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Vol. 2 No. 3 (July 2003)
Uncommon Denominator
The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
www.commonwealinstitute.org
"The great fish swallow up the small, and he who is most strenuous for the Rights of the people, when vested with power, is as eager after the perogatives of Government."
-- John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1775
CONTENTS
Call to Action: Make your voice heard on new voting technologies
Wit and Wisdom: The "War on Criticism"
Talking Points: Power and the right wing
Quoted! Pat Robertson on Charles Taylor
Featured Article: President Bush's use of language
Check It Out: Government Information Awareness
Happenings: New advisor; new communications team; new volunteers
Endorsements: Anne Firth Murray
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a contributor
CALL TO ACTION
The debate over touch-screen voting technology is entering a critical phase, and voters now have a chance to make themselves heard. Please read on, and then make your own voice heard!
On July 2, the California Secretary of State released a much-anticipated task force report on the increasing use of touch-screen voting machines. The report makes a number of recommendations, the most important of which involve heightened security and a voter verifiable audit trail (VVAT) for all voting equipment. There is now a 30-day public comment period, after which the Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley, will decide which, if any, of the recommendations to take. Moreover, other states will face similar decisions soon and are waiting to see what California does. So even if you're not a California voter, this issue affecdts you, and you still have an opportunity to make a difference.
Why is this such a big issue? Because as it stands, the new touch-screen voting technology is vulnerable to error or tampering, the machines do not provide voters with a record of how they voted, and the manufacturers have so far refused to provide information about the software they use. Moreover, it has been estimated that by 2010, as many as 50% of California voters (up from 10% today) will be using electronic voting machines. This means that, unless we take action now, the fundamental procedure of democracy -- the formal expression of the will of the people -- will have less transparency and less accountability than it does now. Rather, it will increasingly depend on the good faith of private companies that are not politically neutral, and on the technological reliability of the machines they produce. (To read more, see the February issue of the Uncommon Denominator or www.verifiedvoting.org).
What you can do - what you should do - if you are a California resident is contact Kevin Shelley and ask him to follow the task force's recommendations. (Although the recommendations do not go as far as we would like, such as calling for independent review of software code and standardization of technological criteria, they are definitely a good start). Also, make sure to say that you want the recommendations implemented immediately, not in 2007, as some of the task force members have advocated. Write to:
Secretary of State Kevin Shelley
Attn: Touch Screen Report
1500 11th Street
Sacramento, CA 95814
Or email to: TaskForceComments@ss.ca.gov.
If your voting district has not yet adopted electronic voting machines, contact your local election officials and encourage them to get ahead of the curve and follow the task force's recommendations.
If you live outside California, contact your local election officials - probably the county board of commissioners or supervisors - and request information about the voting machines being used (or contemplated) in your district. Write to the secretary of state for your state, and to your Congressional representatives, and bring the issue to their attention. You might also want to sign an online petition being organized by Working Assets, which will send the signatures to Attorney General John Ashcroft. Note: While email is more convenient, regular old snail-mail tends to get more attention and carry more weight. At the national level, there is one only Congressional bill we're aware of that seeks to address these issues, the "Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003" [H.R.2239], introduced in the House by Rush Holt (D-NJ). Whether or not this specific bill is the right one remains to be seen, but the fact that Congress will finally be addressing the problem of voting technology is a step in the right direction. (The full text of Holt's bill is available through thomas.loc.gov). Please encourage your Representative and Senators to inform themselves about electronic voting technology and to take the issue seriously.
This issue is too important to our democracy for us to let it slide. Vote now with your feedback so that you can vote on touch-screens later and know that your vote will be counted correctly.
WIT AND WISDOM
Bush Asks Congress for $30 Billion to Help Fight War on Criticism
"WASHINGTON, D.C. - Citing the need to safeguard 'America's most vital institutions and politicians' against potentially devastating attacks, President Bush asked Congress to sign off Monday on a $30 billion funding package to help fight the ongoing War On Criticism.
'Sadly, the threat of criticism is still with us,' Bush told members of Congress during a 2 p.m. televised address. 'We thought we had defeated criticism with our successes in Afghanistan and Iraq. We thought we had struck at its very heart with the broad discretionary powers of the USA Patriot Act. And we thought that the ratings victory of Fox News, America's News Channel, might signal the beginning of a lasting peace with the media. Yet, despite all this, criticism abounds.'"
- parody, fresh from The Onion. Read more.
TALKING POINTS
Even as they have created the most powerful nation in history, Americans have always dreaded centralized power. This fear, we might say, is built into the national DNA, and through the country's history it has attached to a variety of powerful entities: the Church of England, King George III, the "slave power," the rail barons and oil tycoons, the ATF, the World Trade Organization. Our suspicion of power has also created a deeply rooted cultural prejudice in favor of the "the little guy" in all his various forms: the small business owner, the family farmer, the underdog in sports, Horatio Alger, John Henry, even the fugitive or the outlaw. In political terms, it underlies a many-headed populist tradition that runs from the "minute-men," through the Jacksonian era, through William Jennings Bryan, right down to the present wrangling over tax cuts "for the wealthy" or "for working people." Politicians who successfully tap into the populist tradition (whatever their background or beliefs might be) watch their vote totals rise; those who don't get left behind, unless they're especially well connected.
