Here is Paul Weyrich laying it all out for us from a 1980 video clip.

Paul Weyrich, “father” of the right-wing movement and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority and various other groups tells his flock that he doesn’t want people to vote. He complains that fellow Christians have “Goo-Goo Syndrome”: Good Government. Classic clip from 1980. This guy still gives weekly strategy sessions to Republicans nowadays.

I was going to ask the rhetorical question of whether or not this is what the average follower of the Heritage Foundation or the Moral Majority accepts as an underlying philosophy. I then realized that I have read a number of letters to the editor and comments on the internet to realize that at least some of these people are thoroughly aware of this, and that they approve of it.

Here is a very interesting way to look at how we give consent to be governed by our Constitution.  After the lecturer knocks down the usual explanations, he comes up with a perspective on the Constitution that I had not considered quite this explicitly before.

It changes a lot of my ideas when I think that the Constitution is meant to restrict what the government may do, not what the people may do. So not everything that the Constitution says the government must avoid doing is something the Constitution wants the people to avoid doing.

I wonder what my readers will have to say about this. I am sure that at least some of them have a much more refined understanding of all this than I do.

There was a fabulous comment on the article I mentioned in my previous post A Bottom-Up Solution to the Global Democracy Crisis.

I’ll quote a little bit of the comment:

A true democracy, however, would always be able to step on the rights of a minority: as the old saying goes, a “democracy” is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for supper.

If you are the two wolves, you have to convince the sheep that he lives in a “democracy” and he should submit to the will of the majority, or perhaps you will just disenfranchise the sheep, telling him he can’t vote so it really doesn’t matter what he thinks, anyway. This can be done in various ways: you can make more and more petty crimes into felonies thereby precluding the sheep’s right to vote (ah, I say old boy, I think you entered the wrong pasture–that ain’t your grass); you can gerrymander pastures such that other sheep cannot be included, and thus cannot vote; you can demand that the sheep show an ID issued by the wolves and you can always dress a wolf up in sheep’s clothing so that he can make speeches to the other sheep about why it is in their best interest to follow the edicts that the wolves lay down. He will explain on his radio show (or TV program) that not to follow his advice would expose the whole herd to unknown dangers. At least this way, a few at the time can be picked off and the herd as a whole will consider itself “safe.”

Some of the links in the comment are also great.  I think I’ll make separate blog posts of those.

Naked Capitalism has the article Christie Team Digging Deeper Hole in Pension Fund Scandals.  What caught my eye was the connection to Charlie Baker.

To give a very short summary of Sirota’s biggest current story, the IBT journalist has uncovered questionable connections with two prominent figures, Charlie Baker, who is a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts, and former New Jersey pension fund chief Robert Grady.

First, a short background on the Baker story: Sirota showed how that Baker made a $10,000 donation to the New Jersey Republican Party shortly before Christie officials gave Baker’s firm a pension management contract. That donation ran afoul of the Garden State’s pay-to-play rules that bar contributions from executives and partners of entities that manage state pension funds.

New Jersey launched an investigation into Sirota’s charges and announced that as a result, it was exiting the contract with Baker’s firm.

The article does provide a link to The Boston Globe article Baker denies connection between donation, investment.  I leave it up to you to decide if The Boston Globe article gives this story all the coverage you need to know as you decide whether or not to vote for Charlie Baker as our next governor.

Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight web site has the article The American Middle Class Hasn’t Gotten A Raise In 15 Years.

Take the generation born in 1970. In early adulthood, these Americans outearned their parents, those born in 1950. But their gains stalled in the 2000s, when they were in their 30s. Now in their 40s, their earnings have fallen behind those of their parents at the same stage in their lives.

If you are in your 40s and you haven’t reached your economic expectations for this stage of your life, it’s probably not your fault. The world economy has turned against you because all the economic gains are being gobbled up by the top 1%.  The beauty of this for the top 1% is that you are struggling so hard, you don’t have time to do anything about this.

I have the solution for you though.  Stay away from the election on November 4th and turn the Senate over to the Republicans.  You’ll soon be unemployed and have plenty of  time to riot in the streets.

The Republicans may have stopped the Obama administration in its tracks, but at least we can be thankful that the Senate has the Republicans stopped in their tracks too.  Imagine if these people were to get their way.

I read a complaint on Randy Katz’s Facebook page about a quality journal having a pay wall.  In reply, Randy said the following:

Why should quality content be free?

I posted the response below.

Quality content should not be free. Quality content providers should learn that the 21st century needs a completely different subscriber model from the 17th century, let alone the 20th.

When you only had access to a small number of publications, it was easier to decide which few you were going to pay to subscribe to.

Now that we all have access to 100s if not 1,000s of publications, the choice is not so easy. Any whole dollar subscription to each of 1,000s of sources would still be too expensive.

Google and all the ad selling web sites have the technology to make micro-payments to people who agree to host ads on their web sites. They could use this technology for subscribers to web sources. Why couldn’t Google or other site create a “Publisher’s Clearing House” of the web? You would pay one subscription fee to Google, and you would get access to 1,000s of sites. A micro-payment would be taken out of your subscription and paid to the source of whatever articles you actually read.

