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What would the world look like if our side won?
Here’s a tough question for those CRN readers who think of themselves as progressive, left, feminist, environmentalist, social justice advocates, or some combination of many or all the above categories. (I’ll use the word “left” as rough shorthand for all of you, though it’s probably not the best name. It’ll do for now.)
The tough question: What would the world look like if our side won?
Sure: the American troops in Iraq would come home and impeachment proceedings begin, polluters would be punished and Halliburton nationalized, rape would be treated as a hate crime, there would be no discrimination based on the whole usual laundry list of diversity divides, we’d rescind the cuts in social services and education budgets, and Michael Richards and Jane Hamsher would co-host the “What Were We Thinking? Getting Serious About Our Own Racism” permanent traveling symposium. Those are some glib answers. Y’all aren’t getting off that easy. Those answers all have to do with things we don’t like and would end. And there’s nothing wrong with that: there’s plenty of egregious and odious behavior out there that needs to be ended.
But the question wasn’t “What would the world NOT look like?”
When your house is on fire, the only thing you want to think about is putting it out. Someone’s house is on fire right now. Houses burn every single moment of every single day, and society needs to provide effective ways to protect public safety and quench the flames. But if we ran society solely on the basis of firefighting — if our vision of the world that could be consisted of nothing being on fire — we’d all get pretty hungry in short order. The public welfare depends as much on our taking action to create certain positive goods — food, medical care, education, clothing, art and science and music — as it does on our taking action to prevent or minimize bad things, like putting out fires.
So let’s imagine our rough movement is a healthy society, and ignore those fire alarms for just a few minutes. What would the world look like if we won?
The right has an affirmative answer for this question. That’s ironic, because most of what propels the right is the task of rolling back a century of gains made by their opposition: the growing acceptance of gays and lesbians, increasing racial commingling in civic life, restrictions on corporations’ ability to consume and despoil natural resources, the growing emancipation of women, the eight-hour day, the liberation of one mind after another from the strictures of fundamentalist religion of whatever flavor. They want to end all of that, but they cast their vision as an affirmative one. They wish to strengthen the family. They want a strong, proud homeland. They favor discipline, morality, faith, and — in its barest economic sense and even then only for the elect, but those quibbles rarely get brought up — freedom.
It’s a vision that somehow manages to be both both sterile and puerile, based on deliberate misinterpretations of a history that never existed, and if it ever came true it would be varying degrees of hellish for most everyone you know. But here’s the thing: it’s a vision. A powerful, resounding vision. And so, to counter that vision, we have… what, exactly?
At our worst, we offer the promise of a life in which the only relief from a course of arduous self-examination (or, as we used to call it in the Red Guards, Criticism/Self-Criticism) is the self-examiner’s long-anticipated death, one hopes after achieving an internal state marginally less tainted by our own special versions of Original Sin — The Patriarchy, Privilege, Industrial Society, whatever. This is not to say that such things as privilege and the Patriarchy don’t exist, or that they’re more benign than we let on, or anything of the sort. But at our worst, we characterize our politics as an endless group therapy session, the kind in which everyone gets a turn at coming to terms with the harm they’ve done everyone else in the group, any hope of healing is distant, and — since this is a progressive fantasy and health care is a right — the session time never ever runs out. This is the Culture of Resistance. This is the decentralized radical left. The Patriarchy (or whatever) is ubiquitous, and pernicious to the point of omnipotence, and any action against the monster is necessarily constructed within the context of the monster and therefore is part of the monster, sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum, Amen.
The alternative we have to offer? The wonk. The tinkerer. If (for example) environmentalists taking the first path sap your spirit by pointing out the environmental effects of everything you do, from the pollution involved in building your solar electric car to the chemicals that leach out of the condom you use to keep from reproducing, the wonks offer a practical, workaday second choice: you can offset the effect of your life on the planet by making everything you do ten times more complicated. Keep throwing things away, but you’ve got to make sure the discarded item goes in the right trashcan of the five you must now use. Paying the electric bill? Gauge your mixture of fossil-fuel and alternative electricity, and boost the percentage of windmill juice — and if you can’t, then write a well-argued letter to your legislator demanding she enact your right to do so. We can save the planet from climate calamity! That is, if we pursue a course of promoting mitigative cap-and-trade carbon credit futures markets, handily described on our green investment firm’s website.
