. They are going to purchase assets like stocks and real estate. Consequence: no inflation at least as measured by the CPI. Instead the Wall Street bailout during the GFR as well as the $2 trillion tax breaks of the Trump administration produced asset inflation. It's the reason that home prices and rents are becoming increasingly unaffordable. But Summers is worried about inflation as measured by the CPI which is what happens when poor and middle class people get a trillion dollar bailout. They will spend that money at least partly on consumer goods that are included in the CPI and potentially drive up prices. However, much of the bailout money will go to pay off debts like past due rent and mortgage payments. This is not inflationary. So the real moral of the story is that, according to economists like Summers, bailing out rich people is good, bailing out poor people is bad.

So two lessons are to be learned here. 1) The Fed doesn't need taxes to create money and spend it into the economy whether that money is to bail out banks or to bail out the poor and middles class. 2) Democrats need to enact at the Federal level voting laws which encourage as many people to vote as possible and roll back Republican enacted restrictions on voting at the state level. In order to do the latter, Democrats will have to eliminate the filibuster at least for particular types of legislation. The only reason Biden's $1.9 trillion relief bill passed is that it was done by a process known as "budget reconciliation" which only requires a majority vote in the Senate. A national voting rights bill cannot be passed by that process and is subject to the filibuster which requires 60 votes. The Party of No wouldn't hesitate to use the filibuster to doom any voting rights legislation at the Federal level which means essentially that Jim Crow voting rights would again be put in place to discourage black people from voting. And don't worry about your children and grandchildren having to pay off the national debt. The Federal Reserve doesn't need their money.

Off the Top of My Head

Was the Insurrection a Blessing in Disguise?

by John Lawrence, January 21, 2021

What could have been a horrible tragedy ended up being just a horrible spectacle. But what if, instead of showing up January 6, the mob showed up January 20 catching security off guard the way they did at the Capitol?  As it turned out, Congress persons, in a show of defiance, went ahead with their business on the same day, and the inauguration went off without a hitch restoring hope and confidence in government. Result: insurrection defeated with very little loss of blood. The second thing is that now domestic terrorists and white supremacists are on the FBI's radar the way they never were before.Those who broke into the Capitol will be rooted out and sent to jail. Others will be closely watched. I never thought I'd be singing the praises of the FBI, but I'm so happy that they, the Intelligence agencies and the American people are finally aware of the real threats to America and not just imagined ones.

The one possible shred of a rationale that the election was stolen from Trump is that election laws were changed—legally—by the states to allow more mail-in balloting. This was motivated by a need to save people from congregating due to the coronavirus. The net effect was that more people, especially poor working people, got to vote than ever before. This probably made the difference in who won, but in a democratic society ideally every legally qualified voter should be able to vote. Republicans have always used voter suppression techniques to prevent this from happening. Republican operative Paul Weyrich famously said, "I don't want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Well, in this election, unfortunately for Trump, pretty close to a majority of people actually voted. Now Republicans will be doing everything in their power to roll back those election laws so that mail-in voting will not be available in the next election. Democrats need to work very hard to make sure that mail-in voting stays in place permanently and even is expanded. This will insure that the demographic change that favors Democrats will be reflected in the electorate.

I thought that, since the Democrats had majorities in both Houses of Congress, getting legislation passed and signed into law would be a breeze. The only hang-up would be the filibuster, but the filibuster can be nullified by a simple majority vote. Easy peasy. Well, not so fast. There are a couple of conservative Democrats, the most notorious of which is Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia. He has already said he won't vote to suspend the filibuster rule. This leaves budget reconciliation as the only way to get a bill passed by majority rule in the Senate. This will probably be used for the COVID relief bill which will probably pass. It's unclear if it can be used a second time, and, if it were, would Manchin vote with the Democrats? Even then budget reconciliation cannot be used for non budgetary issues.  What it boils down to is that this one man, Joe Manchin, has extraordinary control over the legislative process. Republicans will probably be united in the Senate and be as obstructionist to Democratic initiatives as they were during the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, the FBI is rounding up the mob that violated the Capitol. I want every one of them that went beyond the police barrier, even if they didn't go into the Capitol, rounded up and brought to justice. Some of them are so stupid like one real estate agent from Dallas who even advertised her business live on social media as she was entering the Capitol! Shaman Qanon begged Trump for a pardon. Trump could have blanket pardoned all of them if he had wanted to. After all they attacked the Capitol in Trump's name and at his urging. But when all was said and done, Trump abandoned them to their own fates, something they can ponder while spending 20 years in jail. Something else - I want the FBI to track down everyone who calls or emails someone with a death threat. It seems that a lot of this is happening, and I want the FBI to track down and prosecute all these bozos too. If it takes a Federal law to make this legally all encompassing, then one should be enacted.

Off the Top of My Head

Is This Any Way to Choose Supreme Court ... Or a President?

by John Lawrence, September 27, 2020

So we have a situation in which a President who lost the popular vote has been able to pick 3 Supreme Court Judges. This is what our Constitution has led us to? The US Constitution is out of date, archaic and dysfunctional. It needs to be either revised or rewritten from scratch. Many other countries have done just that with their constitutions. There are better ways to choose a Supreme Court than to have a President choose the composition thereof. Other ways the Constitution is dysfunctional: the electoral college, the fact that the leader of the Senate has a veto over any legislation the People's House creates and the filibuster. I would also add the Second Amendment to the list.

Here is a better way to choose the Supreme Court. Have the House of Representatives vote on the composition of it and have each judge only serve a 10 year term, not a life term. Also have in place qualifications for nominees. In other words not everyone can run for a Supreme Court Judgeship. Only those who are well qualified should be able to. Here are some of the basic qualifications: a Doctor of Law degree from a major University (in other words the highest law degree one can get), a career either in teaching or the practice of law for at least 20 years, having argued at least one case before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court should be democratically elected at least by representatives elected by the people which at present is the US House of Representatives, and not subject to Senate approval. Let me note that I'm not an expert; I'm not a lawyer so anyone should take my recommendations with a grain of salt.

It is obvious that our current Constitution allows for the opening of a can of worms in the election of the President as President Trump has pointed out and intends to exploit. He expects that the balloting will be so mixed up that the Republican party will be able to challenge the outcome in a number of battleground states with the result that the selection of the President will end up in the Supreme Court, three of whose Justices he has picked himself. This is exactly why a Constitution should not let the President select members of the Supreme Court, and they should be democratically elected instead by a vote of the House.

I find it amazing that practically no research has been done on how the Supreme Court should be selected according to my limited Google search. In a democracy these courts should be democratically elected by a representative body within the boundaries that judges or Justices should be highly qualified to even be considered. What is unreasonable about these considerations except for the fact that they don't accord with our preexisitng Constitution? It has become obvious that our 231 year old Constitution, the world's longest surviving written charter of government, is not only out of date, it's anti-democratic in major ways. It was written at a time when only white, propertied men were allowed to vote, at a time when the writers didn't trust the hoi polloi, the rabble, the uneducated, the poor or those not of the same ethnic background as they were.

Off the Top of My Head

A New and Better Voting System for President

by John Lawrence, July 29, 2020

My girlfriend proposed a better way to vote. First of course do away with the electoral college and base the election on the popular vote. That's elementary. Her system, however, is more sophisticated and brilliant. Suppose each party ran 2 different candidates for President. The Republican party, for example, could run Trump and one other, say Republican Larry Hogan, Governor of Maryland. The Democrats might run both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Then the party that got the most votes would claim the Presidency, and the candidate within that party - either Trump or Hogan, if Republicans won - would get to be the actual President. So there would be no wasted votes. If your party - Democrats or Republicans - got the most total votes, you can be assured that someone from your party would be elected President. This way of voting would generate the most enthusiasm and the highest voter turnout because chances are a candidate you would be enthusiastic about would be on the ticket.

