Archive for the ‘Democracy Blog’ Category

The Spoiled Legacy of Ross Perot

Sunday, May 27th, 2012

By
Russell Verney
National Chairman – The Reform Party 1996–1999

May 29, 2012

The year 2012 is the 20th Anniversary of the birth of the campaign for Ross Perot for President of the United States. On the evening of February 20, 1992, Ross Perot appeared on the Larry King Live show and indicated that he was moving close to a decision to become an Independent candidate for President of the United States. His near-announcement set off a sequence of events that resulted in the most significant third-party candidacy since the effort by Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. No one at the time could possibly have anticipated or appreciated the massive outpouring of citizen support that Perot’s announcement would unleash on a political system that was in crisis – not even Ross himself.

That simple initial announcement set off a torrent of phone calls and letters – numbered first in the tens and then in the hundreds of thousands – to the Perot Corporate Headquarters in Dallas; all were from rather ordinary citizens who wanted to join in a genuine effort to reform the politics of the United States. Ross Perot had touched a deep well of anger and anxiety felt by everyday Americans about the growing fiscal failures of the Federal Government. Those who volunteered were a remarkable cross section of people who wanted to take back control of our system for the people who ultimately paid for everything and who had completely lost faith in the ability of the leadership of the two parties to provide the changes that were needed.

The 1992 Presidential campaign of Ross Perot was both remarkable and unprecedented in modern American politics. Perot was the right candidate at the right time for the right set of causes, and his candidacy redefined the direction of American politics. The record is astonishing:

• Perot was centrist, fiercely independent, fiscally conservative, but socially moderate, with the resources required to make his campaign a reality, and he almost single-handedly redefined the direction of the 1992 Presidential election.
• Through largely volunteer efforts, he was able to gain a place on the ballot in all 50 states – an achievement unmatched by any other recent competitive third-party candidate.
• He redefined political communication. Primarily relying on 30-minute infomercials in prime time, where – for the first time – he mostly presented the facts about deficits and debt to the American people – and they listened (and believed) in the tens of millions.
• Through his infomercials, he was able to elevate deficit spending and the growing debt to the number one problem that Americans felt the government had to resolve. The problem of the debt thus became the number one voting issue in 1992 (according to 29 percent of the electorate as measured in the Gallup Poll).
• In the first debate at Washington University in St. Louis, Perot won the debate by the largest margin ever recorded by any candidate participating in Presidential debates (an astonishing 47 per cent of the viewers felt he won the debate).
• When Perot dropped out of the race in June, the effect was to reverse the favorable image of him to an unfavorable one, but in the campaign from September to November, and his success in the debates, his approval rating soared.
• Although in the end, he garnered only 19 percent of the popular vote, according to the exit polls, fully 44 percent of the voters stated that Perot was their first choice for President and he would have won if voters had believed his victory was a real possibility.

Perot lost, but by no means did he disappear from politics. In 1993, he converted his army of campaign volunteers into an organization called, United We Stand, America. Organized to pressure Congress and the White House into taking steps to balance the budget, which would have been for the first time in modern America, the hundreds of thousands who started with Perot in 1992 became the millions who were willing to sign on to his longer-term effort.

That was when we first met Dr. Gordon Black, the primary author of this book on American politics. He was not involved with the campaign until March of 1993 when Perot wanted to conduct a poll on the policy choices that could finally balance the budget; he wanted the poll conducted by a reputable non-partisan researcher. At that time, there were really only three – Louis Harris, who had retired, George Gallup, Jr., who was in the process of selling his company, and Gordon Black, who was the well-known pollster for USA Today.

Gordon Black is many things, all of which eventually resonated with Perot – entrepreneur, businessperson, pollster, academician and scholar, and like Perot himself, a deeply committed man who could articulate the message of political reform.

Perot first approached Dr. Black when our chief legal strategist, Clay Mulford, called Dr. Black in Rochester, New York, to ask him if he would conduct a poll on the issues of the debt and deficits. To our astonishment, Dr. Black initially said no to our request. He told Clay Mulford that he could not work on any poll where the questions were not up to the standards of objective polling, and he doubted that Mr. Perot would permit him the independence to design the poll to those standards. We did not know at the time that Dr. Black had been working independently with others who wanted to establish a new political party to represent the radical middle of the American electorate.

His refusal led to our own reconsideration of what we were trying to accomplish with the poll. We also realized that if the poll did not meet the highest standards for professional polling, people in the media and in politics who understood the science and art of polling and who had an incentive to dismiss its relevance would easily discount it. Clay Mulford called Dr. Black a second time and told him that Ross had agreed with his objection and would provide him with complete freedom to design and execute the kind of poll that would produce authentic results that were accurate and believable.

In this essay (Democracy reborn), for the first time, Dr. Black tells the story of the delivery of those polling results to the senior leadership in Congress and the White House. Dr. Black accomplished this delivery in conjunction with Perot, Mulford, and Sharon Holman, who was Perot’s Press Secretary at that point. It is a fascinating story about American politics, but I was not present, so I will defer to Gordon to tell it.

We are now twenty years later, after that massive effort, and it’s worthwhile to assess what we accomplished through a decade of effort. Perhaps the single most important thing is that the budget got balanced for the first time in modern history, producing surpluses that were well on their way to paying down the national debt until two wars and massive tax cuts stopped the process completely. We have to be a little careful here, the Clinton ‘balanced’ budgets of 98, 99, and 2000 still added to our accumulated national debt each year because the ‘surplus’ paid into Social Security’ was ‘borrowed’ and used by the Federal government to pay for current general operating expenses. Furthermore, as Ross explained back then, it was just a temporary fix and deficits would undoubtedly skyrocket again. Even Clinton’s budget projections showed the deficit skyrocketing when certain delayed spending, temporary spending cuts, and tax increases expired.