A successful movement needs wonks and internal critics both. But to a first approximation, wonks and critics are all the progressive movement offers as a public face to greet prospective new members. The critic says that no action is sufficient, let alone laudable, even on a pro-tem basis. The wonk argues that all we need to do is twiddle the vernier on society, to get it functioning within optimal parameters.
We need something else.
We need, I think, a vision of what the world would be like if we won. Which presupposes that 1) we can win, despite our grievous Original Sin, and that 2) this will be an actual win and not just undoing the most recent damage to the body politic, which would seem to mean something more than getting back to the social status quo of the Clinton administration, or even the Johnson administration.
This, in turn, presupposes that there are still people on the left who can dream, who can hope. Hope has gone out of fashion on the left. This is what I had in mind when I forwarded Wapsie’s comment about the utility of blogging, at least as regards the political blogging aspect of the comment. There are political blogs out there where the blogger’s emphasis is on the long-term, strategies and visions, the good in life. There are far more where any expressed imagining of a better world is at best tolerated patiently, the way hungry kids tolerate a grandfather in his dotage rambling through ten minutes of saying grace before digging into the mashed potatoes. Snark has replaced hope in many quarters of the blog world. Snark has its importance, don’t get me wrong. Me, of all people! I’d be the last person to abandon the stuff entirely. Sometimes it’s the best torch to use to cut through the crap. But constant snark is a symptom of a scarred soul. Afraid to feel hope, afraid even to feel joy, we gird ourselves with ironic detachment lest we feel disappointed when the joy ends, when the hope fails to justify itself. It is safer than all that risk, and we can disinterestedly watch the important events occuring as if they passed us on the other side of the windshield.
I’ve always been the kind of person who wants to get out of the car and walk around.
I expect if we started to talk about what the world would look like if we won, few of us would agree on everything. Some might honestly, sincerely believe that getting back to Johnson’s Great Society and implementing it the right way within the law will be all we need. It sure would be a damn sight better than where we are now. Still, I would have to disagree. Affirmative Action, f’rinstance, is a fine band-aid for the wound that is unequal representation in higher education. Should healthy Affirmative Action programs be our end goal? Or should we work to make a University education available and accessible to everyone who wants one?
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about, of the kind of vision of a better world we might offer.
Back in the day, when the cafeteria-Trotskyist insurgents who tried to take over peace groups were called Workers’ World instead of ANSWER, back in the halcyon 1970s and ‘80s in Buffalo, New York, the WWPs insisted that our demonstrations and leaflets and such all had to include a demand for jobs. We demanded jobs and an end to draft registration, we demanded jobs and that the US end its aid to the murderous regime in Guatemala, we demanded that the Klan not hold a rally in Niagara Square and by the way we demand jobs.
It probably wasn’t a bad call in Union-Occupied Buffalo as the region slid into the economic depression that wound up killing the city and halving Erie County’s population. Why such a potentially popular policy didn’t end up with Workers’ World winning a majority on the City Council and enacting a workers’ paradise I do not know. But I remember thinking it odd that an avowedly anti-capitalist organization would hold, as its main line of march, a demand that more of the proles be granted rightful places in the workings of the capitalist machine. Maybe it was a simple PR move: “people want jobs.” Maybe Sam Marcy envisioned total victory and nationalizing of the Main Street Trico plant and he wanted the state’s new employees all ready to make windshield wipers for the revolution.
Who knows? All I know is I remembered doubting that jobs were what people actually wanted, long term. Sure, for people worried about paying their mortgages, a job is a great stop-gap solution. But demanding jobs is the Way Of The Wonk: the notion that what we needed to do was take the existing structure of society and turn down the unemployment rate a scoche.