In 2016 Democrats who were enthusiastic about Bernie Sanders just stayed home and didn't vote because they didn't like Hillary Clinton. Likewise, in the upcoming election many Republicans who hate Donald Trump simply will not vote rather than vote for a Democrat. However, if a voter had the choice of two possible candidates within the same party, they would not have to hold their nose and vote for a candidate they hated, nor would they have to vote for the candidate of the other party. This would make the election more about voting for the party a voter preferred than for the actual candidate within that party.

Similarly, this method would work when there is a third party candidate running. Historically, voting for a third party candidate takes votes away from the party that the third party candidate is closest to in ideology. For example, the 2000 Presidential contest in which there were 3 contestants: George W Bush, Republican, Al Gore, Democrat and Ralph Nader running on the Green Party ticket. Since Nader was to the left of Al Gore in ideology, he siphoned votes away from Al Gore. The contest came down to a very close vote in Florida which was only decided by a Supreme Court decision. If Nader hadn't been running Gore would have surely won Florida and the Presidency and history would have been changed considering the ill fated Bush Presidency. Bush lied us into war in Iraq which Gore probably would not have done.

If my girlfriend's voting system had been in effect, Democrats would have 2 candidates Gore and Nader if Nader had run as a Democrat and Republicans may have had two as well or maybe they would have gone with just Bush. In any case, Nader's votes would have added to the Democrats' vote total rather than taking away from it, and the Democrats and Gore would have won the election. In the 1912 Presidential election, Teddy Roosevelt who had been President for 2 terms before ran as a third party candidate. Consequently, Taft and Roosevelt split the vote and the Democratic candidate, Wilson, coasted to an easy victory. If Taft and Roosevelt both ran as Republicans, their party would have defeated Wilson and Roosevelt would have probably garnered more votes than Taft thus being elected to his third term.

With this system primaries would not need to eliminate all but one candidate. Particularly, if there are two candidates who have more or less equal support, running two candidates for President would encourage larger voter turnout. It would also encourage crossover voting between the two parties if one of the candidates in one party was philosophically close to the other party. In any event every voter would have a dog in the fight, enthusiasm for voting would be greater and fewer voters would stay home and not vote. Of course other problems connected with voting like voter suppression and gerrymandering also need to be solved. This proposal would not solve every problem connected with voting.

 

 

 

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

Republican Conservative Paul Weyrich: "I don't want everybody to vote."

by John Lawrence, July 1, 2020

To continue with Weyrich"s quote: " Elections are not won by a majority of the people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down." Pretty good reason why Trump doesn't want widespread use of #MailinBallots. Weyrich was an American religious conservative political activist and commentator, most notable as a figurehead of the New Right. He co-founded the conservative think tanks The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). He coined the term "moral majority," the name of the political action group Moral Majority that he co-founded in 1979 with Jerry Falwell. So much for his bonafides.

The Department of Motor Vehicles has no problem with identifying every licensed driver and every registered vehicle in the state. They also use the mails to inform drivers when their registration is due and when their license has expired. You never hear anything about driver fraud, so how hard is it to locate every registered voter by mail? Republicans have notoriously used voter suppression techniques to make sure that blacks and Latinx are discouraged from voting. Just having to take a day off from work and stand in a long line at distant polling places is discouragement enough. But there's more. The Atlantic reports:

A new poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and The Atlantic has uncovered evidence of deep structural barriers to the ballot for black and Latino voters, specifically in the 2016 election. More than that, the survey finds that the deep wounds of Jim Crow endure, leaving America’s democratic promise unfulfilled.

The real extent of voter suppression in the United States is contested. As was the case for poll taxes and literacy tests long ago, restrictive election laws are often, on their face, racially neutral, giving them a sheen of legitimacy. But the new data from PRRI and The Atlantic suggest that the outcomes of these laws are in no way racially neutral. The poll, conducted in June, surveyed Americans about their experiences with voting, their assessments of the country’s political system, and their interfaces with civics. The results, especially when analyzed by race, are troublesome. They indicate that voter suppression is commonplace, and that voting is routinely harder for people of color than for their white counterparts.

In some places voting is a luxury poor people can hardly afford. So making voting easier would allow more poor people and people of color to vote. For sure they would probably vote Democratic. That's why Republicans, who are the party of the rich, want to make it as difficult as possible for them to vote. In addition to that gerrymandering has made it almost impossible to get a fair outcome in many elections. In many states the party in power gets to draw the voting districts any way they want so they draw them in such a way that minorities or candidates that minorities favor can never win. Incumbents are reelected time after time.

Gerrymandering is a practice intended to establish an unfair political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries. Two principal tactics are used in gerrymandering: "cracking" (i.e. diluting the voting power of the opposing party's supporters across many districts) and "packing" (concentrating the opposing party's voting power in one district to reduce their voting power in other districts). A third is homogenization of all districts (essentially a form of cracking where the majority party uses its superior numbers to guarantee the minority party never attains a majority in any district).

Several states are considering independent redistricting commissions taking the power to draw district lines away from the party in power. This would guarantee a fairer distribution of districts and that district lines were drawn in a neutral manner not favoring either party.

The Biggest Political Party in America You’ve Never Heard Of

by Robert Reich

Thursday, January 23, 2020

If I asked you to name the biggest political party in the United States, what would be your answer? You probably have two guesses that come to mind: the Democratic party or the Republican party.Well, it’s neither.

It’s the party of Non-Voters.

Let’s look at the last presidential election: 100 million Americans who were eligible to vote in 2016 DID NOT vote. That’s a bigger number than the number who voted either for Donald Trump or for Hillary Clinton. In Michigan, for example, where the contest came down to roughly 10,000 votes, it’s plausible to say that non-voters were the ones who decided the election.

Non-voters — those Americans eligible to vote but don’t — are in effect America’s biggest political party. Unless we work to reverse this trend, they could decide the next election.

So who are these missing voters? They are Americans who are most affected by decades of a broken political system, economic inequality, and laws designed to make it harder to vote. They are people of color, young people, and people with lower incomes.

At the same time, these missing voters tend to be more progressive than most voters. For example, non-voters are more likely to support higher taxes to pay for government services, a higher minimum wage, a federal jobs guarantee, and other progressive priorities.

There are also seven million young people of color who weren’t old enough to vote in 2016 but will be 18 by the 2020 election. These voters will also be critical to mobilize.

All of which means that voter turnout will determine our future. These non-voters are potential voters, and recent elections with record turnout show that we’re headed in the right direction.

The key question is how to get even more of them to the polls. Four steps:

1. Make it easier to vote, not harder. Some states have enacted laws to suppress the votes of people of color and young people, such as requiring an ID, reducing the number of polling places in Democratic districts, and purging voter rolls. These tactics must be ended. The Voting Rights Act, which for decades kept some of the worst practices in check until major provisions were struck down by the Supreme Court, must be restored.

And we need to make it easier to vote by making Election Day a federal holiday; enacting Automatic Voter Registration, for example when people turn 18; and voting by mail.

2. Mobilize young voters. They’re a huge potential voting block. In the 2018 midterm elections, 36 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 cast ballots, shattering turnout records from the past quarter-century and contributing to major Democratic victories across the country

3. Inspire enthusiasm and grassroots energy around big ideas and bold policies, not milquetoast, consultant-driven half-measures. Look at Stacey Abrams’s campaign in 2018. Even though she didn’t win, Abrams ran a bold campaign and worked to turn out Democratic voters that had largely been ignored in the red state of Georgia. As a result, Abrams garnered more votes — 1.9 million — than any other Democrat running for any office in the history of the state, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Jimmy Carter.