While Clinton made a better effort to balance the budget than anyone else did before him, it wasn’t truly balanced and it was only expected to be short-term. Although headed in the right direction, Clinton’s version of the balanced budget would not have paid down any significant part of the national debt.
How we managed to generate surpluses in American history is a matter of great controversy among economists representing each partisan side of the debate – and that is part of our modern problem of understanding anything in contemporary American politics. The facts are not in dispute. The Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 raised taxes, mostly on the top 1.2 percent of the wage earners, and these increases generated a steady increase in revenues without any tangible evidence that it undermined the economy. Virtually all of the Republicans in Congress opposed this tax increase, but it passed when the Democrats still controlled both Houses and President Clinton signed it into law. Perot actively supported increased taxes on the wealthy, a support he manifested continuously and communicated effectively to both Congress and the American people and a commitment shared by many of America’s most successful entrepreneurs like Warren Buffet.

Next, through cooperation with the Republicans, Clinton managed an historic overhaul of the Federal Welfare System in the Historic Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, when he signed it into law in August of 1996. Although a majority of the Democrats in both houses voted against it, this effort was essentially bipartisan in nature. This act was part of a larger effort by the Clinton Administration to limit spending increases, particularly for defense; spending only increased by 2.9 percent during the period, while the economy was growing at a robust rate, generating new jobs and new income.

The economists in the pay of the two political parties interpret these events very differently, and you can be sure that none of them gave Ross Perot any credit at all. However, the actions taken are exactly what Perot was advocating and promoting, both before Congress and on national television, and they produced exactly the effect he foresaw. Therefore, I guess you will have to decide for yourself what he accomplished, but it is hard for me to imagine a balanced budget without his direct intervention.

Beyond this, our longer-term accomplishments were few indeed. The “fix” that Perot and our army of supporters engineered was not a permanent solution and the two major parties collectively kept Perot out of the 1996 debates, which effectively denied the voters a direct comparison between him and the other candidates. The volunteer enthusiasm that persisted so long eventually dissipated, and we returned to politics as usual – two political parties composed of entrenched incumbents, financed by special interests, all willing to sell American down the river for their own benefit. This is sad, but true! The anger that Americans felt in 1992 has grown even greater, and that is along with a sense of decline, doom, and gloom that is unique in American history, other than perhaps the Great Depression.

Dr. Black’s essay (Democracy Reborn) correctly points to the underlying causes of our democratic failures, and he tells you, rather precisely, what we must fix if we are to avoid the seemingly inevitable decline of our place in the world. The “causes” he identifies are not the ones that many of you think about, and that is part of the problem. Will we have the courage and strength of our convictions to make the requisite changes? Frankly, I don’t know! He most certainly provides a vision of the possible. However, will we find the leadership among us able to deliver that vision? Again, I don’t know. Personally, I think it will require a modern version of Ross Perot, a man or women with the financial means to finance the vision by arousing the somnolent center into action, but will that leader have the proper vision to see what must be accomplished? Again, I apologize – but I don’t know.

What I do know with certainly, is that we will not restore our growth, competitive electoral choice, political dynamism, direction and most important – the American Dream – unless we substantially reform the rules of the electoral game – getting the special interest dollars out of our elections permanently and restoring real choice to the voters who deserve it. In a way, the choice is really up to you, the voters.

But, given the voters quiescence in the face of massive corruption, perhaps you genuinely enjoy voting in elections where the incumbents have all of the money and the challengers nothing at all – in districts that have been deliberately rigged through sophisticated gerrymandering to make it very difficult to dislodge an incumbent. But, if you do, you have nothing whatsoever in common with the millions of men and women down through our history who fought and died to preserve our democratic rights.

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The Discouraged American Electorate

Friday, May 18th, 2012

By Humphrey Taylor
Chairman, The Harris Poll

The latest polls paint a bleak picture of the American electorate. In our most recent Harris Polls, 78% of adults think the country is on the wrong track: only 32% give President Obama positive marks while a mind-bogglingly low 6% give Congress positive ratings. This is the lowest approval rating for Congress ever recorded and it may well be the lowest approval rating ever recorded for a democratically elected legislature.

Nonetheless, the malaise runs deeper than dissatisfaction with the current political incumbents. In August of 2011, the annual Harris Alienation Index reported big increases in the number of people who believe that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (73%), that “the people running the country don’t really care what happens to you”(73%), that “what you think doesn’t count very much anymore”(66%), that “most people in power try to take advantage of people like you,” and that 87% feel that “ the people in Washington are out of touch with the rest of the country.” Never before, in the history of the country, have so many Americans been so “alienated” from those who run the country. These numbers underlay the frustration expressed in the “Occupy Wall Street Movement.”

It can be argued that all this gloom is merely a reflection of the lousy economy, the large numbers of unemployed, and the continuing housing crisis. Obviously, these are all incredibly important factors. However, I also think there are other causes for this malaise and that it will continue even when the economy recovers.
First though, a word of caution, pollsters should strive to be politically neutral – not advocates.

As a pollster myself, I see my role as that of a professional voyeur, a eunuch, in no way aroused by what I am measuring and observing. Nevertheless, I am human and, like everyone else, I come with some baggage. My experiences growing up in Britain, having lived on five continents, and having conducted thousands of surveys in the UK, the USA, and more than 80 other countries, surely influenced my values and beliefs. Although I lived in New York for thirty-five years, what I observed elsewhere also conditioned my impressions of American politics and government.