What people want when they want jobs, I thought, is three-fold. People want to feel economically secure: they want to be able to eat and stay warm and have some privacy and see the doctor and buy a new jacket every once in a while. People want to feel useful, like what they do with their lives makes a difference to something outside of themselves, whether it’s curing cancer or making a really good hamburger. People want to not be bored, to divert themselves by talking to colleagues, by honing skills, by doing something that holds their interest.
My guess: if there were a way for people to meet those needs without having jobs — most jobs, after all, meet need number one less than sufficiently and the other two needs even less well — that unemployment would skyrocket.
What would happen if we seriously advanced the notion of a world in which no one went without the basics of food and shelter and medicine, no matter what? Where we all had access to education and training in whatever interested us, in vocations from gardening to higher mathematics?
That’s the kind of notion that the progressive vision has at its root, after all, though that vision has been filtered through decades of revisions and retrenchments. What if we started to reclaim it?
What if we started to suggest to people that the world could be a place in which no one went without the basics? Where some measure of personal fulfillment was assumed to be a human birthright? Where the common person’s private joy was considered an overarching social good, part of the general welfare?
If we cast our vision in terms, as the late Ellen Willis suggested, of true freedom — the libertarian freedom to do what you want without impinging on others’ rights, and the progressive freedom from want, from fear, from coercion — what might that look like? What might that mean? A progressive project devoted to freedom and joy would certainly be criticized as individualistic (by people who spend their political lives arguing with every other person in the progressive world, and by people on the other side whose politics of personal accumulation match Halliburton’s), or as unrealistic (by people who don’t blink at a mass political movement aimed at bringing on the Rapture).
But it might just be a little more compelling a way to build the movement than our current “guilt and geekery” strategy. What do you think?
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
This is the sort of world I have imagined for much of my adult life, and I cling to a faint vision of it still, despite my increasingly pessimistic views of human nature.
One theme that speaks to me more loudly and hopefully as time passes is simply this; take care of the children. Every child should have all its physical needs met, and all the love, care and mentoring it requires to grow into a whole human being. And no child should have any greater claim on these things than any other. Those who teach and care for children should be cherished, and recognized as, literally, the guardians of our future.
If our (I mean all) kids can grow up whole, with a sense of beauty, compassion and humility, there might still be some hope. I’m reluctant, however, to use the phrase “No Child Left Behind”.
I’m going to think more about this.
And Beth, Ontario’s not so bad either.
By: By Rob G on 2006 12 05
If I were in charge there’d be universal healthcare coverage (crisis and basic preventative, at a minimum), an adequate social safety net, efficient mass transit in large cities, and a minimum wage reflective of the actual cost of living. Probably a lot of things I haven’t thought of, but I think with economic security for most of the population a lot of it would take care of itself. For instance, with widespread economic security and legalized drugs we eliminate most of the motivation for property crime.
By: By C.A.L. on 2006 12 05
More to the point, I think, than Why do we need?, is How do we get rid of?. Making ourselves change how we live (which is, we agree, necessary) will require a sea change of a like unseen since the dawn of agriculture (OK, maybe that’s hyperbole. I just wanted to type “unseen since the dawn of agriculture”).
Maybe I’m misreading you, spyder, but it’s not mental masturbation to try to come up with a vision that will inspire such a change. Anyway, you write “masturbating” like it’s a bad thing.
By: By Rob G on 2006 12 05
Chris, please revisit this in the near future. You put a bit of time into the post and I only think it’s fair to give us some time to really think about what you said. I mean no disrespect to Beth or Rob, but they’re probably younger and smarter than me; I need more time to think. I’m just glad you’re back to make me think with articles like this one.