4. Personally encourage others to vote. Make sure they know how to register, and when and where to vote. Tell them to be a voter.

Rebuilding America starts with the simple act of voting. If we can activate even a fraction of those 100 million non-voters, we can restore American democracy and make our economy and our democracy work for the many rather than the few.

This is why it’s so important for you to vote – and urge everyone you know to vote, too.

Why I’m Betting on Millennials, this November 6th

by Robert Reich

Sunday, September 23, 2018

Millennials (and their younger siblings, generation Z’s) are the largest, most diverse and progressive group of potential voters in American history, comprising fully 30 percent of the voting age population.

On November 6th, they’ll have the power to alter the course of American politics – flipping Congress, changing the leadership of states and cities, making lawmakers act and look more like the people who are literally the nation’s future.

But will they vote?

In the last midterm election, in 2014, only 16 percent of eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 29 bothered.

In midterms over the last two decades, turnout by young people has averaged about 38 points below the turnout rate of people 60 and older. Which has given older voters a huge say over where the nation is likely to be by the time those younger people reach middle age and the older voters have passed on.

I’m not criticizing younger non-voters. They have a lot on their minds – starting jobs, careers, families. Voting isn’t likely to be high on their list of priorities.  

Also, unlike their grand parents – boomers who were involved in civil rights, voting rights, women’s rights, the anti-Vietnam War movement – most young people today don’t remember a time when political action changed America for the better.

They’re more likely to remember political failures and scandals – George W. Bush lying about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction; Bill Clinton lying about Monica; both parties bailing out Wall Street without so much as a single executive going to jail.

Most don’t even recall when American democracy worked well. They don’t recall the Cold War, when democracy as an ideal worth fighting for. The Berlin Wall came down before they were born.

Instead, during their lives they’ve watched big money take over Washington and state capitals. Which may explain why only about 30 percent of Americans born in the 1980s think it “essential” to live in a democracy.

Many young people have wondered if their votes count anyway, because so many of them live in congressional districts and states that are predictably red or blue.

Given all this, is there any reason to hope that this huge, diverse, progressive cohort of Americans will vote in the upcoming midterms?

My answer is, yes.

First, the issues up for grabs aren’t ideological abstractions for them. They’re causes in which Millennials have direct personal stakes.

Take, for example, gun violence – which some of these young people have experienced first-hand and have taken active roles trying to stop.

Or immigrant’s rights. Over 20 percent of Millennials are Latino, and a growing percent are from families that emigrated from Asia. Many have directly experienced the consequences of Trump’s policies.

A woman’s right to choose whether to have a baby, and gay’s or lesbian’s rights to choose marriage – issues Millennials are also deeply committed to – will be front and center if the Supreme Court puts them back into the hands of Congress and state legislatures.

Millennials are also concerned about student debt, access to college, and opportunities to get ahead unimpeded by racial bigotry or sexual harassment.

And they’re worried about the environment. They know climate change will hit them hardest since they’ll be on the planet longer than older voters.

They’ve also learned that their votes count. They saw Hillary lose by a relative handful of votes in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

They’ve been witnessing razor-thin special elections, such as Conor Lamb’s win by a few hundred votes in the heart of Pennsylvania Trump country, and Hiral Tipirneni’s single-digit loss in an Arizona district Trump won by 21 points in 2016.

They know the importance of taking back governorships in what are expected to be nail-bitingly close races – in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Kansas. They’re aware of the slim but increasingly real possibility of taking back the Senate. (Who knew Ted Cruz would be so vulnerable? Who even knew the name Beto O’Rourke?)

As doubtful as they these young people are about politics, or the differences between the two parties, they also know that Trump and his Republican enablers want to take the nation backwards to an old, white, privileged, isolated America. Most of them don’t.

In my thirty-five years of teaching college students, I’ve not encountered a generation as dedicated to making the nation better as this one.

So my betting is on them, this November 6th.  

Off the Top of My Head

The British Are Coming! The British Are Coming!

by John Lawrence, August 30, 2018

A recent Frontline report painted in dire terms the perfidious activities of Russian hackers who dared to intervene in our sacrosanct American elections. Just think. They posted ads on Facebook and used bots to spread rumors about Hillary. This could be easily fixed if Facebook wasn't so greedy that they wanted more and more eyeballs, any eyeballs, to view their crappy site. The more eyeballs looking supposedly at their ads, the more money they make. I've got news for you, Facebook. Check out your advertisers before you let them place an ad. I know. I know. This will result in a loss of money. As for bots, check out the identities of anyone spreading stuff on your site. It wouldn't be hard to do. It's just that Facebook wants more and more money. And by the way stop sending me emails saying that some friend of mine has changed her status. You just want me to open Facebook. Also stop sending me friend requests from people I never heard of.

So much for Facebook. It's a shitty site designed to make the maximum amount of money that preys on people's curiosity. As far as hacking into the Democratic National Committee and releasing Podesta's emails, this could be prevented if the DNC took security seriously or took the security of email seriously. Why in God's name are they storing all those emails on one site? Do they even need to be stored at all? I don't think so. You see you have a bunch of nincompoops running the DNC that don't know the first thing about security. If the whole damn internet has to be redesigned to put security first, say an internet 2.0, then that is what has to be done.

As far as hacking into our voter registration lists, why do these even have to be hooked into the internet? Did we not conduct elections before the internet was invented? Then go back to that system. Have a latter day Paul Revere ride his horse between polling places with the results. That was secure. Instead of yelling "The British are coming", he could yell the results "So many votes for Hillary and so many for Trump." Seriously, just disconnect the voting system from the internet if hacking is such a problem. And then redesign the internet.

Off the Top of My Head

A Modest Proposal for Keeping the Russians from Hacking Our Voting Machines

by John Lawrence, August 3, 2018

Disconnect them from the internet, dummy. Go back to paper ballots. Vote by mail like I do in California. Fill in the bubbles, and then an automatic scanner (not connected to the internet) can tally them. Why the need to connect voting machines to the internet in the first place? It seems pretty stupid. A simple phone call could tell the results to whomever needs to be told. There is no need for the internet to be involved whatsoever.

Yesterday "top Washington officials" vowed to do whatever is necessary to protect our elections from Russian hacking. The answer is simple. Disconnect voting machines from the internet. I'll say it again.

The New York Times reported:

But the men and women charged with detecting and defending against any threats to the American political process showed no such ambivalence. They bluntly said that Russia was behind a “pervasive” campaign to weaken America’s democracy and influence the 2018 election.

They also sought to reassure voters that federal, state and local governments were taking steps to guard against what Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, described as a “24-7 365-days-a-year” effort by Russia to sow division as Americans head to the polls in the fall.

Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, echoed that assessment, saying that “Russians are looking for every opportunity, regardless of party, regardless of whether or not it applies to the election, to continue their pervasive efforts to undermine our fundamental values.”

Undermine our fundamental values? Just what are those fundamental values, Mr. Coats, that Russians are seeking to undermine? The right to call your opponent "crooked Hillary"? The right to denigrate, humiliate and demonize your opponents? The right to lie to people to get yourself elected? The right to create false scenarios and accuse your opponent of crimes and then have it repeated ad nauseum over hate talk radio, TV and the internet?

The article continues:

Mr. Wray and Mr. Coats were joined at the briefing by Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, and Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, the head of the National Security Agency.

Officials at the briefing did not describe specific threats to the coming elections, and they were vague about how the government was responding to what they called Russia’s interference campaign. But they said Mr. Trump had directed them in a National Security Council meeting last week to aggressively confront the threats.