So it should come as no surprise that the modern conservative movement, including its increasingly powerful far-right wing, is working overtime to claim the populist mantle. What is more surprising is that they have been so successful, given the actual policies that they are implementing.
What the Right would have us believe is that their policies are designed to wrest power away from government and away from special interests and return it to the people. Their rhetoric draws on the libertarian and laissez-faire strains of conservatism, summed up in Ronald Reagan's exhortation to "get the government off the backs of the American people." What seems to be happening, however, is that the libertarian Right (represented by people like William Safire and John McCain) has lost ground to the traditionalist or religious Right, which is much more comfortable using power to achieve its ends, and much more sympathetic to massive concentrations of power. Despite the populist rhetoric, the right wing of American politics is moving in a clearly anti-populist direction, for in the very real debates and conflicts that our society is now wrestling with, they consistently pursue policies that tend inexorably toward imbalances of power.
This surely comes as no surprise to progressives who follow the news. But it's worthwhile to look at how the pattern extends across a number of different areas.
* The Media. In June, the FCC voted to loosen restrictions on media ownership. Although some conservative organizations, notably the NRA, opposed the decision, it was fundamentally in line with anti-regulatory conservatism. Its effect, however, will not be to distribute power more widely (as the anti-regulatory argument usually goes), but to allow the big fish to eat more little fish. This means not only that Americans will have fewer perspectives available to them, but that today's independent media businessmen -the owner, say, of a small-city newspaper or radio station - will probably be working for Gannett or Clear Channel Communications tomorrow. Unless Congress overturns the FCC ruling, information, and the power it confers, will flow into fewer and fewer hands. (An organization called Free Press is organizing an effort to pressure the Senate to roll back the FCC decision.)
* Privacy. Information is also flowing more freely into the hands of the administration, which claims that it needs to know more about the personal lives of individual citizens as part of the war on terrorism. This is probably the area where the libertarians have lost the most ground. As surveillance technologies become more sophisticated, and as the administration - through the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Act of 2002, and the Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) system - arrogates to itself more intrusive surveillance powers, privacy law is falling further behind and Americans find themselves increasingly exposed to the prying eyes of the government. Privacy is not just a right, but a form of power in itself, and it is drip-drip-dripping away. (See previous articles on privacy in the Uncommon Denominator, vols. 1:9, 1:10, and 1:11).
* Tax Policy. Not since the Hoover administration has there been such a dramatic redistribution of economic power upward. The causes of this shift lie partly in the natural downturn of the business cycle, which disproportionately affects the middle class and the working class, but more importantly in regressive tax policies. The rhetoric of tax-cutting, of course, is quintessentially populist: the people should be able to keep more of their money. But the consequences of current tax-cutting are anti-populist in three main, interlinked ways.
First, while a family might save a few hundred dollars a year in taxes, they will pay far more than that over the long run in terms of lost or reduced programs and services.
Second, it means that a larger total share of the country's GDP will be retained by the wealthiest stratum of society (and the promise of trickle-down economics, as the 1980s showed, is chimerical).
Third, it limits the ability of the government to act as the country's "biggest venture capitalist" (in the words of Bill Gates, Sr.), to stimulate innovation, and to support economic development. By investing in infrastructure, R&D loans and subsidies, and higher education, the government promotes the kind of robust, innovative economic activity that not only helps smaller entrepreneurs compete against major corporations, but ultimately pays for itself.
* The Imperial Presidency. Since the 1970s, a central aim of the Right's political program has been to concentrate more power in the hands of the executive branch (as long as it is occupied by one of its own). There are several dimensions to this. The most important involves the relative weakening of Congress in various ways: the undermining of the War Powers Act; passage of the line-item veto; a current proposal to limit the Senate filibuster (which is at issue in judicial appointments); fierce arm-twisting to keep Congressional representatives in line; and so forth. Meanwhile, the push has been toward "executive privilege," more commonly known as secrecy. Even as the administration seeks to collect more and more information about Americans, it reveals less and less information about its own operations, and in the rare cases when reporters press the issue, they are denounced as "liberal." Finally, and more subtly, the Right seeks to create an image of the President as a stern yet caring father figure, upon whom Americans should feel dependent and to whom they should feel grateful. It is the personalized quality of this desired relationship that is striking; in contrast to the idea of a public servant discharging his duties. The Right's ideal is that we invest our hopes and dreams, our very identities, in an individual man, who does not serve so much as benevolently rule.