When viewed through this international prism, the American system is strikingly different from most Western democracies with parliamentary systems. The most striking, and interrelated, differences include:

• The direct election of the US president, as compared to prime ministers chosen by the leading parliamentary parties.
• The difficulty that presidents have in passing controversial legislation and major reforms – in stark contrast to the power of prime ministers, whose parties normally control their legislatures.
• The gerrymandering of American Congressional districts so that the overwhelming majorities are safe Republican or Democratic seats, where the elections that really matter are the primaries rather than the general elections.
• The Senate filibuster rules that allow a minority to block legislation unless there is a 60 vote majority in its favor.
• The ability of American incumbents, parties and their supporters to raise and spend huge sums of money and buy unlimited amounts of TV and radio time.
• The political power and influence of all this money, or rather of all the people, companies and organizations involved.

These unique features of American democracy have a tremendous impact on what the American government can and does achieve. They help to explain why the United States was so late, compared to other affluent democracies, to introduce a government pension scheme (Social Security), to sign many international treaties, and why, Obama-care notwithstanding, it still does not offer universal health insurance.

The gerrymandering of Congressional districts and the resulting importance of primary elections, squeezes out the moderates and fills the House of Representatives with members who appeal to the relatively small minorities of party activists – Left-wing Democrats and Right-wing Republicans, many of whom regard compromise, or reaching across the aisle, as anathema.

The direct election of presidents often results in a White House with little or no skill or experience in working with the Congress to get things done. President Lyndon Johnson (who only became president because of the assassination of President Kennedy) was very unusual in that he really knew how to twist arms, cajole and make deals with members of Congress to pass important legislation. Most presidents have to learn this on the job and many have failed to do so entirely. It is no happenstance that some of the most important social legislation was passed under exceptionally strong presidents, whose parties controlled both houses of Congress, after or during major crises – by FDR in the Great Depression and by LBJ after the death of John Kennedy.

In all fairness, and in defense of the sometimes infuriating checks and balances in the US system of government that make it so difficult to do accomplish anything significant, I should point to the problems that can be caused when it is too easy to pass legislation. The post-war British Labour government nationalized the UK steel industry. As governments changed over the next 25 years: it was subsequently denationalized, nationalized again, and then denationalized again – by then, the industry virtually ceased to exist.

What is the relevance of all this today? It is difficult to be optimistic about the US political system as it currently operates. The House of Representatives seems more polarized than at any time since the Civil War. More money will be spent on the 2012 elections than ever before, much of it given by special interests for the sole purpose of electing the members of Congress that will help their “interests.”

The power and influence of the extremists in the two main parties seems to grow consistently stronger in every election cycle. And there is no indication that any of the underlying causes of these problems will change. Nonetheless, history suggests that we should be cautious of contemporary political judgments. Historians sometimes look more kindly on politicians than their contemporaries do. Speaker Reed famously explained, “A statesman is a dead politician.” George W. Bush additionally pointed out, rather optimistically perhaps, that Truman and Eisenhower, although much reviled when they left office, are now regarded as good presidents. However irrationally, I remain an incurable optimist.

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The Big Lie in History and Politics

Friday, April 20th, 2012

Gordon S. Black, PhD

Most political systems throughout history are based in part on fictions, what I am terming in this commentary, the “Big Lie”, which is an arrangement of lies that the entire leadership of the system will defend, because the Big Lie supports the ambitions of all of the leaders in the system, regardless of their other political views or factional loyalties.

The Big Lie is supported by a commonly accepted honor code of silence—or omerta, as with the mafia—among leaders, regardless of party: Never discuss in public the fact that the Big Lie is real. They are bound by this commonly accepted code of self-interest to maintain the Big Lie, even when they know better than anyone just how much of a lie it is.

These kinds of lies are different from the common partisan lies which are the mainstay of interparty competition. If you want to see examples of partisan lies, just go to www.snopes.com and look at the more than one hundred phony emails concocted about Barack Obama and his family. The Internet is today the playground for corrupt partisan lies of all kinds.

So what do the Big Lies involve? Many of the Big Lies involve the sources of funds to maintain the leadership of the system. In the Soviet system, the Big Lie was that state ownership and control over the means of production would out-produce the performance of the free market system, and produce more equality of wealth and affluence. That Big Lie quietly died in 1989—and the old Soviet communist system died with it—when the fiction could no longer be sustained by the reality of the utterly dismal performance of the communist systems compared with those operating democratically allowing free markets and private ownership.

At the same time, we should remember that the communist Big Lie was for a long time massively financially profitable for the leadership of the Soviet Union, China and the other communist systems, even when it impoverished the entire population dominated by their system of beliefs. Just look today at North Korea and Cuba!

The Catholic Church of the sixteenth century provides another example of the Big Lie in operation. In 1520, the German monk, Martin Luther, was declared by Pope Leo X to be a renegade and heretic, subject to excommunication and even assassination, when he had the temerity to declare that the payment of “indulgences” to the Catholic Church had no effect whatsoever on whether or when a dead person got into Heaven. The Big Lie was an “indulgence system” which financially supported the leadership of the Catholic Church, and the Pope and Cardinals were most certainly not willing to have such a profitable practice challenged by a junior clerical scholar from Germany.