“Our democracy itself is in the cross hairs,” Ms. Nielsen told reporters. “The progress we have made is real, and the nation’s elections are more resilient today because of the work we are all doing. But we must continue to ensure that our democracy is protected.”

Ms. Nielsen said the government had “seen a willingness and a capability on the part of the Russians” to hack into the American election infrastructure, including voter rolls and voting machines. In addition to helping states and local governments prevent that hacking, she said her department was working to ensure that methods were available to validate the vote if a cyberattack occurred.

Vague about how the government was responding? What's vague about disconnecting voting machines from the internet and making them unhackable? Validating the vote if a cyberattack occurred? These folks are total alarmists. By now we should all be aware that the internet is full of holes. It is not secure so why do they insist on using it? To justify bigger increases in the Homeland Security budget? Methinks they protest too much. It's like Jimmy Carter said, "The energy crisis is real." Emphasis on "real". Sure it was, but Jimmy was overwrought, and so are Ms. Nielsen and the others. Just disconnect the voting machines and problem solved.

As for the ads supposedly taken out by Russians on Facebook, I doubt if they could do any more damage than Republicans and their operatives and trolls have already done to the democracy by spreading false rumors. These folks are determined to maintain Russia's enemy status to justify large increases in their budgets and the budget of the military-industrial-intelligence-homelandsecurity complex.

 

VOTER TURNOUT IS EVERYTHING

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

The largest political party in America isn’t the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. It’s the Party of Non-Voters.

94 million Americans who were eligible to vote in the 2016 election didn’t vote. That’s a bigger number than the number who voted either for Trump or for Clinton.

All of which means that voter turnout will determine who wins control of Congress next November, and who becomes president in 2020. Turnout is everything.

This is why it’s so important for you to vote – and urge everyone you know to vote, too.

A THIRD PARTY? HOW NOT TO SETTLE FOR THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS

by Robert Reich

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Are you happy with the electoral choices provided you by the two major parties? If not, should you vote for a third party candidate?

Not so fast. Remember what happened in 2016, when Libertarian Gary Johnson got 3.2 percent of the popular vote and Green Party candidate Jill Stein got 1.06 percent. Enough votes that, had they gone to Hillary Clinton, she’d have won the Electoral College, and Donald Trump wouldn’t be in the White House.

Oh, and anyone remember what happened in 2000, when the votes that went to Ralph Nader all but sealed the fate of Al Gore, and gave us George W. Bush.

You see the problem? In a winner-take-all system like ours, votes for third party candidates siphon away votes from the major party candidate whose views are closest to that third-party candidate. So by not voting for the lesser of two evils, if that’s what you want to call them, you end up with the worse of two evils.

But here’s the good news. You’ve got at least 2 ways to avoid the lesser of two evils other than voting for a third party candidate.

First, you could build support for your favorite primary candidate inside one of the major parties – like some of you did for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries.

But, you might say, look what happened to Bernie! The Democratic Party establishment rigged the game against him.

I don’t want to open up this particular can of worms, but if a party establishment has a choke hold on the primaries – the answer isn’t to go with a third party and end up with the worse of two evils, but to organize and mobilize inside the party to break that choke hold, as some would say the Tea Party has done in the GOP.

Never underestimate the power of grassroots activism focused like a laser on taking over a major political party that has ossified.

Another way to avoid the lesser of two evils: Get your state to institute ranked-choice voting, also known as instant-runoff voting, which allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference.

The process is simple: In the first round, only voters’ first choices are counted. If a candidate gets a majority, that’s the end of it: That candidate wins. If no candidate gets a majority, the candidate who received the fewest votes is eliminated, and then the second choices of voters who preferred that candidate are counted.

If that gives a majority to one candidate, that candidate wins. If there’s still no one with a majority, the process continues,  until one candidate gets a majority.

Ranked-choice voting isn’t perfect, but it enables you to vote your conscience –even for a third-party candidate – without the worry that you’re giving ground to the candidate you like least.

The idea is gaining popularity. Last year, some form of ranked-choice voting was proposed in 19 states. In 2016, citizens in Maine initiated a referendum for ranked-choice voting and won. It’s already being used in statewide special elections in North Carolina, and in 10 major cities.

You don’t have to settle for the lesser of two evils. But in order to get the candidates you want elected you need to get involved, now. In the primaries. And in changing your state to ranked-choice voting.

It’s our democracy. Whether it works, is up to us.

'Momentum for Better Elections' as Maine Supreme Court Approves Ranked-Choice Voting for 2018 Elections

Published on

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

by

Common Dreams

Decision by the Maine Supreme Court confirms that voters "are sovereign and have the final say"

 

 

by

Julia Conley, staff writer

 9 Comments

After an historic decision by Maine's Supreme Court, starting with primary elections in June, the state's voters will be able to rank their selections in the voting booth. (Photo: Michael R/Flickr/cc)

Election reform advocates on Wednesday praised a decision by Maine's Supreme Court, upholding the use of ranked-choice voting for the state's upcoming primary elections, saying the ruling demonstrated that the court heeded the demands of Maine voters.

"Mainers have said clearly that they want election reform and they want it now," State House Speaker Sara Gideon told the Portland Press Herald. "The court has been clear in their ruling that ranked-choice voting is the law of the land."

Terrific news from Maine:. The last-gasp legal effort to block ranked choice voting in June primaries is UNANIMOUSLY denied by the state Supreme Court. More momentum for better elections! https://t.co/fdhdmYatbF https://t.co/kL3XmzueVV

— Rob Richie (@Rob_Richie) April 17, 2018

Unlike in traditional voting, in which the candidate with the largest share of votes wins—even if he or she is far from capturing a majority of the support—in ranked choice voting, voters rank each candidate in order of preference. If no candidate has a majority after the first count, the least-popular contender is eliminated, voters' ballots are added to the totals of their second-ranked candidates, and the ballots are recounted. The eliminations and recounts continue until one candidate has a majority.

Supporters of the system say it increases voter turnout and proportional representation.

Maine's June 12 multi-party primary elections, in which voters will choose candidates for governor and congressional districts, will now make history as the first state election to use ranked-choice voting.

Fifty-two percent of Maine voters supported the system in a November 2016 ballot initiative, but lawmakers passed a bill last year delaying its implementation until December 2021 and argued that the state could not use a new voting system without direction from the legislature. The state Senate also threatened to repeal ranked-choice voting altogether if it could not pass a constitutional amendment by then.

More than 77,000 Maine residents signed a petition saying any repeal of the system by the legislature should be voided.

"The Maine legislature has changed or repealed all four of the initiatives passed by Maine voters in 2016," said Kyle Bailey of the Committee for Ranked Choice Voting in a statement on Tuesday. "Today's decision by the Maine Supreme Court confirms that the Maine people are sovereign and have the final say."

"I am hopeful that the Secretary of State can now carry out this June's election without further interference," said Gideon.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Off the Top of My Head

Use Paper Ballots for the Next Election

by John Lawrence, February 14, 2018

Worried about Russian hacking? The solution is simple. Just use paper ballots. They are unhackable. Instead what we get from the media and the government is a lot of commiseration about the supposed fact that the Russians are planning to discombobulate our next election. All of this should be a nonissue. Disconnecting from the internet would be the smartest thing any of these nincompoops in power have done in quite some time.

Then are you worried that Russia might use Facebook and Twitter to spread alt facts and alt news. As if there weren't enough Americans already doing the same. Free speech, baby. Oh, are only Americans allowed free speech. Every one else keep you mouth shut. The things is that the authorities don't want to allow free speech. Speech coming from Russia is by definition propaganda. Speech not agreeing with the official Trumpian, Republican party line is by definition propaganda.