Lest all this seem like a leftist rant, consider the comments of Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the conservative-libertarian Cato Institute and a former special assistant to Ronald Reagan. Discussing the administration's approach to war in Iraq, Bandow has this to say of the "conservative intellectuals" currently in power: "In their view, once someone is elected president, he or she faces no legal or political constraint. The president doesn't need congressional authority; Washington doesn't need UN authority. Allied support is irrelevant. The president needn't offer the public a justification for going to war that holds up after the conflict ends. The president may not even be questioned about the legitimacy of his professed justification. Accept his word and let him do whatever he wants, irrespective of circumstances.... This is not the government created by the Founders. This is not the government that any believer in liberty should favor." Bravo! (Click here for Bandow's full column.)
* Labor and Litigation. When it comes to workplace protections and the ability of people to seek redress in the courts, the Right sides with corporate management so consistently that it often doesn't even bother to sound populist. Certainly, not all labor disputes should favor the unions (that's what mediators are for), and not all lawsuits have merit (that's what juries are for). But seeking to systematically change the country's legal architecture in order to undercut the ability of workers or victims to resist corporate power is an insult to the American principles of fair play and even dealing. And in each case, it's a double punch. First, not only is the economy hemmorhaging jobs, but those workers fortunate enough to stay employed have fewer rights, and may be less likely to insist on those rights for fear of being fired. Meanwhile, as the administration weakens environmental laws and other public health regulations, they are also pushing through "tort reform," so that the people who are harmed as a result of corporate malfeasance have less ability to fight back.
There are lots of complicated arguments involved in all of these issues, and lots of persuasive rhetoric, but when in doubt, look at the actual results of particular policies. Look at where the power is flowing. That will tell you, better than words, who's populist and who's not.
QUOTED!
"We're undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country." -- Conservative activist and TV evangelist Pat Robertson, on the administration's insistence that Liberian President Charles Taylor step down. Taylor is, by almost every account, one of the most ruthless African dictators currently in power.
FEATURED ARTICLE
From time to time, the Uncommon Denominator will highlight particularly interesting or important articles about American political culture. The following is the introduction to "A Nation of Victims," by Renana Brooks, published in The Nation in June:
"George W. Bush is generally regarded as a mangler of the English language. What is overlooked is his mastery of emotional language -- especially negatively charged emotional language -- as a political tool. Take a closer look at his speeches and public utterances, and his political success turns out to be no surprise. It is the predictable result of the intentional use of language to dominate others."
Click here to read the whole article.
CHECK IT OUT
In response to the spooky-sounding, and privacy-threatening, Terrorism Information Awareness system (previously known as Total Information Awareness), an MIT computing team has sought to turn the tables by coming up with the Government Information Awareness project. Still in its earliest stages, GIA is the brainchild of grad student Ryan McKinley and assistant professor Christopher Csikszentmihályi, of the MIT Media Lab's Computing Culture group.
Based on the idea that democracy depends upon an informed citizenry, the threefold mission of GIA is to "empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America," to "allow citizens to submit intelligence about government-related issues, while maintaining their anonymity," and to "allow members of the government a chance to participate in the process."
The database, or really network of databases, is intended to function as a highly flexible, highly transparent, always evolving work-in-progress that will allow people to explore, collate, and compare data about public figures and events in federal and local government, and in industry. Two key features of the GIA architecture are: 1) data openness; all of its information, including the code, is available for public perusal and use; and 2) data extensibility, which emphasizes relationships among elements, and (in their words) "allows the system to grow in any direction, and accommodate as-yet unimagined institutions, organizations, or threats."
As of now, GIA has information on more than 3,000 public figures, but the variety of information is still pretty narrow, given the newness of the site. The most interesting material currently available involves campaign contributions. The number of figures included, however, and the kind of information stored about them, will continue to expand as the site develops.
Check it out. You may even have something to contribute.
HAPPENINGS
New Advisory Board Member -- We're proud to welcome Peter Coyote, an accomplished actor and award-winning narrator, as a new member of our advisory board. From 1975 to 1983 Mr. Coyote was a member of the California State Arts Council, which he chaired for three consecutive years. Since the early 1980s, he has been acting and doing voice-overs for documentaries, with over 90 movies and over 70 documentaries to his credit. Mr. Coyote's current political interests include environmental pollution, the integrity of the election process, and the hazards of election fraud.
Volunteer Program Jumpstarted -- Corporate communications specialist Judy Horst has signed on temporarily to restart CI's Volunteer Program. She's reviewing our needs, setting up work projects, and starting to contact those who have offered their services in the past. Helping her are Summer Interns Tara Syed and Julia Erlandson. If you are interested in volunteering, please visit our Guest Book to provide your name and contact information.
ENDORSEMENTS
"The Commonweal Institute has taken on an ambitious set of tasks designed to ensure that progressive and just perspectives will be heard on the issues of the day. In a time when individual rights and basic democratic principles are under threat, the work of the Commonweal Institute is particularly important." -- Anne Firth Murray, Founder, Global Fund for Women
GET INVOLVED
If you agree with Anne Firth Murray (see above), there are a number of ways you can help the Commonweal Institute achieve its goals.
Right now, as you read, you can simply forward the Uncommon Denominator to friends and family who might be interested in learning about the Commonweal Institute. Getting the word out is crucial.
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