Luther’s ‘Ninety-Five Theses’, posted in 1517 on the door of the Wittenberg Church, challenged the financial system that made the Catholic Church among the richest organizations in the world at the time. Without the faithful’s belief in the effectiveness of “indulgences”, the Church was threatened with a massive loss of income that sustained the entire leadership of the Church,

In the 1930s, one of the many Big Lies of the Nazi regime was that the German Jews, particularly the bankers, were responsible for the German loss in World War I and the subsequent disorder and poverty in Germany. That Big Lie was used to herd Jews all over Europe into the gas chambers and ovens of the Nazi Holocaust, while the Nazi leadership was enriched by confiscated Jewish wealth.

Big Lies are powerful precisely because those in the leadership refuse to challenge their validity since everyone’s self-interest depends on the process that the Big Lie protects.

Nor are our modern democracies immune to the Big Lie. The Big Lie in our democratic systems is the claim, made uniformly by virtually every politician, that the financial contributions to their electoral campaigns have no influence on them at all—that big money does not buy access and the corresponding influence that access affords.

When asked about this in public by reporters, all politicians, no matter what political party or country in which they operate, deny emphatically and often self-righteously to the media that the large contributions to their campaigns have no influence at all on their decisions or access. Yet, making this assertion, everyone one of them knows that it is simply false—that it is the Big Lie of our democratic systems. The reporters also know that the statement is false, but the ethics and etiquette of journalism require that they leave the statement unchallenged because they cannot directly prove its falseness.

Peter Cruddas was, until very recently, the billionaire philanthropist who served as Treasurer of the Conservative Party in Great Britain. Cruddas was forced to resign over a simple mistake he made: He was duped into describing on a video the “fundamental truth” that no politician in any democracy is permitted by common agreement among all elites to discuss in public and with the news media. He described candidly and in detail how the size of your campaign contribution to Prime Minister David Cameron influenced your ability to gain access to the PM to press your case for whatever cause you consider important. In other words, his terrible mistake was that he told the truth that most of us realize. (See: Biography of Peter Cruddas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Cruddas)

This revelation is actually not news to anyone who has any sophistication in the practice of democratic politics. Cruddas was just discussing the corruption process that every political scientist, high level politician, and journalist knows actually takes place.

What Cruddas described, candidly, honestly, and in detail is a campaign process that is in fact an organized system of bribery, extortion, and corruption. Of course, bribery and extortion are illegal in virtually every civilized democracy. But not for the politicians! Instead, these activities are the basis of the quest of politicians in the system for their grail of money, power, glory, and wealth. (What Cruddas said: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34qZfi-ZBAc&feature=related)

Cruddas’s basic sin was, like Martin Luther, telling the truth. The politicians in Great Britain were nearly as aroused in phony outrage as Pope Leo X and his Cardinals were in fury over Luther’s telling of a truth that might threaten their source of campaign treasures. They all—Conservatives, Labour, or Liberal alike—depend on the wealthy hands that feed their collective ambitions. The fact that they are all purveyors of the Big Lie seems to have no moral effect on them at all. (Response and Analysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yTDf39COf4)

This Big Lie, however, goes beyond the wonderful benefits it provides the politicians. Nearly every democratic system in the developed world is today suffering from the effects of this Big Lie. When wealthy and powerful private interests can buy easy access to those in power with campaign contributions, that process opens up the entire budgetary and regulatory process to those same interests to gain income, wealth, privilege, and tax breaks from the politicians of all political parties.

The collective result in democracies from Greece to California is the same: continual and growing deficits, profound unfairness in the tax system, massive debt, vast underfunded pension liabilities, terrible cuts to existing public services, and out-of-control spending. Simply put, this Big Lie is the underlying mechanism leading nearly all democracies toward financial insolvency.

Our democratic election systems are fundamentally broken, where money through campaign contributions is the guarantor of the success to those in power and the access of those who provide the funds. This Big Lie must be maintained by everyone in power—office holders and special interests equally—to preserve their own hard-won status in the system. They will maintain their support for the Big Lie even in the face of financial ruin for the rest of us.

So Peter Cruddas must go in disgrace, even though his only sin was to be the little boy who said that the King has no clothes. The “morally outraged” politicians rally against him to defend the Big Lie that protects their privilege. The voters, of course, are once again left entirely out in the cold, facing over the coming generations the harsh consequences of the Big Lie—massive intergenerational debt, declining public services, rising taxes, and financial instability.

Most voters in our democracies are not stupid. They know that they are victimized by the Big Lie, and they have grown to hate and despise those in power because of it and the national media that allows the lie to persist largely unchallenged. But the voters are leaderless and powerless to do anything about it, since no political party is willing to challenge the Big Lie that benefits those in all of the parties who are in power.

Our so-called “free media”, also well aware of the truth, is largely helpless in the face of the unwillingness of anyone in power to tell the truth about what goes on in the system. Peter Cruddas might not have invited his role, but his video is in the same general vain of Martin Luther posting his Theses on the door of the Catholic Church in Wittenberg. The question, of course, is whether his exposure of the complete corruption of the electoral system will have any impact at all for reform.

Unfortunately, probably not.

