Post by POA on Jan 29, 2006 19:43:29 GMT -5
camaxtle said:
I have just caught up on the discussion on this board. Sorry. But lets get down to discussing some points. How to we undermine the DLC? How do we find another mouthpiece for people of liberal persuasion? This group has so much power, how do we fight it? Who could we talk to that would be willing to listen?Then POA mentioned New Democratopia, which sparked a thought, that has been lingering for a while. That is: The United States in it's present form cannot continue to exist in a manner that means anything. It's too big and cumbersome, too diverse. It is time to regionalize. Smaller countries function better and are more able to provide for it's society. Hey I'm an idealist. This train of thought came to me after reading "Ecotopia" The author's name escapes me. A good read and something to be considered.
I'll look for Ecotopia. I think someone else has mentioned it to me.
The problem with trying to undermine the DLC from within the Democratic Party isn't just that the DLC is (or rather, has been) the pocketbook-although that's changed a little because of Dean's direct funding methods combined with the fact that the Republicans prefer a closed system of donor-to-lobbyist-to politician-to lobbyist again. It's also that the structure of the Democratic Party itself is so Byzantine that there are a lot of places where groups like the DLC and it's hydra-like associates can hide themselves.
Three examples: the DNC members-who exactly are they, and how are they chosen? One story that I read recently is that the DNC passed unanimously a resolution that condemned people who planned a peaceful boycott of Israel (I'll find the url). This story was so deliberately obscured that after hours of searching, I was only able to find two paragraphs of it.
A second example is Rahm Emanuel's DCCCC, which is actually running a pro-war candidate against an anti-war candidate in a district in his state.
A third example is superdelegates, in which politicians basically are allowed to vote directly in the process that selects them-but since politicians have common interests between them that are stronger than their interest in representing the people from their home states, what really happens is a form of over-representation of interests within the system against everyone else.
One way of undermining the DLC might be for all of the groups that have caught onto their schemes to start banding together, at least online, while we still have the power to do so. I've started a link to here over at Reality-Based Community, and I'll probably do the same soon for Progressive Independent, which I like although I can't join because my dominant email address is a free one. I also think that there are some other bloggers that have had it with the Democrats' so far that I read, such as Stop Me Before I Vote Again: Deconstructing the Democrats.
Another way might be to cut down every DLC'er in terms of their getting elected wherever they're found, and in that way make the DLC a pariah organization. The problem with this as a strategy is that it's only going to work for the first couple of politicians. After that, they're probably going to go to a 'secret' membership structure (if they haven't done that already) so that way nobody has any way to tell whether they're a DLC member or not until the disastrous festivals of ass-kissing with the fascists occur.
A third way might be in states that have initiative/referendum processes, to pass initiative/referenda that state that donations to political candidates can only come from citizens of that particular state. This hobbles the DLC and similar organizations because they collect money from the states that have it and give it to politicians in states that don't.
As far as the United States continuing to exist-I saw your point, but I do think that it would continue to exist in a meaningful way: namely as a dystopia which nobody except the gated wealthy and the rabid right-wingers would want to be associated with. I agree it would be better if there were, say, 20 Barbadoses rather than one Tsarist Russia. I think there is an organization in Vermont that's already considering secession called the Vermont Republic, or something similar (try searching for Thomas Naylor).
Perhaps, in order to seem like a valid possibility, it might be a good idea to somehow start small. Such as forming common institutions for basic taskings such as power and food production, perhaps an 'independence bank' that was honest, not available to be bought out, and doesn't trade on the market so it doesn't feed into the capitalism/'pirate' system, but will help people locally, so on.