The American people have to be smart enough and savvy enough to take everything they read or see with a grain of salt whether it's a tweet from Trump of Vladimir Putin or one of Putin's operatives. After all the Russians are allowed to have their own perspective as are the Brits as are the Germans etc etc.Not everyone agrees with the US party line. In fact fewer and fewer people around the world are agreeing with it, and they are finding ways to detach themselves from US influence.

The Atlantic reported:

Among many other needed measures promoted by nonprofit and nonpartisan Verified Voting, Congress should require standardized voting systems around the nation. It should insist on rock-solid security, augmented by frequent audits of hardware and software. Recounts should be performed routinely and randomly to ensure that verified-voting systems work as designed. The paper ballot generated by the machine should be the official ballot.

What Congress should emphatically not do is allow or encourage online voting. The sorry state of cybersecurity in general makes clear how foolhardy it would be to go anywhere near widespread “Internet voting” in the foreseeable future.

So if there is no online voting, how is the American voting system hackable by the Russians?

 

Off the Top of My Head

Next Election Use Paper Ballots

by John Lawrence, February 12, 2018

Some people are all concerned that Russia is going to hack the next election and there's nothing we can do about it. Much hand wringing and nail biting. What are we going to do? Put more sanctions on Russia? There is a simple solution: go back to paper ballots. They're unhackable. Whoever thought that the internet was the solution to all of our problems was just dead wrong. The internet has created as many problems as it's solved. It's left the electric grid hackable. It's left major corporations including banks hackable.

I think some people refuse to entertain the thought that just maybe the ways things were done 50 years ago was superior to the way they are being done today. Paper ballots worked for hundreds of years. They would still work now. Let's just decide to use them and then get on with our business. Someday when a more robust internet and computer system is available, maybe then would be the time to convert to electronic ballots. Until then the way they did it in the olden times will work just fine.

American politicians and media seem to agonize for hours over scandals and stuff while never talking about the solutions to problems or even getting around to discussing the problems themselves. The latest distraction is the sexual harassment imbroglio. They spend hours discussing it. It is only second to the "if it bleeds, it leads" news mantra. At least on Meet the Press yesterday, Peggy Noonan had the guts to come right out and say the solution to the Russian hacking scenario was "paper ballots." So why don't they just do it and get on with other business?

All these things that Americans thought were so great like the internal combustion engine, we're now finding out are killing the environment. Nobody wants to go back to the horse and buggy days, but horses and buggies were sure a lot better for the environment. All this progress that America is so famous for in many cases has only contributed to screwing up the planet. Corporations dump toxic waste creating profits by not paying for these "externalities."

We need to figure out ways to live together in peace and so that everyone has an adequate standard of living. The American values of competition and developing the next greatest gadget and widget in order to keep the economy growing is something that needs to change. We need to upgrade our values and see the world in a different way. Environmental protection and eliminating poverty are paramount.

RISE To The RIGHT In GERMAN ELECTIONS

MUST BE SEEN In Context Of GERMANY’s EXCELLENT PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION SYSTEM

by Frank Thomas

The recent German elections show that, since the arrival of over 1.2 million refugees (mostly from Syria) in 2015 and 2016, Germany is indeed changing to the right – but I certainly would not say in a radical or unhealthy way. This is because EU economies and political proportional representation systems, like Germany’s, generally combine stable elements of basic social needs and safety nets with individual/corporate capitalistic initiatives and market mechanisms. Rules are enacted and enforced to insure fair play and social harmony.

In the German elections, the CDU/CSU centrist coalition together with the SPD socialist party went from a very high 502 Parliamentary seats or 79.7% of the 630 seats, BEFORE the elections, to a lower total of 399 seats or 56.3% of 709 Parliamentary seats now. In light of the SPD’s decision not to join Merkel’s CDO/CSU centrist party group in a new coalition government, Merkel must find a way to unite, for example, with the Green left of center party and FDP right of center party to form a reasonably centrist coalition government. Although the rising AfD rather conservative nationalistic party won 12.6% of the total vote for all parties, making it the 3rd largest party followed closely by the FDP party with 10.7% of the total vote, Merkel will not be forming a coalition government with this far right party.

Forming a governing coalition will be no easy task. But Merkel will respect the clear voter message of getting disciplined control of and cutting back drastically on her open-door immigration policy. The extraordinary extent and speed at which the flood of refugees have entered Germany under Merkel’s leadership is creating considerable societal strains, ^e.g. severe problems of assimilation as well as fears of expanding criminality and terrorist acts, and a watering down of the German culture. Very understandable and natural concerns, in my view.

But I don’t think Germany is heading into a radical, socially-polarizing, ultra-right transition under their multi-party, proportional representation system. This is because as noted earlier, there are many structural “checks and balances” inherent in the European political multi-party, proportional representation constitutional structures. Far more than the paralyzed two-party Mess the US is trapped in where “social polarization” is evolving on a scale and depth many, many times more alarming and potentially dangerous to our democracy than most EU countries.

The Constitution Project: France

by John Lawrence

Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite

From operationworld.org

France's Constitution goes back to the French Revolution of 1789 when France guillotined the King and became a Republic. Article 4 states: "Liberty consists in being able to do anything that does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of every man has no bounds other than those that ensure to the other members of society the enjoyment of these same rights. These bounds may be determined only by Law." The current Constitution was adopted in 1958.

This is from Wikipedia:

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (French: Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen), passed by France's National Constituent Assembly in August 1789, is an important document of the French Revolution and in the history of human and civil rights. The Declaration was directly influenced by Thomas Jefferson, working with General Lafayette, who introduced it. Influenced also by the doctrine of "natural right", the rights of man are held to be universal: valid at all times and in every place, pertaining to human nature itself. It became the basis for a nation of free individuals protected equally by the law. It is included in the beginning of the constitutions of both the Fourth French Republic (1946) and Fifth Republic (1958) and is still current. Inspired by the Enlightenment philosophers, the Declaration was a core statement of the values of the French Revolution and had a major impact on the development of freedom and democracy in Europe and worldwide.

The Declaration, together with Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the United States Bill of Rights, inspired in large part the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The French President is elected directly by a vote of the people much like the US. The French Parliament consists of two Houses: the National Assembly and the Senate. In all elections where there is a single official to be elected for a given area, including the two major national elections (the election of the President of the Republic and the election of the members of the National Assembly), two-round runoff voting is used. For elections to the European Parliament and some local elections, proportional representation voting is used. The Senate is not elected directly by the people but indirectly by elected representatives. It also includes some representatives of French citizens abroad.

Donald Trump's Winning the Republican Nomination Could Be a Fluke

by John Lawrence from the San Diego Free Press

Trump's Win Could Be an Artifact of the Voting System

Not many people give much thought to the dynamics of the voting system. We just accept that you vote for one guy or the other and everybody gets one vote and the person who gets the most votes winds. This system called plurality voting or first-past-the-post seems obvious, but there are a myriad of other kinds of voting systems. For instance, each voter could rank order all the candidates with the lowest candidate getting zero points and the next candidate above them in the rank order getting one point, the one above them getting two points etc. Then the one with the most points wins. This system was first proposed by the French philosopher Jean-Charles de Borda in 1770. As the result of more information per voter being collected by the voting system, a different, and presumably more accurate, outcome could occur.