Gordon Black, PhD

Gordon S. Black is the retired founder, chairman, and CEO of Harris Interactive, one of the large market research and polling firms in the world. He has a doctorate in Political Science from Stanford University, is the co-author of The Politics of American Discount (John Wily and Sons, 1994), and is the author of several eBooks and short stories listed on Amazon.com. http://amzn.to/GSBlack

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Winning the War For Reform

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

By Gordon S. Black, PhD

I have been asked a number of times to explain why I think this effort, www.indielitworld.com , has a chance of succeeding. Some of you have received detailed email answers from me, but I finally decided that every one of you might be interested in the answer since I’ve asked you to invest a little bit of yourself in this effort.
Most political movements fail! They arise, are moved by passion and leadership to expand, usually because of a widespread grievance of some sort, and then peak and start to decline, falling well short of the goals that the leaders of the movement set for themselves originally. Sometimes, the effort finds a consistent level of support that permits a small reform-organization to persist for many years supporting causes, but always dependent upon a relatively small cadre of intensely committed supporters to keep going. Common Cause is such an organization, and a good one, and there are hundreds in Washington and the State Capitals that persist for years – promoting their values and causes, and with some success.

A few movements, of course, do succeed, and they change our lives forever – the Civil Rights Movement, the Woman’s Rights Movement, the Progressive Movement, etc. The question is why – what makes one movement succeed while most movements fail?

The analysis of this question and answer was laid out many years ago in a small book by the economist, Mancur Olson, who wrote The Logic of Collective Action (1965), which was published during my first year of graduate school at Stanford University. In Olson’s analysis, every attempt at organization that seeks a public or collective good must find a way to solve the free rider problem. The “free rider problem” arises because of the character of a public or collective good, which is defined as a “good,” if achieved, must be provided to everyone in a particular group, whether or not they paid a price for the achievement of the good or not. Reforming the rules by which we run elections and lobbying is an example of a public good.

The “free rider” problem is simply this. If person cannot be denied the right to a public good, if provided, it is (unfortunately) rational for each individual to avoid the cost of paying for the good, since they cannot be denied it. Hence, they are free riders who will get the good if it is provided, but they are better off not paying for it themselves with their money, time and effort. The problem, of course, is that if everyone acts like a free rider, public goods will never be provided.

I have personally been involved in a number of movements over my life, starting with the Anti-War Movements of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, the Perot Movement during the early 1990’s, and other efforts of one sort or another. The Anti-War Movement was a case in point of limited success. Beginning in spring of 1968, after the Tet Offensive, a large majority of Americans turned against the war and wanted to end it – supporting rather large scale demonstrations in the process.

Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were able to continue an unpopular war for years, even in the face of intense, but not decisive opposition. The “public good” of ending the war was never provided, until finally it was obvious even to the hard-core supporters that we were not going to prevail in Vietnam.
The Anti-War Movement was sustained by intense motivation of young Americans who faced the draft, forcing them to serve in a War that they despised. This was not lost on policy makers, and people like Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney created an all-volunteer army precisely to be able to pursue an unpopular war like Iraq, with little or no disruptive movement to block their war making power. Sadly, these men learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam and went ahead and committed the same error all over again.

The Perot Movement in 1992 was an example of another solution to the free rider problem. Perot was a multi-billionaire, and everyone knew that he could afford to pay the full cost of organizing and running a campaign all by himself, and that singular fact altered the calculations of millions of Americans who were willing to support him with their time since they knew he could make the campaign happen by himself. In doing so, he altered the calculations of millions of Americans who came to believe that he had enough chance of success that they could afford to invest their time and money in his effort.

What does this have to do with www.indielitworld.com? The problem of political and electoral reform is a huge problem of long standing, which pits an overwhelming majority of Americans – more than 75 percent in all the polls – against a small, but very powerful, set of forces among the incumbents and special interests who own and dominant American politics today. Reform has the people; but anti-reform has the money, organization and powerful office-holders, and the money will almost certainly win against an unorganized majority. There are many good and well-meaning efforts pursuing electoral and political reform at the present time, some of them impressive and of long standing, but they simply have not solved the free rider problem, and unless they do, they will not succeed in winning the war for reform – no matter how well meaning and intelligent they are!

Electoral and political reformers need two things to win the larger and longer battle for reform. First, the movement must transform itself from a mob into an army – a very large army of what I call, “citizen-democrats”, who are educated about the problem and who are united on a set of objectives. The objective is to reach the size where the movement can use their superior numbers to defeat the powerful special interests that will oppose them. We need millions of people who are willing to give a little of themselves to a common effort. In a democracy, however, the millions will prevail over the self-interested few if they can become an army!

Second, the organizational part of the larger effort needs to be sustained without begging constantly for money from people. A multi-billionaire solves that problem immediately because he can pay all of the costs of collective action without demanding others to support the effort financially. We do not currently have an enlightened multi-billionaire willing to pay the full cost of the reform effort, and it not likely that we will find one any time soon.

Our little effort, about 140 strong right now, is my idea of how to solve the two problems in the same effort, under the very unlikely name, www.indielitworld.com. We know we have the public on the side of reform, overwhelmingly, but how do we get the masses of people willing to do at least a little to support political and electoral reform?

First, we propose to solve the financial self-sufficiency problem by selling eBooks on-line to a captive audience of readers, who are motivated to buy the books, both because they are interested in the books themselves and because they know that their purchase of the book contributes a little bit of money to a common cause in which they believe – a little like buying Girl Scout cookies.

The authors provide the eBooks for the simple reason that they want to sell more books, and our commissions are the same as they can get from the other book sellers – so why not list them with us. Many authors are on the whole fairly progressive in their views, and they will support reform themselves, so they can do a little good by listing with us and letting the reform effort have the commission.

The readers get a little something as well. First, we provide a good deal of free information on topics which interest those who care about reform. Second, as the number of listed books grows, we offer a product that is valuable for people who love to read, but they get the added benefit of knowing that their purchase supports a cause that they care about. Third, our readers are themselves recruiters from among their family and friends, whose views on reform they are likely to know. They can circulate our blog to people they know, and some of them will join the site as readers.

