I was reading page 2 of the Kansas City Star (1/5/2006), and came across this nugget:
Former Washington mayor and now Councilman Marion Barry (yes that M. Barry) urged two young men who robbed him at gunpoint the other day to turn themselves in: "I don't even want you prosecuted, really. I love you. Give yourself up." Barry was held up in his kitchen. The thieves apparently knew Barry was a community leader, which he said made the crime "kind of hurt." Barry: "There is a sort of an unwritten code in Washington, among the underworld and the hustlers and these other guys, that I am their friend".
Now, I am not one to agree with Newt Gingrich too often, but he made a statement which I now echo (albeit tied to the Jack Abramoff scandal, not the Barry comment):
"(We need) to rethink not just lobbying but the whole process of elections, incumbency protection and the way in which the system has evolved."
I agree. What fundamental changes or shifts would you make to the election processes in this country. Be sure to explain how this would make our democracy better. If you like the system, be sure to critique others' comments.
Are those quotes connected? I guess I don't know anything about M. Barry. I would imagine any time you are specificly victimized it would hurt. I would also imagine that it would be hard to be a friend to a group as nebulous and fractured as the 'underworld.' Wouldn't being friends to some elements of that society make you enemies of others?
ReplyDeleteSo, you agree with Newt, but what would you change?
I think my post and this one end sounding a bit too much like writing assignments. I think I need to rethink the way I post topics.
pl,
ReplyDeleteM Barry's claim to fame is having been caught with cocaine while mayor of D.C., and then being reelected.
EP,
In regards to the Newt comment, I would isolate changes that we could make that would be considered clearly better than what we have, but not so radical as to be tied up in endless conversation weighing the merits of the change. For instance, a proportional representation system such as many european countries use would be considered a rather radical change, but instant runoff voting( IRV ) is a fairly simple change that most people see as clearly better than the standard plurality system we now use.
For those who are unfamiliar with IRV, its a system where instead of voting for a single candidate in an election you rank the candidates in your preferred order. From there, there's a couple of variations on how you could determine the winner but one of the more populate methods is to iteratively remove the candidate with the least amount of votes and retabulate the results until 2 candidates remain at wich point the candidaet with the most votes wins.
For instance, in the 2000 election someone might have ranked Nader 1, Gore 2, Bush 3 and Gore 4 - upon iterative retabulation this voter's vote would have actually gone to Gore.
It's a simple change that has vast benefits and no downside that I'm aware of. It allows you to vote your conscience without "throwing your vote away", thereby giving a chance for third party candidates to get viable voter support. It effecictively gives you the same result as a runoff election without the added time and expense.
If this sounds interesting to you, there's a better explanation at this link :
http://www.fairvote.org/?page=189
There's also info on this site about governments( mainly local in the U.S ) that have recently adopted IRV. Ireland use it for their Pres and Australia for the house of reps.
I was suprised to find that fairvote.org seems to have added quite a few topics beyond IRV in the last couple years. If they address these as well as they have IRV, then they be be a good source of ideas for this thread as well.
In retrospect there is an initial financial burden associated with IRV in that some old-style voting machinery still in use is not equipped to handle ranking. It would seem that even without implementing IRV though, there is a benefit to upgrading the outdated machinery. This does upon things up to a rather controversial debate about what the most secure/accurate form of voting machinery is.
Also, I have an idea that's been tumbling around in my brain for several years for a type of political contract that would allow us to vote for lesser or non-established politicians that would be willing to contractually obligate themselves to certain stances. I see this as a viable way of challanging the political elite and forcing through changes that would be largely unsavory to the current political establishment. I don't have time to do this idea justice at the moment, but I do plan on addressing it on my apathocracy blog at some point in the future. When I get to that point, I would be appreciative of any help you guys could provide on hasing out the idea.
uberfreki,
ReplyDeleteGood call. Americans are incrementalists, and it is therefore nearly impossible to push through sweeping change due to the set up of our political system (think staggered elections, gerrymandering, and the two party system).
Universal health care in Oregon (voter referendum) and medicinal marijuana in multiple states (Supreme Court) are both recent examples of sweeping changes that were turned down because Americans like changes to their political system in small doses.
I therefore like IRV, but I do not think it would have an immediate effect, due to the entrenched two-party system and low voter turnout we are now experiencing.
While increased voter turnout would likely change the two-party system we now have, it would take some time for the people currently not voting to embrace this idea.
ep,
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I believe you are correct that it would take awhile for IRV to have a noticable impact on voter turnout. We did not become an apathocracy over night, and so it follows that it will take awhile to stop being an apathocracy. I think the first step is to teach people that we are an incrementalist society( Thanks for the new word ). If we're pragmatic about it, however frustrating political incrementalism may be, it is also a positive stablizing force.
I've had friends that I would consider much more inclined to political activism than myself but they become discouraged because they don't see a way to make the country radically different as they would like it. How do we combat this "all or nothing approach" and illustrate that some positive change is better than no change? Perhaps we set forth an agenda of incremental changes to work for and if successful our efforts will demonstrate the point and create further political momemntum? IRV seems to be an easy sell, so I think its a good candidate for such an agenda. Does anyone have any other ideas for incremental changes to include in such an effort( not limited to voting reform )?
I was playing with an incrementalist idea a while back in response to my anger with the news media. I believe that mixing commercialism and news is a horrible thing.
ReplyDeleteMy 'grassroots' solution to this is to take on local news stations one at a time. By have a group of individuals over the course of a week monitor the evening news and then complain to the station when they do biased or inaccurate reporting. If the station continues, eventually you can compile a stack a misreports and take it to a competing news organization. They might be interested in airing it.
Once you are satisfied with a single stations news reports, move to the next. Essentially it sets up a monitoring system for our news. Now the difficult part is to decide what is incorrect or biased reporting. I have no idea if this would work, but would be curious to see if it would make an impact.
ryan,
ReplyDeleteI wonder about how effective such a letter writing campaign would be. First, the media outlet you complain to must evaluate how many viewers they might pick up by following your advice versus how many they stand to lose by doing so. Second, I doubt whether media outlets care to get in a war with eachother over bias or accuracy since it would likely come back to haunt them due to their own transgressions - there's perhaps a form of mutually assured destruction in operation here.
Furthermore, there's a greater "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" question in regards to the media. Do we choose our media outlets because of their bias or do media outlets intentionally use bias in an effort to win us over. Originallly I was thinking that perhaps a boycott would be effective. Unfortunately, if the reality is that much of society prefers a biased media, then it would be difficult to organize a boycott of the worst offenders.
Alas, doing nothing is bound to achieve nothing, so your approach is certainly worth a shot.
I seem to recall from when I listened to NPR on a more regular basis that some organization puts out an annual report on media bias and inaccuracies. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting( FAIR ) seems to ring a bell, but I could be wrong.
At any rate, FAIR has a pretty intriguing Media Activist Kit, albeit much of it is devoted to print media. I thought you might find it interesting, so here's the link
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=119
One other idea I had was to take every opportunity you get to participate in neilsens ratings and while doing so, make sure the only media outlets that get your attention are the least biased ones. It's probably a minimal impact, but perhaps the key is to attack this issue from every possible angle and make all of the minimal impacts add up.