Thank you all for this very interesting discussion of an interesting but not perfect proposal for something we all desperately need, Democratic Governance. I like the neighborhood sized unit, research has shown people are saner in groups of 150–200 that can know one another. Thus the problem Annette points out below, we don’t know our neighbors and there is a reason for this. I also like direct decision making by the people in a direct system, as mentioned, but the people have been intentionally miss-educated and continually lied to, misinformed by mass media for decades. How can they make informed decisions?
I think the problem is not that we have political parties, the problem is we have a winner take all political system that very swiftly coalesced into a single two-faced party firmly entrenched and serving the interests of a small wealthy segment of the population, those who control the money, which research has shown is the controlling factor in public policy. It is the controlling factor in governance and the Money Power, the power to create and issue the money, is an even more awesome power. And it is a hidden power becasue it actually belongs to the people who’ve been robbed and who don’t know it.
Any government that does not control the money is controlled by those who do. 10 centuries before Christ the Greeks recognized that a vital prerogative of democratic governance was that government had to issue the money. Clearly, if a government cannot create and issue the money, how can it govern?
The American Revolution was fought becasue the privately owned Bank of England had the Crown outlaw the colonial currencies that had, after many years of monetary experimentation, finally provided a healthy prosperous economy for the people. While the Money Power was included in the Constitution, government has never issued money except to fund the Revolution and the Civil War. Today we have a privatized for-profit money system creating and issuing, not money, but credit used as money, that systematically concentrates wealth to the wealthiest. This empowers a few to decide who controls every market, what every public policy will be, who is allowed to be elected, even what people believe. (please note the lie in the middle of that word believe) So the Money Power is an awesome power which is why it really needs to be publicly controlled.
Additionally the abuse of monetary authority for personal gain is usury. All the great religions and great philosophers condemned usury and yet most haven’t a clue why, which must make Dante’s comments seem strange to them. He put usurers in the lowest sub-circle of hell, below even murders. He called usury the “anti-art” as it produced nothing of value and “…an extraordinarily efficient form of violence by which one can do the most damage with the least effort.” We even have research on “the psychological consequences of money” that show socially debilitating effects but no connection to usury is made, despite the fact that our entire monetary system is based in usury. Usury is the sin of sins, the progenitor of the 7 deadly sins rife among the elite and our society. Consider how those ‘socially debilitating effects’ impact not just neighborhood life but society in general.
So we’ve got a huge problem to overcome, a system that dominates nearly every aspect of our lives, our society, our culture. Lets figure it out. The Green Party is the only party that calls for reclaiming the Money Power for the people, the economic sovereignty of the nation, with a platform that is a living, growing, plan for transforming society in much the way I think we all want, a world of peace, prosperity, justice and love. How can we make it happen?
Full disclosure; I am a member of the Green Party and will address the 12 limitations from this Green’s perspective another time and will explain why I’ve often referred to the GP as the anti-party party.