The ultimate goal is to recruit an army, not a mob or a large demonstration, for political and electoral reform – to use our numbers to overcome the financial advantages of the special interests. Of course, once we become an army, there will be people of wealth who are public-spirited and agree with us who will step forward to finance the individual campaigns for reform.

Will we succeed? I’m not sure. The idea has enough merit to me that I am financing it for the time being, and working pretty much full time on it. We have other authors now willing to list their works with us, and we have readers signing up, although not as fast as I would like, but I am impatient. I do know that if we are successful, the growth will be slow at first, and then accelerate as we gain size, publicity, and financial resources. The more readers we have; the more authors will list with us; and the more revenues we will generate.

I was seventy years old in October. I have no enthusiasm for demonstrating any longer. My knees get sore if I have to stand up in the cold for too long. I also want to win this war, and I want to win it thoroughly and permanently, changing the rules to restore real competition to our elections, to limit the relationship between lobbyists and incumbent office-holders, and to restore the ethical standards that we have a right to expect and demand of those who represent us. Winning this war is a legacy that I want to leave my children and grandchildren – a political system that works better for the many and not just the few who have the means and the knowledge to manipulate the system for their wealth and advantage. Yes – I am an idealist, but I hope a very practical idealist, who is planning for success in an endeavor that will benefit all of us.

The real question now is for you, the reader or potential reader. I know that most of you agree with us on the value of our cause, so that is certainly not the question. The real question is whether or not you will opt to be a “free rider”, who undermines the cause for everyone, including your children and grandchildren, or whether you will become a contributor, who makes it happen. I really don’t know the answer to that question yet. Only you do at the moment.

Gordon S. Black,
Administrator
www.indielitworld.com
admin@indielitworld.com

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The Dismal American Electorate

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Editor’s Note: This latest blog on www.indielitworld.com is written by Humphrey Taylor, the Chairman of the Harris Poll and the Chairman of the National Council of Public Polls. The essay describes the dismal condition of American public opinion toward their government – and some of the causes. You are invited to participate in this discussion as a reader and contributor to a discussion of the problems facing the Western democracies. This analysis is a reflection of the growingly obvious failure of the American government to provide answers that voters find appealing.

By Humphrey Taylor,
Chairman, The Harris Poll

The latest polls paint a bleak picture of the American electorate. In our most recent Harris Polls, 78% of adults think the country is on the wrong track, only 32% give President Obama positive marks while a mind-bogglingly low 6% give Congress positive ratings – the lowest approval rating for Congress ever recorded.

But the malaise runs deeper than dissatisfaction with the current political incumbents. In August the annual Harris Alienation Index reported big increases in the number of people who believe that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer (73%), that “the people running the country don’t really care what happens to you”(73%), that “what you think doesn’t count very much anymore”(66%), that “most people in power try to take advantage of people like you”, and that 87% feel that “ the people in Washington are out of touch with the rest of the country “. Never before have so many Americans been “alienated” from those who run the Country – numbers that underlay the frustration expressed in the “Occupy Wall Street Movement.”

It can be argued that all this gloom is just a reflection of the lousy economy, the large numbers of unemployed and the continuing housing crisis; and obviously these are all very important factors. But I think there are other causes of this malaise that will continue even when the economy recovers.

But first a word of caution Pollsters should strive to be politically neutral rather than advocates. As a pollster myself I see my role as a professional voyeur who is also a eunuch so that I am not aroused by what I am measuring and observing. But of course I am human and, like everyone else, I come with some baggage — my values and my beliefs. In my case these have surely been influenced by my experiences growing up in Britain, having lived in five continents, and having conducted thousands of surveys in the UK, the USA, and more than 80 other countries. Although I have lived in New York for thirty-five years, my impressions of American politics and government are conditioned by what I have observed elsewhere.

When viewed through this international prism, the American system is strikingly different from most western democracies with parliamentary systems. The most striking, and interrelated, differences include:

• The direct election of the US president as compared to the prime ministers chosen by the leading parliamentary parties,
• The difficulty that presidents have in passing controversial legislation and major reforms – in stark contrast to the power of prime ministers, whose parties normally control their legislatures.
• The gerrymandering of American Congressional districts so that the overwhelming majority is safe Republican or Democratic seats, where the elections that really matter are the primaries rather than the general elections.
• The Senate filibuster rules that allow a minority to block legislation unless there is a 60 vote majority in its favor.
• The ability of American candidates, parties and their supporters to raise and spend huge sums of money and to buy unlimited amounts of TV and radio time.
• The political power and influence of all this money, or rather of all the people, companies and organizations involved.

These more or less unique features of American democracy have, of course, a huge impact on the American government and what the government can and does achieve. They help to explain why the United States was so late, compared to other affluent democracies, to introduce a government pension scheme (Social Security), to sign many international treaties and why, Obama-care notwithstanding, it still does not offer universal health insurance.

The gerrymandering of Congressional districts and the resulting importance of primary elections, squeezes out the moderates and fills the House of Representatives with members who appeal to the relatively small minorities of party activists – Left-wing Democrats and Right-wing Republicans , many of whom regard compromise, or reaching across the aisle, as anathema.

The direct election of presidents often results in a White House with little or no skill or experience in working with the Congress to get things done. President Lyndon Johnson (who only became president because of the assassination of President Kennedy) was very unusual in that he really knew how to twist arms, cajole and make deals with members of Congress to pass important legislation. Most presidents have to learn this on the job and many have failed to do so. It is no happenstance that some of the most important social legislation was passed under exceptionally strong presidents, whose parties controlled both houses of Congress, after or during major crises — by FDR in the Great Depression and by LBJ after the death of Jack Kennedy.