In the case of the Republican primary the single vote per voter with so many candidates almost guaranteed some sort of anomaly. A total of 17 candidates started off in the primary on March 23, 2015. As each state was ticked off, Trump garnered most of the votes; however, a majority of the voters voted for one of the other candidates. The result was that Trump was reported as having "won" the state, especially if it was a winner-take-all state. As Trump won, his momentum built up and before too long, his winning the primary seemed inevitable. Even after all but Cruz and Kasich had dropped out, Cruz and Kasich were splitting the anti-Trump vote.

In After Trump, the GOP May Need a Better Voting System, Kathleen Parker writes:

... the better candidates didn’t win because, obviously, so many of [the candidates] siphoned votes from stronger ones, giving Trump the lead and all-important momentum. Thus, the constant refrain from Trump supporters that the “establishment” is ignoring the “will of the people” is true only to a point. Trump is the choice of a plurality of the GOP but not of the majority — a distinction with a crucial difference.

What If There Had Been Two Candidates - Trump and anti-Trump?

If the primary field had coalesced around one or two anti-Trump candidates and Trump earlier in the game, the outcome might have been completely different. Suppose each voter in the Republican primary had not only given his first choice candidate a vote, but had also given his second choice a vote as well. It might have been discovered that there was a solid candidate other than Trump who had a vast majority of second choice votes as well as a goodly number of first choice votes. Adding together first and second choice votes might have selected someone other than Trump as the winner of the election.

If there are more than two candidates running for election in the American way of voting, often times the third candidate acts as a spoiler splitting the vote for one of the two most popular candidates with the result that the least popular ends up the winner. Ross Perot was a third party candidate in 1992 and 1996. History seems to show that he did not siphon off enough votes from Republicans to give Bill Clinton the election. Clinton would have won anyway, Perot or no Perot. However, in the 2000 election Ralph Nader running as a third party candidate did siphon off enough votes from Democrats to give George W Bush the election. If all votes had actually been counted Gore would have won anyway, but if Nader had not been in the race, Gore would have won handily.

French Enlightenment Philosopher Condorcet, Voting Theorist

The Marquis de Condorcet was an Enlightenment philosopher who was way ahead of his time. I visited him in the Pantheon in Paris because he's one of my heroes.

Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen write in the New York Times:

The Marquis de Condorcet, the great 18th-century political theorist and mathematician, proposed a system for electing candidates who truly command majority support. In this system, a voter has the opportunity to rank candidates. For example, her ballot might rank John Kasich, Ted Cruz and Mr. Trump in that order, meaning that she likes Mr. Kasich best, but if he doesn’t win, she would go for Mr. Cruz. She could, alternatively, choose to vote just for Mr. Kasich, which would amount to ranking Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz in a tie for second. The winner would then be the candidate who, according to the rankings, would defeat each opponent individually in a head-to-head matchup — a real majority winner.

Approval Voting and Politonomics

In 1977, New York University politics professor Steven J. Brams and decision theorist Peter C. Fishburn devised approval voting, by which, according to their method, voters cast a vote for each candidate of whom they approve, in no particular order. The candidate with the most votes would win. Approval voting has been shown to be superior to the American method of first-past-the-post, but the problem is where do you draw the line between those candidates you approve and those you disapprove? I devised a method for doing exactly that. I call my method politonomics because it has applications to both politics and economics, in particular to Economic Democracy, and it is capable of producing multiple outcomes instead of just "the winner of the election." Multiple outcomes could be advantageous, for instance, in electing a city council without resorting to winner-take-all districts or a districtless Congress.

Using another voting system in which voters rank the candidates (A is preferred to B is preferred to C) or rate the candidates (on a scale from minus one to plus one, for example) provides the system with much more information than just casting a vote for the most preferred candidate. Outcomes can then be determined in which the overall satisfaction of the electorate is more likely to be achieved. Minorities will be better represented than they will be with majority rule. None of the voting systems proposed so far is perfect. There can be anomalous outcomes produced by all of them (except perhaps politonomics). However, the antiquarian nature of the American voting system whether in Congressional or Presidential elections and especially in gerrymandered districts could very well indeed lead us down the road to the first Fascist President.

What the World Needs Now? - More Cooperation or More Competition?

by John Lawrence

When I was a graduate student at UCSD in the midst of the anti-war movement, protesting the war in Vietnam, I went to the library and pondered what would make the world a better place, what could I do to contribute something that might make war less likely and peace time activity more likely. I concluded that more cooperation was needed. More ways to resolve conflicts big and small. For example, democratic voting systems resolve conflicts in such a way that solutions are found that are acceptable to all parties for the most part. I took it for granted that institutions that provided for more cooperation and less competition were more desirable. I thought that this was what the Enlightenment was all about. My heroes were the Enlightenment superstars: Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, John Locke.

As I sat there and went through the stacks, I discovered another field and another set of superstars. Social choice has a long history going back to the French Enlightenment philosophers, the Marquis de Condorcet and Jean-Charles de Borda, and even further back than that. One of the 19th century superstars in this field was none other than the Rev. C. L. Dodgson otherwise known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland. These guys came up with voting systems which are essential to democracy and are essential to the whole notion of cooperation and conflict resolution. The most recent work in this field was by Kenneth Arrow who published a book Social Choice and Individual Values in the 1950s which attempted to generalize conflict resolution in society in both the political and economic spheres. Arrow concluded that this was impossible and came up with his famous Impossibility Theorem which was a generalization using sophisticated mathematics of the paradox of voting that was known to Condorcet hundreds of years ago. Therefore, Arrow concluded democracy was impossible and any economic system other than capitalism was impossible too. Hmmm, I thought, this is obviously a cop-out because some political and economic systems are more desirable than others and Arrow has done nothing except to throw cold water on any framework that could consider these. I took it as my self-assigned task to prove that Arrow was wrong, that social choice is possible. My work can be found on the website Social Choice and Beyond.

My latest work is "Politonomics: A Meta-Theory Encompassing Political and Economic Decision Making." This is from the Abstract:

In “Social Choice and Individual Values,” Kenneth Arrow said , “In a capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make ‘political’ decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make ‘economic’ decisions.” This paper resolves that dichotomy by developing a meta-theory from which can be derived methods for both political and economic decision making. This theory overcomes Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem in which he postulates that social choice is impossible and compensates for strategic voting, an undesirable aspect of decision making according to Gibbard and Satterthwaite. Thus the politonomics meta-theory spawns both political and economic systems which are indeed possible and which cannot be gamed. In a typical voting system the outcome of an election among several candidates results in one realized outcome – the winner of the election - which applies to all voters. In a typical economic system, a consumer may choose among a variety of possible baskets of consumer items and work programs with the result that multiple realized outcomes are possible with a unique or quasi-unique outcome for each worker/consumer. As the number of possible realized outcomes of a political-economic decision making process increases, the process becomes more economic and less political in nature and vice versa. We show that as the number of possible realized outcomes increases, voter/consumer/worker satisfaction or utility increases both individually and collectively.

I never considered, as I sat there pondering, that there would be people who would argue that what the world needed was not more cooperation but more competition, but, as I sit here today, I realize that the whole conservative right wing is in favor of just that. They want not more cooperation in either the political or economic realm but more competition believing that only winners should prevail and human progress is only possible when you give free reign to those among us who are the most talented, intelligent and ambitious. They believe that competition will result in the strongest among us winning just as Nietzsche believed that a good war hallows every cause. Their ethic is that the naturally gifted elite should prevail, and they are not concerned about what happens to the rest of us or of who is trampled in the process. This is also the philosophy of Ayn Rand as espoused in her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

The debate today about increasing inequality in the world has to do with the prevalent conservative belief that only the strong should survive and be promoted and that freedom should preclude equality as a value. The rich should get more tax breaks because they are the true instigators of human progress and should be catered to at every turn. Perhaps a few crumbs will trickle down to the rest of us. This kind of thinking is counter to the Enlightenment and is fast returning us to a neo-Dark Age. No more is human progress to be measured in reduction of poverty and extension of basic services like health care to everyone. It is to be measured in terms of the great advances to human civilization like iPads, iPods and iPhones. People who are capable of coming up with these advances should be cut every break and none of the billions of dollars they make should be transferred by government to the least of these among us like the homeless, the poverty-stricken and the destitute because, well, they are the least among us, not the best among us who should be given every break.

