Category: Political

If you want to do something that will have a long-term social impact please listen to the following cautionary tale.

In the 1950s there was a very successful school for community organizers. Highlander Education Center in Tennessee.

Founded in the 30s by Communists and Quakers it was funded in the 50s by several pro-civil rights unions. It also got funding from the few incipient civil rights granting organizations.

Highlander trained all of the major civil rights organizers and leaders.

Part of the organizers’ training was to create cohesion among protesters. This was done with songs and chants.

I was in demonstrations and protests from the late 50s until the early 1980s. We always sang songs and chants. The most popular song was: "We shall overcome." Later in the hippie days a popular chant was:" Gimme an F." From a song by Country Joe. The F originally stand stood for F I S H. It changed. The chant sounded like an army Sergeant's marching chant.

I have gone to protests and demonstrations since the mid-1990s and today there is only one chant: " What do we want?" The response depends on the protest. "We want clean clothes" should be the response from the squalid Occupy movement. Just one endless mindless chant.

So Highlander has failed. The chanting today is limited to a child's potty training mantra.

Over the past month we have watched our national government do a number of preposterous things. It is embarrassing because it goes to the roots of our dysfunctional democracy and raises the question of whether democracy can be improved.

It turns out that legislators cannot reduce government budgets in any way that jeopardizes funding for the individual politicians.  Party appointees and hacks under them will follow the Party line.  Legislators cannot think about the common good.  It can never override their own personal legislative benefits ranging from cars, to salaries, to staff, all the way to lavish retirement bennies. Legislative bodies are unable to act in ways that are contrary to their own self interest.

To expect otherwise is self-deception.

I am here to remind you that there is a way to have legislative groups that are functional and act on behalf of the general population.

For that to happen we need to have legislative bodies of every sort and at every level selected by random processes. The technical term for this form of legislative body selection is sortition.   The book that I wrote on the subject is Citizen Legislature.

When I get furious with the inability of Democratic legislatures to act in the common good and in the public interest I have to remember that random selection of legislators is the solution to this problem.

In my neighborhood in San Francisco there are regular neighborhood battles against new retail outlets and apartment buildings. There are many empty stores, too few living spaces and many battles.

Discussing this with some of my friends who were bemoaning the fact that a Trader Joe's store, which we all needed and which would've done much to help the other neighborhood businesses, was rejected by the neighborhood groups while CVS, a pharmacy chain, got the same space. There are already big Walgreen pharmacies within two blocks in each direction.

I was compelled to explain the situation to my friends.

There are three lobbyists in San Francisco who are excellent at their jobs. Some national chains,CVS, Walgreens, Citibank, Chase, Loews, cell tower operators, Comcast  and a few others have been smart enough to hire these three top lobbyists. The rest of the major chains including Starbucks, Trader Joe's, Home Depot, and Walmart have hired lobbyists who are not in the top rank.  They don’t get good locations or any location at all.

The difference between the top rank three lobbyists and the rest is that the top ranked lobbyists know who to bribe and what bribes will work. The others just cost money and can't deliver.

Local government, here and in most of the world, is totally in the hands of bribery. To think otherwise is foolish.

In San Francisco the ordinary homeowner needs to know that certain construction groups have established bribery mechanisms. You hire Chinese for electrical work, Mexicans for roofing and Irish for carpentry and you will get your permits promptly. Hire anyone else and you will face long delays and obstreperous neighbors.

That's the way it works.

I have done several blogs on the issue of randomly selected legislators and my role as the originator of this idea.

The idea was incorporated in a California redistricting plan that was approved twice by California voters on initiatives.

We now have the results of a careful independent study of the outcome of the redistricting that was done by randomly selected citizens.

The study shows a great success. An even greater success when it is compared to redistricting by incumbent politicians.

I expect my idea to be copied in many other states as the idea is better understood and this evaluation is promulgated.

Willie Brown is the most brilliant political operative in the history of California. Maybe the U.S.

To his regret, he returned to San Francisco to be mayor. A job he disliked vehemently because he had to deal with a garrulous Board of Supervisors, mostly idiots. In a town of Lefty ideological voters.

Willie had a long history of running campaigns in California from his central position as Democratic Party banker.

Willie tried an experiment in his second campaign for mayor. He wanted to see if the traditional Chicago, New York political machines would work in San Francisco.

He set up several large church fried chicken dinners in black neighborhoods. He then offered, via his political friendship network, to take any black voter to the polling station by limousine and afterwards to the free chicken dinner.

Willie was prepared to transport several thousand black voters.

He only got several hundred.

Political machines with the traditional bribery form don't work in San Francisco.