By: By Carl Buell (OGeorge) on 2006 12 05
Carl, you do yourself a disservice, and are too nice to me (if not Beth). I had the same reaction (wanting to take more time), and probably shot off my keyboard too soon, but wanted to put something down, even if it risked being trite. Sometimes initial reactions are valuable, if only for me to go back and see what they were. I hope to put something more thoughtful down in a day or two.
By: By Rob G on 2006 12 05
Sorry, Carl, but no dice. I expect no less than brilliance from you in the next two hours. Otherwise you can’t live in my utopia. Unless you ask nicely.
Cascadian, I like the ecoregoinal slant. But why a boost in the minimum wage — as nice a short-term idea as that is — rather than simply ensuring that no one lacks the basics?
If you’re wondering whether that can happen outside the context of a monetary economy, why not go for a universal guaranteed income rather than a minimum wage?
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 12 05
I also want more time to think about this. But, generally, a world where money isn’t a real issue. Where people can pursue their own interests without care about Maslow’s lower needs. Where people can pursue their own betterment and the betterment of all of Earth’s creatures.
By: By Roxanne on 2006 12 05
We need wonks, foremost and most desperately.
The ultra-high level of self-actualization, where all basic needs are filled without having to pay for them, is very lovely. But I don’t know how to get there.
Houses, food and clothing come from somewhere. The basic materials have to be grown or manufactured; they have to be shipped to whoever makes them into products; and then they have to be shipped again to the end-user. Each step requires a separate and very disparate competency. Many of those steps are dangerous, or tedious, or both. All of those steps involve processes that need to be developed, refined, perfected. They require specialized training, equipment, and management. These are not things that people do purely for the love of doing them nor out of solidarity with humankind.
And that’s just the basic needs! When you start talking about things like healthcare and transportation, you’re also talking about incredibly complex technologies that require years of pure research, some of which will amount to nothing, some of which will look and perform fine at first but then have unintended consequences no one saw coming. Again: very specialized training, tools, and analysis.
The progressivist utopia assumes at least a current level of technological innovation - while also assuming there exists a system that continues to innovate, to improve economic efficiencies without attendant environmental damage or social disarray.
Or are we going to stop technological development where it is right now, because we don’t want have to deal with the infrastructure and expense and resource depletion needed to keep it going? Lovely! Where does the next leap forward in alternative-energy come from? Or in eco-friendly building materials? Or in AIDS/ALS/MS /cancer/other disease and disability therapies?
The progressivist utopia requires, absolutely requires, a population small enough to avoid scarcity and environmental degradation - yet one also well-educated enough to make enlightened decisions about which technologies to pursue and which ones to avoid, about distribution of goods and services, and about planning for disasters.
OK, so let’s talk about population control, eduation policy, decision-making models; whether we want high-density city centers to avoid sprawl and habitat degradation or low-intensity cities to avoid congestion and local resource depletion. And how to distribute essential goods and services to each.
Concentrate on the wonkery first. Please. Come up with actual ideas on how to keep people housed, fed, clothed, healthy and educated without any large industrial base; without economies of scale; without paying anyone for anything; without institutions capable of research into microbiology, bioengineering, physics, and civil engineering; and without a functioning nationwide transportation network.
Then we can talk about how wonderful it is that we’re all poets and artists.
By: By CaseyL on 2006 12 06
Casey, I agree utterly. I don’t mean to denigrate expertise at all, merely the notion that all we need to do is tweak the status quo in various complicated ways.
Tweaking the status quo mainly preserves the comfort of those who already benefit from the status quo.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 12 06
Sortition - sample based legislature, courts and media.
By: By Yoram Gat on 2006 12 06
Then we can talk about how wonderful it is that we’re all poets and artists.
What were you saying about defensive snark in response to hopeful language, Chris?
By: By Mark T on 2006 12 06
Star Trek World, or…...Armageddon!
If I had to choose between Armageddon and living with Jean Luc Picard et al, I would abstain.