Nevertheless, I remain in the camp of those who think that more cooperation in the political and economic spheres will do more for human progress than more competititon. I also have spent about 40 years in my spare time trying to prove that Arrow was wrong, that social choice is not impossible and that democracy in both the political and economic spheres is not only possible but desirable. This has a lot to do with voting systems, democratic institutions and constitutions but also with cooperative economic systems in which freedom is seen not as the freedom to make money at other people's expense (the losers in the competitive struggle) but the freedom to work as much or as little as one chooses and in accordance with one's preferences as much as possible. Freedom from work is for many people just as desirable a goal as the freedom to make billions of dollars, and wealthy people who don't have to work would be the first to tell you that. Economic democracy in my view is more desirable than cutthroat capitalism, and can be practiced not only at the national level, but at the enterprise level in the form of co-ops like the Mondragon Corporation.

Marx's famous definition of the "good society" was "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." This of course was perverted in defining communism as a society where all the wealth created by those who had a lot of talent and ability as well as a strong work ethic combined with those who had not so much in those categories would be thrown into a pot and then divided up in equal portions and handed out by the government. Such need not be the case in achieving the "good society." The "needs" part is pretty basic and could probably be accomplished with abouit 10% of the wealth that exists in the world today. Most people can provide for their own needs - no transfer necessary. There are some who cannot and to transfer a small part of the wealth of the wealthy to provide for their basic needs seems to me to be no more than humane. That still leaves the vast amount of wealth in the hands of the wealthy. In other words if you total up how much it would cost to provide for all the basic needs of everyone in the world and tote up how much wealth there exists in the world, it would take a fraction of all that wealth to provide the basic needs for everyone who cannot provide for their basic needs themselves who turn out to be mainly children, seniors and handicapped (whether physically or mentally) people.

A recent documentary by German TV station Deutsche Welle pointed out that half the world's production of food is wasted because super markets only want perfect vegetables and ones with slight blemishes are thrown out even though they are perfectly edible. Shelves need to be fully stocked with bread right up till closing hours even though any bread left over at the end of day will be thrown out as "day old." All the food that is thrown out by advanced nations is enough to feed all the world's hungry three times over although no governments or other institutions, much less the supermarkets themselves, seem to be interested in organizing that effort. This is what I mean by the fact that the basic needs of all the world's people could be satisfied without subtracting much if anything from the world's wealthy although a lot of them would admit they do not need incomes of millions of dollars a day like the Fortune 400 billionaires have.

Another documentary noted that Finnish school children have the highest test scores in the world despite the fact that they have one of the world's shortest school days with 15 minutes intermissions between classes during which time they are encouraged to go outdoors and play. All grades have large amounts of music, art and self-defined projects. They don't teach to the test. They are concerned with the development of each student as an overall human being not just as some super competitive cog in a nationally competitive machine. The Chinese on the other hand have the opposite approach demanding that children learn by rote methods and extra hours in school and at study. The Finnish schools are all public and everyone is accepted into every class. There are no advanced classes or tracking of students into lesser classes if they are not among the elite intellectually. Everyone is thrown in together; yet they have the best outcomes of any country in the world on standardized international tests. Egalitariansim seems to gain the best results.

An egalitarian ethic in which the concern is for the development of the whole human being rather than a promotion of just those who have superior abilities in accordance with a competitive ethic seems to me to be the most humanitarian way to treat both children and adults. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights already provides for most of the "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" ethic. It calls for free health care which most advanced socierties, with the exception of the United States, already provide. It calls for free education and other public institutions and covers most basic human needs including food and shelter.

Here are Articles 25 and 26:

Article 25.

• (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
• (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.

• (1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
• (2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
• (3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

All the basic needs of everyone on the planet could be provided for without subtracting much of the wealth of the rich since most people can provide for at least their basic needs without any transfer of wealth whatsover being necessary. Interestingly, the US among other nations does provide food security for the poor through its food stamps program. And of course seniors are provided for through Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, programs which conservative free marketers are anxious to change or eliminate.

I am with the Enlightenment thinkers especially the English utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who thought about the happiness of society as a whole and concluded that everyone counted, not only the ones with exceptional talent, ability and other admirable qualities. A society should be judged by how it treats "the least of these my brethren" which is the core and essence of Jesus' teachings but, sad to say, not the core and essence of Christianity as it exists in the world today. Perhaps we should start thinking about an alternative constitution for the US which has the world's oldest constitution (236 years old!) while being the world's youngest advanced nation. Other societies including most European societies while being older than the US have newer constitutions. As far-sighted as the Founding Fathers were, a new and updated constitution incorporating not only political but also economic rights along the lines of the UN Declaration of Human Rights would do much to right the wrongs and shortcomings of present day America and the world.

The Two Party System is Not Working

 by John Lawrence

The following is an article from the Ohio Commission on Hispanic/Latino Affairs on the Two Party System. My rebuttal follows after the article.

"As Republicans and Democrats grapple over spending caps and tax structures, and as our national legislature stays virtually locked-up with a Democratic Senate and a Republican House, it’s worth wondering how we got here.  The United States is one of a bare handful of countries across the world that uses a two-party system of government.  Third parties are typically repressed in such an environment and, indeed, members of either or the two parties in the United States serve as the overwhelming majority of elected officials at all levels of government.

"The voting system that the United States uses for legislative districts - as well as the Electoral College system for Presidential elections -encourages a two-party system.  This voting system, called often called “winner-take-all”, means that in each election in each district, the winner of the election will win the seat.  It seems simple and intuitive, but many other countries do things slightly differently.  Proportional representation is often used as a voting system in countries with multi-party systems.  Simply put, these seats are filled according to the percentage of the vote that each party received.  To illustrate the difference, say that a party wins 15% of the national vote but won no seats in individual elections.  Under the American “winner-take-all” system, that party would receive no seats in the legislature.  In a proportional representation jurisdiction, however, that party would receive 15% of the seats.  Countries that employ some proportional representation sometimes have a certain quantity of legislative seats set aside to be filled in this way in addition to those seats assigned to geographical districts, whose winners will fill the seat.  Our Electoral College system, likewise, is a winner-take-all system.  Winners of the plurality of the votes in each state win all of a state’s electoral votes.  Only Maine and Nebraska split electoral votes according to proportional voting.  This environment teaches voters that votes for third parties are often “wasted”, and it teaches third parties that they must fuse to have any hope of promoting an alternative to either of the dominant parties.

"Disadvantages to two-party systems are obvious.  The system bars fringe, extremist and issue parties from winning seats and therefore wielding influence.  It also discourages cooperation between the two dominant parties.  In a multi-party system, parties often have to form “coalition governments” - alliances with other parties which, in exchange, allow the agendas of the smaller parties into the majority.  The system does have its advantages, however.  It promotes centrism and discourages extremism.  In order to appeal to a wide-enough swath of the electorate, the parties must be moderate.  It also promotes political stability which is often an indicator of economic growth.  By contrast, multi-party systems can go months or even longer with no government in power due to disagreements and fractures among the parties.  This instability has notably plagued Italy for much of its modern history.