In all fairness, and in defense of the sometimes infuriating checks and balance in the US system of government that make it so difficult to do tough things, I should point to the problems that can be caused when it is too easy to pass legislation. The post-war British Labour government nationalized the UK steel industry. As governments changed over the next 25 years it was then denationalized, nationalized again and denationalized again, by which time the industry had virtually ceased to exist.

What is the relevance of all this today? It is tough to be optimistic about the US political system as it operates today. The House of Representatives seems to be more polarized than at any time since the Civil War. More money will be spent on the 2012 elections than ever before, much of it given by special interests for the sole purpose of electing members of Congress that will help their “interests.”

The power and influence of the extremists in the two main parties seems to grow even stronger In every election cycle. And there is no sign that any of the underlying causes of these problems will change. However, history suggests that we should probably beware of contemporary political judgments. Historians sometimes look more kindly on politicians in retrospect. As Speaker Reed famously said “a statesman is a dead politician”. Truman and Eisenhower were much reviled when they left office but are now regarded as pretty good presidents (as George W. Bush has pointed out, optimistically perhaps). However irrationally, I remain an incurable optimist.

Humphrey Taylor, Chairman, the Harris Poll
Advisor and Contributor,

www.indielitworld.comHumphrey Taylor has been the Chairman of the Harris Poll since 1975, and he has served more recently as the Chairman of the National Council of Public Polls. He is widely regarded as one of the leading pollsters in the world. A product of Cambridge University, Taylor has polled almost continuously his whole career, and his past clients include Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

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American Elections — Competition or Fraud?

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

A note to the Reader: This is the second essay in a series that are posted on the website, www.indielitworld.com. My wife says this is too long because we have lost our willingness to read anything other than slogans, and she is probably right, but I don’t know any other way to explain a complex issue. If you are not interested in politics and what is wrong with your country, you can just ignore it. If you are interested and do care, I hope that you will join us in a conversation on www.indielitworld.com.

By Gordon S. Black, PhD

I want to start by asking you a question. Assuming you liked sports, would you be willing to pay $100 to go see a basketball game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the best high school team in California? To most reasonable people, this is actually a pretty stupid question. Why would anyone pay to see supposed “competition” that was as mismatched as the one I propose? One might attend for a single time as a novelty, but mismatched competition gets boring very quickly, as most of the professionals in sports realize as they work hard to equalize the competitive balance of the professional leagues in order to retain the interest and loyalty of the fans.

Since the answer to this question is obvious, let me ask a second question about an analogous situation. Why do we bother to vote in elections where one of the competitors, whom we call an “incumbent”, has $3 million in cash to spend on the election while the other candidate, the challenger, has less than $100,000 to spend in the competition? Why bother? There is no doubt about the outcome. The probability that the incumbent will win is very close to certainty. The incumbents will win 98 to 100 percent of the time in this situation, and the challengers will lose, and our vote in that outcome is largely meaningless in that it has no probability of affecting the competition at all.

I know the answer to this question as well. We Americans are trained from childhood to believe that our votes matter, that the right to vote is the central pillar of our democracy, and we are socialized from childhood to feel a genuine sense of obligation to go to the polls and participate. So we vote mostly out of a sense of civic duty or responsibility. This contention is supported by a mountain of statistical evidence gathered over the past fifty years on voting behavior.

However, our sense of civic obligation is not strong enough any longer to get more than half of us to vote in off-year elections or for most contests at the state and local level. Participation in our elections at every level of government has been declining over the past fifty years. The reason is obvious. As more and more of our political contests for office have become as imbalanced as the one described above, we Americans come to see elections as meaningless to us as fully imbalanced election is. We become nonvoters even as civic groups spend millions of dollars attempting to persuade us that our votes still matter.

This point was brought home vividly to me in an off-year election in 1990. I was standing in a voter line early one morning in Pittsford, New York, a suburb of Rochester, New York. There were quite a few people there in the period before everyone had to go to work. I was reading something; just waiting for my turn to enter the election booth arrived. In front of me, there were two young women waiting and talking, one of them glancing at her watch every few minutes. They are both growing impatient. “Why am I doing this?” One woman asked the other.

“Doing what?” was the puzzled response.

“Standing in this line waiting to vote!” was the reply. “This is just plain stupid and a waste of time. I’ll wait all this time, and when I finally get into the booth, I’ll see a whole set of phony elections where the outcome is already decided. The incumbent is going to win and I won’t even know the name of the other candidate. It’s absurd!”

The other woman to whom she was speaking had a thoughtful look on her face, thinking about it. “You know, I think you’re right, but I still feel that I have to vote. It’s my responsibility.”

“Well, I don’t have the time to waste standing here! I’ll see you later.” And with that, she turned and walked out of the voting station.”

I was actually startled by the exchange. I am a Political Scientist by training and I know a great deal about voting behavior, but this singular event was an up-close and personal demonstration of something that I had not thought about for a long time.

The experience of watching the woman leave the voting station kept reverberating in my head, and I decided to talk a look at the actual outcome of the state and national elections. The results were striking. In the Congressional and state legislative elections nationwide, 98 percent of the incumbents who ran were reelected and the ones that lost were mostly due to scandal. In races for the legislature in New York State, every single incumbent of both political parties was re-elected in 1990, and in every election before that dating back more than 30 years.