By: By Rob G on 2006 12 06
i want more time to think, too. my first thought is that i can’t really consider this stuff well when it is framed as, “what if we won?” won what? and how?
that reaction probably reflects a belief that there has been far too much attention paid to categorizing everyone as “us” and “them,” trying to divide the populace into 2 bins not on single issues or premises, but on all issues at once. it probably also reflects a belief that sheer power has become the currency of public life—a pretty messed-up system for most of us—and so wins are defined more personally, and less as advancing the common good.
but i have not thought those ideas through enough. i blame the patriarchy, the media, the major political parties, and our fearless leader.
beth and rob express the way i think we should be approaching things instead—placing up front the basic human needs of food, shelter, health care, education, and, well, human dignity. putting the basic needs of children first, even though they lack political clout, wealth, and the ability to be economically productive. taking better care of the planet and its citizens.
these are the principles that advance dignity and ensure a better present and future, but they seem to get lost in public and political discourse in the US. the observations about canada’s approach are very appealing as a first step: first ensure the basics are met, and also ensure that discussions are open, debates are on the merits of an issue, government is trustworthy and transparent.
oh, and also—let there be peace on earth. every preschool teacher has a better diplomatic arsenal than our federal government seems to possess.
By: By kathy a on 2006 12 06
i want to think more about casey’s observations, too. expertise and economies of scale and how to actually implement changes are huge. i don’t think they are unsolveable problems, and do think we need wonks. i guess that from my initial, unthoughtful perspective, that can and will happen if the public discourse about priorities changes.
By: By kathy a on 2006 12 06
I think we need wonks too. I am one. To reiterate, my using the word to describe a specific metaphorical type of wonk should no more be read as a criticism of expertise than my description of internal political criticism as an endless therapy session should be read as a slam at psychiatry.
It’s all about getting lost in detail. Detail is crucial, but focusing entirely on detail while failing to address the underlying assumptions on which the detail rests is often counterproductive. More to come on this in a post today, I hope.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 12 06
My short answer: Re-inhabitation.
For the long answer, give me some time.
Thanks, Fred
By: By Fred Levitan on 2006 12 06
“Diseases kill because life is at its core, about dying.”
Wow. Just…wow.
By: By CaseyL on 2006 12 06
What kind of positive future do I envision? Let’s start with a democratic global government that eliminates war and allows complete freedom of movement—no borders, no passports. We take space exploration seriously and set up settlements on the Moon and Mars. There are many different kinds of communities, but all offer access to fresh food, nature, learning and good neighbors. All people have lifelong access to education designed to bring out their gifts—as Chris said, “vocations from gardening to higher mathematics”. Spirituality is important, but fundamentalism has died away. Is that enough for now?
I’ve run workshops where people do this kind of visioning, and the bonding is incredible. (<a href=“http://perceivingwholes.blogspot.com/”>) We need opportunities to share visions for the world we truly want. Thank you, Chris, for providing one. And may I recommend Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and Pacific Edge for thoughtful, well-written utopias?
By: By Jane Shevtsov on 2006 12 06
Kathy, my tongue was halfway towards my right cheek (the upper one) when I wrote that, but...
Star Trek was utopian in the true sense of the word. That universe would only be possible if people were like the characters portrayed by the actors. The only long, dark teatimes of the soul that they endure are because of external factors (aliens taking them over, etc), not because they are people with all the flaws that flesh is heir to. They portray an ideal world, but they don’t explain it. Where did all the Khans go?
But yes, I concede that it is a positive vision.
I’m more of a Babylon 5 kinda guy, anyway.
By: By Rob G on 2006 12 07
The ideal future world for me, following the Star Trek analogy, would be the one in ‘Errand of Mercy’ where the wise old Organians force a peace treaty between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, through their power to prevent violence through their advanced mental powers. Interesting that the Organians take on the guise of a simple, pastoral community living in harmony with their environs.
“Live long and prosper!”
“Make it so!”
“I’m a doctor, not a futurologist!”