"The United States has been a two-party system for most of its history.  Today’s Democrats trace their founding to Andrew Jackson and the ashes of the early Democratic-Republican Party in the 1830’s.  Their primary foes were first the now-defunct Whig Party and later the emergent Republican Party.  Somewhat strangely, they were very weak in populous New England but very strong on the frontier and in the mid-Atlantic states.  The Republican Party was founded in 1854 to combat the expansion of slavery into the territories and was, perhaps consequently, strong in the North and very weak in the South.  One founding father - George Washington - who was venerated for his wisdom and leadership as well as the examples he set, warned of the insidious influence of political parties in his farewell address, and charged the United States to avoid them, saying

“ 'There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain  limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.' ”

"Despite his best efforts, however, the United States has largely institutionalized its two-party system.  Despite recent third party relative successes, such as Ross Perot in the 1990’s, the chances of sweeping change remain remote."

The following is my rebuttal:

The article states:

"The system bars fringe, extremist and issue parties from winning seats and therefore wielding influence. ... In order to appeal to a wide-enough swath of the electorate, the parties must be moderate. "

This is not true if one of the parties becomes an extremist party in and of itself.

Right now the two party system is not working. Far from coming to some kind of compromise between the two parties leading to a "centrist" government policy, the Republicans are going to the rightward extreme and then holding the Democrats hostage to their position.  There is nothing inherent in the two party system that leads to compromise. Republicans have shown that they can prevent any excercise of legitimate government functions even if they are in the minority by using the filibuster. They can filibuster every federal judiciary appointment and even every appointment to head an agency as they've prevented Elizabeth Warren from heading the Consumer Financial Protection Commission. They can literally bring government to a standstill and even destroy the US if they so choose by not raising the debt ceiling. They have threatened to do all of this if they don't get totally their own way. Thus the two party system is fatally flawed.

Their sole goal is to get rid of Obama in the 2012 election, and they are not willing to do anything even if it is beneficial to the American people, even if polling shows 80% of the American people would prefer it, that gets in the way of defeating Obama. Their sole aim is to prove that Obama is ineffective and can't get anything done. Such a system of government cannot last. If the Republicans take the White House in 2012, they will have achieved their goal, and, if they then start passing some legislation that would benefit the American people, the public will think that Republicans know how to get things done while Democrats don't. The only reason they might be able to get some things done is that Democrats won't filibuster every piece of legislation that might benefit the American people just for political advantage because some of them still care about the American people.

However, since the Republican party is a wholly owned subsidiary of large corporations and the wealthy, the chances of their passing much in the way of legislation that would benefit the middle class is nil. Instead once they get their hands on all the levers of power, the US will go the way of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, NJ and other states where Republicans control all three branches of state government: privatizing public institutions including Social Security and Medicare, deunionizing, demonizing government workers, lowering taxes especially on the rich and corporations, cutting spending including unemployment insurance, welfare and the safety net in general. Then Democrats will have no choice except to filibuster all proposed Republican legislation. However, Republicans might throw a few crumbs to the poor and middle class all of which Democrats will heartily endorse because they are not as totally heartless as Republicans.

Calif. Voting Change Could Signal Big Political Shift

By JESSE McKINLEY

Published: June 9, 2010 in New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — The time for tinkering is done.

That was the message Californians sent when they voted Tuesday to radically rejigger elections in the nation’s most populous state. Under Proposition 14, a measure that easily passed, traditional party primaries will be replaced in 2011 with wide-open elections. The top two vote-getters — whatever their party, or if they have no party at all — will face off in the general election.

Supporters argue that without parties picking candidates for the general election, moderates and independents will move to the fore, and voters will pay more attention to the electoral process.

Critics of the measure say it will give a huge advantage to candidates who have the most money or the widest name recognition.

That no one actually knows what the real effect of Proposition 14 will be seems almost beside the point to frustrated voters. What mattered, supporters said, is that something fundamental about politics — anything fundamental — had been changed.

As supporters celebrated, they promised to bring the so-called “top two” system to a state near you, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the charge — though his second term, plagued by budget meltdowns and plunging popularity, was, analysts said, one of the leading motivators for the measure.

Whether the measure will empower more independent voters — who were already allowed to vote in Democratic or Republican primaries, provided they requested a ballot — remains to be seen. But what did seem certain was that California was again poised to capture the mood of the country, just as it did in 1978 with Proposition 13, which distilled widespread antitax sentiment into a cap on property taxes.

This time, it is the anger of the electorate that Californians have bottled, experts said, even if they are not totally sure what they are doing.

“I don’t know that people really knew what they were voting for,” said Bruce Cain, director of the University of California Washington Center, based in the District of Columbia.

Mr. Cain said the state of the state — high unemployment, record foreclosures and a palpable anger at legislators — had primed the pump.

“When people get mad,” he said, “they lash out.”

But just as with Proposition 13 — which required a two-thirds majority for the Legislature to increase revenue through new taxes — Proposition 14 could come with a raft of unintended consequences, opponents say. They cited a potential rise in fringe candidates as well as the marginalization of small parties.

“Big business and big government won yesterday,” said Christina Tobin, chair of StopTopTwo.org, a leading opponent of the measure, which was heavily outspent by the “Yes” side.

One probable impact was an increase in litigation; both major parties suggested that they were weighing how to stop the implementation of Proposition 14 before its scheduled start in 2011.

Proposition 14 is based on a system in place in one other state, Washington, which the Supreme Court upheld in 2008. Louisiana uses a similar open system, but requires state and local candidates to gain a majority in primaries to win election or face a runoff.

On Wednesday, Mr. Schwarzenegger was being hailed by backers as a political winner and an agent of change, as he trumpeted Proposition 14’s promise of encouraging moderates — who, the argument goes, are shunned by highly partisan primary voters. He also acknowledged the rising role of independents, who now make up one in five voters in the state.

“We in California have said we’ve got to come to the center, we’ve got to bring everyone together in order to solve problems,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said at a news conference in Los Angeles. “And I think the rest of the nation eventually will find out this is exactly where the action is.”

What is also certain is that voters liked Proposition 14; it won in 56 of the state’s 58 counties, with the only two detractors coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum: Orange, the conservative bastion in the south, and San Francisco, the liberal paradise in the north.

Despite that mandate, Ron Nehring, the chairman of the Californian Republican Party, which opposed the proposition alongside the state’s Democrats and four smaller parties, said the measure would actually take power away from the mass of primary voters and hand it instead to a smaller group of party leaders and loyalists who would decide their candidates in conventions and caucuses. A single handpicked candidate would then get support, he said, while challengers would be shunned.

“Ninety-nine percent of the Republicans that were involved in choosing our candidates are now excluded from choosing our candidates,” Mr. Nehring said. “In the future this decision will be made by no more than a few thousand and, in most cases, a few dozen.”

California voters may not be finished with their shake-up. The November ballot, after all, will include a measure to tax and regulate marijuana, as well as possibly including proposals to eliminate the two-thirds majority for passing a budget and further limit legislators’ time in office. (California was one of the first states to adopt term limits in 1990.)

All of those elections will likely pivot on the ability to draw independents, who were ecstatic about Proposition 14’s passage.

“There is now a new political force in California,” said Royce D’Orazio, a stand-up comic who works as the Los Angeles chapter organizer for the group independentvoice.org, who spoke at the governor’s side on Wednesday. “To all our brothers and sisters in states across this country, help is on the way.”

For his part, Mr. Schwarzenegger seemed pleased by his victory — “this is, by the way, national news,” he said — but still tried to temper expectations for an electorate hungry for anything new.

“It will not solve all the problems,” the governor said. “But it will change a lot.”