With this system the subscriber does not have to decide beforehand which publications are likely to have an article that he or she wants to read on any given day, week, month, or year. For a set fee, the reader can decide on the spur of the moment which source to read with the knowledge that the chosen source would get a fair payment.

When you use up your fee in micro-payments you replenish your subscription with some more money.

I am going to keep pushing this idea until someone finally takes up the challenge.  I think my last post on this topic was Monetizing Internet Content – Refresher Course.  It’s not so much a question of why people can’t think outside the box, but more of a question of why am I the only person who can think outside of this particular box?

Think Progress has the article Watch Obama’s Top Science Advisor Repeatedly Shut Down Climate Deniers At House Climate Hearing.

There are three videos in the article. I’ll include the first one here.

The Congressional climate change denier did not understand how his argument was cut off at its knees, but I do understand it. Whereas the congressman will go on repeating that nobody can answer his question, I will remember the answer quite clearly.

This segment did not include the explanation that ice melting in a glass of water does not raise the water level in the glass, but ice dropped into the glass from outside the glass raises the water level quite dramatically. Apparently, this congressman has no idea that the Antarctic ice sheet, the Greenland ice sheet, Alaskan ice, Siberian ice and all of our mountain glaciers are not yet sitting in the oceans. Once they melt it will be like dropping them into the ocean.

What are these ignorant people doing judging science in the halls of Congress?

After posting this, I ran across a posting on Jacquelyn Wells’ Facebook page. This link points to the Politicus USA article Jon Stewart Obliterates Republicans By Highlighting Their Ignorance On Climate Change.

Here is a snapshot of the Stewart scientific experiment.

Here is the video of the segment. The scientific experiment is only a small part of this great segment.

New Economic Perspectives has the article A Bottom-Up Solution to the Global Democracy Crisis by Joe Firestone.  There is a good description of what has gone wrong with our current system.  Ultimately, the article leads to a description of a possible solution.  Firestone says the following:

I know of a global web platform now in development that can be brought online rapidly which, along with its members and participants will generate new voter-controlled institutions capable of countering the factors I’ve named earlier. This platform can empower U.S. voters, for example, across the spectrum, to join forces to replace poorly performing elites with leaders that will represent the people in time for the U.S. presidential and Congressional elections of 2016.
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If you want to learn more about the project to bring this web platform for re-inventing democracy to fruition, and how it can restore the ability of democracies to change their leaders, then please go to reinventdemocracy.net, and reinventdemocracyfoundation.net for more information.

The web site presents some very intriguing ideas and possibilities. In looking through the pages of the web site, I don’t think I found evidence that the patented software systems are actually available on this web site, yet. I can hardly wait to see the software in action.

I have sent an email query about how to help the web site get developed more quickly. I have asked if there are thoughts of turning this into an open source software development project. I’ll report back here if I get any further information.

September 22, 2014

I did get an email response which was an Invitation to Join the Re-Invent Democracy Community. The link below will take you to their crowd sourcing web site. There is a slide show explaining what Re-invent Democracy is trying to accomplish.

New Economic Perspectives has the article BANK of the COMMONS. by J. D. Alt. In discussing an assumption that Thomas Piketty made in his book Capital in the Twenty First Century, Alt says:

Instead of simply assuming, however—and in such an off-hand fashion!—that legitimate “democratic governance” cannot possibly be inserted into a central bank’s procedures for issuing fiat currency, why not try to imagine a way that it could? This is precisely what a “Bank of the Commons” might accomplish.

This is a very interesting idea.  One of the people commenting on the article claims that this was done in the 1930s and 1940s.

This idea isn’t far fetched at all.  We have systems almost like that in operation right now.  Think of government funded research grants.  What the NIH does right now is one example.  PhD’s at Universities and other research institutes write grant proposals, and the NIH funds some of them.  The current system is pro-cyclical though.  The amount of funding goes up when the economy is doing well, and it goes down when the economy is doing badly.  Highly qualified researches are dropping out now because of the lack of funding for good proposals.  I read of one newly minted Professor who decided to open a winery (maybe it was a brewery) because he couldn’t get funding for his biomedical research proposals.

The Bank of the Commons would not restrict itself only to research proposals by scientists with advanced degrees.  It would be open to anyone or any group that had a good proposal.  (Of course that is also true of some government grants now.)   However, the other difference is that a Bank of the Commons would be economically counter-cyclical, if that is the way we decide it should be run.

MassLive, the online arm of The Springfield Republican, has the article US Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey oppose President Obama’s Syrian rebel training plan.

U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey on Thursday broke with the president and opposed the request to train and arm the rebels for a war against Islamic state militants.

The Senate approved the request late Thursday on a 78-22 vote.

Warren said she wasn’t convinced the proposal to train and equip Syrian rebels advances U.S. interests or that it would be effective in pushing back Islamic State fighters.

“I remain concerned that our weapons, our funding, and our support may end up in the hands of people who threaten the United States,” Warren said in a statement. “I do not want America to be dragged into another ground war in the Middle East.”

I was thrilled to hear that my favorite Senator, Elizabeth Warren, has finally showing signs of developing independent judgment on foreign policy matters.  Through years of hard fought battles, Elizabeth Warren learned to be skeptical of the domestic policy statements of the powers that be.  I am glad to see that she now realizes that the propagandists on domestic matters don’t just automatically become honest brokers when they speak on foreign policy.