By: By Fred Levitan on 2006 12 07
For those who may scoff at the Klingon stuff, it seems that Star Trek TNG has been officially deemed Eeevul Marxist-Environmentalist Propaganda. I’d keep an eye on this Kathy McCarty person who brought it up, if I was all of us.
The Old/Original Series, contrariwise, seems to have been granted the official Propertarian Seal of Approval.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2006 12 07
I don’t scoff at Klingons. They provided me with my model for writing software.
By: By Rob G on 2006 12 07
Some great comments in this thread. (I epecially like the way spyder thinks.) I wonder what the wonks here think about Michael Albert’s proposals for participatory economics?
By: By Dave on 2006 12 07
I need to take some time to think about this too.
However, a first thought about the answers so far:
I’m seeing several people answer in terms of “What do people NEED?” with their answers being free health care, plenty of food, housing, etc.
Only one commenter has looked at the backside of the issue and asked “Where is all this stuff going to come from?” (There is no “freeâ€? health care, for instance. Somebody has to go to med school and work his/her ass off for years to become a doctor.)
We need to think about this big picture not only in terms of what we deserve/what we need/what we’ll get, but also what we’ll have to do for it.
One of the questions has to be “What can people – what can *I* DO?”
(Injecting a grim note into the discussion: Every pleasant future I see has a lot fewer humans on earth. I think we’re over the carrying capacity of earth by a factor of at least three, and possibly as much as ten or more. It appears to me that the Star Trek future, which I also want to see, can only happen on the other side of several billion unfortunate deaths.)
Still, I want us all to think about this some more, and see what better world we can envision.
By: By Hank Fox on 2006 12 08
Cascadian: I really like your “global federated bioregions” idea! I think that’s an even longer-term destination than a global federation based on something like present-day nation-states, but it’s definitely worth thinking (and talking) about.
Nationalism is a powerful enough force in today’s world that splitting and combining pieces of states into bioregions would be close to impossible. However, if we can build a global political system that would make nations into something like US states or Swiss cantons, reshaping the map will become far easier because national boundaries will lose their importance. Think of the way Maine separated from Massachusetts in the early 1800s.
By: By Jane Shevtsov on 2006 12 09
For 40,000+ years health care was free, or at the very most barter exchanged for therapeutic remedies
True spyder, but this was also a primitive and often harmful set of practices. Sure we could have people who learned first aid, basic contarindication, etc. But how does one go to a town healer type for neurosurgery or knee reconstruction? It seems to me that this is what you are saying.
By: By MM on 2006 12 09
“The right has an affirmative answer for this question.”
Um, no they don’t. Not really.
They _pretend_ they do and maybe they _think_ they do. The trouble is that they have no intention of carefully thinking through whether their fantasy of a righteously right-wing world makes any sense at all.
The world of Norman Rockwell might look sweet and comfortable and inviting (well, if you are of the right color to blend in anyway) just as the world of Pleasantville does. But can the people in Norman Rockwell paintings sustain the society they live in? Don’t there have to be coal miners off stage somewhere, and steelworkers to make the dentist’s instruments, and factories for the phone equipment so folks can gossip on the phone, and so on?
In fact, the “realism” of the right, which they tout again and again and again as their main draw (conservativism allegedly being founded on the collective wisdom of centuries) has been again and again and again exposed as what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism.” Platitudes replace reason, hypocrisy stacks the deck, and the realities that rightists actually fight for bear no resemblence to their vaunted fantasies of rectitude.
No, I don’t think that we on the left do so badly to muddle along in problem-solving mode. And yet, I do have a vision of what the future might be if we “win.” “Winning” would involve the drastic and near-total revision of everyday reality, no doubt. So it would take decades if not centuries even if everyone got with the program tomorrow. It is therefore a kind of Star Trek vision of the future I have, in which problems are solved with both high technology and common decency; in which the economy is based on sharing; in which diplomats have the humility yet resolution of a Jean-Luc Picard.
Silly, science-fictional? Duh. The point of working to enable human beings to live out their potential while respecting others is that we don’t know what good humanity is capable of if only we can stop hitting each other over the head. We’ve been at this hitting each other over the head for 8000 years or so and I don’t expect it to stop on a dime.