The concern did not leave me. Instead, it led to a book published by my son, Ben, and I in 1994, entitled The Politics of American Discontent (John Wiley & Sons). That book examined elections and voting behavior back to 1960, and we looked at voting behavior in California and New York and several other states. We were able to establish a number of trends:

• The percentage of incumbents re-elected to office was rising during the whole period to the point in 1992 that most incumbents were clearly invulnerable, no matter how unhappy the voters were with the government.

• Incumbents were winning because they could amass vast and disproportionate funds for their re-election campaigns, outspending their opponents by a margin to ten to twenty to one, mostly spent on phony propaganda that proclaimed how wonderful they were.

• The electorate was responding as one might expect, with turnout (and interest) declining in most elections except those where there was a clearly balanced competition for a major office, usually the President, Governor or United States Senator.

As a Political Scientist and an American, I believe deeply in the importance of giving voters a real choice in elections. A “real choice” is one where both the incumbent and the challengers have a relatively equal opportunity to communicate their views to the electorate, and where the incumbent’s self-promotional activities are countered by a competitor who has the desire and means to challenge the rosy, self-serving picture that is always presented by the incumbents about their activities. Incumbents will still be more likely than challengers to win, but they will not win because the voters were denied an opportunity to hear both sides of the arguments.

By this standard, American elections have become mostly a fraud; a fraud where the appearance of freedom and the right to vote are affirmed by the politicians and the courts, even as these rights are undermined by the reality of the completely one-sided nature of the competition for most offices. The incumbents have a near monopoly on the ability to communicate with voters, and that was not what was intended when the American democratic system was established.

It does not matter whether you are a Democrat, Republican or Independent. This situation is not in the interests of Americans as citizens or voters. When you are denied a real choice, you are denied your most fundamental and sacred democratic right – the right to influence your government through your votes for candidates. Why? When elections are all decided by the amount of money that an incumbent can amass from special interests, that is not a fair competition by any standard of competition.

What I recognized in 1990 was simply this. Even as the Berlin Wall had come down in 1989 and some limited form of democracy was developing in the former Soviet Empire, Americans were giving up their right to influence their government through the creation of effectively one-candidate elections – just like the Soviet system – where the outcome of the election was determined in advance. And, we were giving up our democratic right without anger, protest, or outrage – a basic right that Americans had died to protect many times in our past, gone without a whimper from the quiescent public.

The implications of our failed electoral system are profound, and they will shape this Blog over the next few months. If they make you angry, they should, and you should join us at www.indielitworld.com because we intend to do something about it. If you have lost your capacity for anger, then I feel sorry for all of us.

Gordon S. Black, PhD
Administrator
admin@indielitworld.com
gordonsblackhi@indielitworld.com

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The Economic Crises of Our Democratic Failures

Wednesday, September 28th, 2011

Editor’s Note: This blog is devoted to a single set of issues — what is wrong with our democracy and how we can fix it. The election systems of the Western democracies are profoundly broken, and the flaws in their design threaten to destabilize our governments and destroy our economic progress. The Great Recession of 2008 and the current crises over public debt are symptoms of underlying flaws in our democratic systems; and unless we fix the flaws, we have no chance of fixing the economic crises that the flaws have produced. Chronic deficits, massively uncontrolled debt, and growing unfunded and underfunded pension systems and entitlements are the product of these flaws, and democratic citizens simply have no way to cure these systems unless we are willing to address the roots causes of the economic failures.

However, democratic citizens cannot fix flaws that they do not recognize or understand, and this is the primary objective of this blog. Our modern elections have turned into systems whereby special interests of all kinds basically use legalized bribery and extortion with incumbents to buy politicies that are favorable to their interests. Our incumbents in all parties have put public policy and your tax dollars up for sale to the highest bidders who fund their campaigns for reelection. The incumbents get the campaign money they need to stifle any competitition against them while the speical interests get unfair access to your tax dollars and favorable regulation of all kinds.

As a result, our collective democratic systems have become desperately ill; overburdened by five decades of policies whereby massive deficits and debt that were used by incumbents to achieve the financing they needed for their campaigns. The looming economic disaster is not about failed economic policies; it is about a failed political process. The economic problems cannot and will not be solved until we recognize and act to repair the political processes that are producing the failures.

This site, www.indielitworld.com is devoted to these issues and their resolution, and to the authors and readers who care enough about politics and political reform to want to redress these failures. Our effort is not for everyone — and certainly not for the faint of heart because these reforms will not happen overnight and they will not happen without the support of millions of democratic citizens who care enough to want their democracies back! Our objective eventually is to sign up an army of people — authors and readers alike — who will willingly support electoral and political reform in our demoracies. This is not just an American problem by any means. The current crisis of the Euro system is caused by the same forces that are bankrupting the American individual states.

We are all part of the problem. We let this corruption happen on our watch. The incumbent’s stole our right to competitive choices in elections with our passive cooperation. They invalidated the importance of our votes, and we simply stopped voting because we knew that most of the elections were frauds so stacked in favor of the incumbents that they could not possibly lose. What they have taken away, they will not give back without a struggle because they love the perks and priviledges of power far too much to want to part with them willingly.

So, we are offering you a choice. We want to provide the means whereby we as citizens can come together to redress the grievences that we have with our government and its political leadership class. We offer you a struggle; but it is a struggle that we can win because we are ten thousand times the number of those who are corrupting the system. So, please join us, and help us by spreading the word.

Gordon S. Black
Administrator
gordonsblackhi@yahoo.com

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