The ones that work are union based. The union has sufficient power over its members to get them to act. The unions have 26,000 city employees, the highest salaries and benefits in the country,  thousands of SEIU maintenance workers and thousands of hospital workers.  Unions have a large voting influence. No bribery, just suasion.

When you increase the price of goods and services, poor people are more affected than wealthier people. An increase in gasoline price per gallon affects poor people much more than anyone else; the same is true for clothing food and utilities.

Here are the 10 ways the Democrats increase prices for goods and services for the poor.

1. Urban Democrats throughout America try to ban Walmart, Target and many other low-cost stores from their cities. The cost of nearly everything at Walmart and Target is lower than at the stores urbanites have to shop at. Direct effect on poor people.

2. The standard way for Democrats to raise taxes for their many policies is to tax wine, liquor and cigarettes. These products are used disproportionately by poor people. These taxes are a direct levy on the poor.

3. The Democratic Party, in nearly all Democrat-controlled states, increases the number of licenses for semiskilled retailers. Licenses are required for barbers, beauty salons, manicurists, acupuncturists, massage and a long list of semiskilled nonprofessional occupations. The only people hurt by this are the poor. They cannot get inexpensive services and they cannot  easily create work for themselves.

4. The Democratic party has always been a strong opponent of free trade agreements. For over 200 years economists have explained that increases in international trade reduce costs. If Italy can produce leather shoes at a lower price, then free trade will bring lower-cost shoes to the United States. The Italians, conversely, will buy the lower cost architectural engineering services from the United States. The poor benefit the most from lower-cost goods and services. They are hurt the most by tariffs and trade barriers.

5. The Democratic Party is owned and supported disproportionately by unions. Unions thrive by limiting the number of employees the company can hire. This is done by raising retirement costs, health costs and creating unwieldy work rules. The consequence is fewer people get jobs in unionized shops, and the poor people with the fewest skills are the ones most frequently excluded.

6. One party has been the strongest advocate of welfare, food stamps and disability payments. These are essential for people who genuinely need them, but the absence of careful criteria for their usage and the Democratic party opposition to means testing (checking to see if the welfare recipient owns $1 million house) has detrimental effects on the poor community. With a heavy presence of non-working peers in a neighborhood, there is encouragement to young people to choose a life of sloth and dependence. Such encouragement is a disability to the poor in and of itself.

7. The Democratic Party has been a national opponent of school vouchers. Such vouchers are used to escape the lowest quality public schools. Since these schools are disproportionately in poor neighborhoods with low income students, this policy causes direct lifetime harm for the poor.

8. The Democratic Party has been the sole pressure to create and raise the minimum wage. This is because the party is in the thrall of unions and unions know that raising the minimum wage will raise the already higher union wages. In simple supply and demand terms, when you raise the price of a good or service there is less demand for it. When the price of labor is raised by a minimum wage law the number of people employed declines. This is particularly true for young people and people with minimum skills. This hurts the poor more than anything else that the Democratic Party does.

9. The Democratic Party has long been the source of price and cost controls. It was Democrats who allowed wholesalers to set retail prices for decades before courts threw it out. A Democrat administration has reinstituted this rule after a 50-year absence.  The Party sets minimum prices for milk and milk products and many other agricultural products.  The Democrats created the fantasy need for ethanol that dramatically raises the price of corn for poor people in Mexico, Egypt, and the world.  Everything is more costly for the poor, including food. Especially food.

Urban Democrats always support rent control. Since poor people move more frequently than any other population except young people, rent control does not benefit them at all. Most poor people leave the urban center as rapidly as possible if they cannot get public housing. The public housing, of course, is filled with graffiti and is dangerous. A distinctly poor problem.

10. School busing was a necessary policy in the government mandated segregation of the Jim Crow South. In the urban North, segregation was real but not created by government policy. The urban North school busing had two effects: it carried the criminally dangerous behavior of ghetto neighborhoods into all schools, making life for the poor a relentless environment of danger.  Busing also drove middle-class populations out of the cities and out of the public schools. It left public schools with seriously diminished parent support and a rapid decline in quality of education for those remaining in public urban schools.

Summary: the Democratic party is shockingly harmful to the poor of America. That is not the intent of its policies, but that is its effect…unambiguously.

Lessons from the sequestration:

* A malicious goverment can act with incompetence if it wants to.  Voters are not customers, Democrat voters are ideologically blind.  

* Democrats believe government is incompetent but they want more.

* Barack Obama is arrogant and meanspirited… he is no Ronald Reagan and never could be.

During political campaigns the standard procedure to develop policy statements is to test it on a focus group (roughly a dozen people) who are identified as independent voters.

In a campaign, these explanations need to be used openly to allow others to cross party lines.