I do from time to time indulge in fantasies of what a revolutionary populist USA might be like. But what will emerge from our efforts in reality, only time can tell.
By: By Mark Foxwell on 2006 12 10
Ugh; Star Trek as Utopia? I’d rather live in a Culture Orbital or GSV, be a Programmer-At-Arms with the Qeng Ho or uplift my fellow species to membership in the galactic civilization (err, insert reference to David Brin’s Uplift universe here).
But Star Trek? Please read part nine of Justin B. Rye’s classic rant, which gives an excellent rundown of Trek’s appalling politics, along with a delightful excoriation of its affinity for new-agey woo.
By: By grendelkhan on 2006 12 10
Yes, we need a vision. More practically, we need a place where people can come together to share their visions, criticize and refine each other’s ideas, and maybe come up with a list of well-honed ideas that a lot of people could get behind. We also need people willing to spend the time to do all that. (I’m working on the web site part, but I’m not so good at getting people interested.)
As far as a specific wish-list, here’s what bubbles to the surface:
I would like to see a world in which…
...it is possible for an experienced, skilled person to get a decent job appropriate to their skillset and experience without having to brag, fine-tune, exaggerate, or interview repeatedly
...it is possible to live at a reasonable level while only holding down a part-time job, leaving time free for one’s creative endeavors
...neighborhoods are actually neighborhoods, with places to gather and play and with people who actually know and maybe even like each other, rather than just collections of people who happen to sleep in the same zip code
...every law carries an explanation in plain English of what it means, and why it was enacted (with links to more details, including examples of problems, the goals it attempts to address, how it was passed, etc.) (“No legislation without representation” for short.)
...every large corporation that does business with a community has some community ownership and input into the decision-making process.
...the more you own, the more public oversight there is of what you do with it.
...there is a place where the actions of any politician, public figure, or corporation are collaboratively recorded, and can be discussed in an ethical context (wikipedia addresses part of the “collaborative recording”, but not so much the discussion)
...lawyers are rare, and are only called in to help advise on the most intricate disputes and in criminal cases; and where most civil cases are worked out with the assistance of dispute-resolution techniques and software
...victimless “sins” (drugs, prostitution, gambling…) are taxed and regulated rather than incurring jail time
(Out of time now. Could keep going otherwise.)
Woozle
issuepedia.org
By: By Woozle on 2006 12 10
Good stuff, Woozle.
I’m reminded of my own desire that prison sentences—and the death penalty—could be applied to corporations. Being legal “persons,” why do corporations have more rights that their real flesh-and-blood peers? If a corporation commits a crime, or causes a death, I’d like to see the corporation itself suffer. Not just monetarily, but with discorporation—at the least the removal of corporate protections, so that the officers could be charged with murder, negligent homicide, etc., and the corporation terminated.
I also have a very strong interest in science and reason being the guiding lights of this future world. Which to me means, at least partly, that religion and sectarianism must be LESS of a factor in deciding public issues.
Bearing on that, I recently ordered a large, beautiful book called “World Changing: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century.” Lots of promise in the title, right? And lots of glitzy stuff in the Amazon pitch for it.
The Table of Contents shows sections on ecology, green cities, third world development, a worldwide green economy, human rights, nonviolent revolution, and a lot more.
Yet a few days after I got the thing, I looked in the Index for citations on reproduction. There was NOTHING indexed for contraceptives, condoms, birth control, family planning, reproductive choice, or sex education.
In a 500-plus-page book, “Population” is cited a mere 9 times, and then only in passing remarks. The most important and basic factor in almost all environmental problems appears almost completely absent from the book, and there are no solutions suggested, other than a weak mention of educating and improving the economic situation of women.
I haven’t started reading it yet, but I’m already asking myself if the thing was edited by a Christian conservative.
By: By Hank Fox on 2006 12 11
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