George Soros

The Interactive Voter Choice System and Totalitarian Society

Joseph M. Firestone — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 01:04:07 -0500

In previous posts, I've looked at the Interactive Voter Choice System (IVCS) in a number of ways as: 1) a way of preventing the collapse of American Democracy; 2) the only way around all that money in politics; 3) a way of people self-organizing into voting blocs and electoral coalitions to make candidates and electoral officials accountable once again; and 4) the remedy for overcoming the threat to open society. In this post I want to write about a similar concern about the threat to open society: specifically, the possibility of the emergence of totalitarian society in the United States, and the potential for the IVCS to prevent that emergence.

The Theory of Mass Society

During the 30s, 40s, and 50s of the last century, liberal democracies were understandably concerned with understanding the conditions that lead to the emergence of totalitarianism. Towards the end of that period, a sociologist, the late William Kornhauser, formulated a conceptual framework using two attributes: accessibility, by which he meant an individual's capability of being influenced by others, and availability, by which he meant an individual's susceptibility to mass behavior: a psychological state characterized by a focus on remote objects, a direct mode of response to these objects, vacillation between apathetic and activist responses to these objects, and a readiness to make direct responses to these objects through mass movements.

Kornhauser's framework also divided people into two simple categories: elites and non-elites. Then by categorizing the two attributes into high and low accessibility and availability and cross-classifying by elite and non-elite, he arrived at four states of society: 1) communal society, in which elites are have low accessibility and non-elites are not available for mobilizing for mass behavior; 2) pluralist society, in which elites are highly accessible, and non-elites are unavailable for mobilizing; 3) mass society, in which elites are highly accessible and non-elites are highly available for mobilizing; and 4) totalitarian society, in which elites have low accessibility, and non-elites are highly available.

Kornhauser Framework

(Source: William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society, New York: The Free Press, 1959)

This framework is overly simple and was criticized for vagueness and ambiguity, not least because it was difficult to measure power which was important in distinguishing high from low accessibility, and elite vs. non-elite, and also because the notions of high and low availability seemed biased against the style of Civil Rights and New Left activism that became important in the 1960s. Because of these problems with the framework, difficulties of measurement, and the decline of Communism, Kornhauser's work fell by the wayside, as did Popper's work on Open Society. Popper's Open Society notion, however, experienced a renaissance with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and later the collapse of the Soviet Union, because, suddenly many nations wanted to understand what it meant to be an Open Society, and were very open to George Soros's willingness to support the spread of Open Society ideology and activism based on that ideology.

Perhaps, however, because of the rise of an increasingly authoritarian plutocracy in the U.S., it's time now to reconsider some of Kornhauser's thinking also. It's no longer the early '90s. Today, Democracy and Open Society are threatened in the lands of their birth. In Kornhauser's terms, they're threatened because the triumphs of neo-liberal ideology, and the rapid globalization of economy it has been associated with, have created discontinuities (rapid changes in the direction of social trends) in authority, community, and society, of the kind Kornhauser wrote about, as instrumental in creating mass society.

The rapid evolution of the United States into a society dominated by the Financial, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, as well as Information Technology, has resulted in the occupational displacement of more and more people, who have found themselves either, under- or unemployed, or condemned to relatively low income service jobs delivering only a fraction of the income they once enjoyed. It has also begun to produce an education and skills gap in which the United States lags behind insurgent nations, intensely striving for admission into first world economic status. These problems have been exacerbated by the crash of 2008, and the ensuing Great Recession and are still being exacerbated by continuing high rates of unemployment, the disruption and ending of careers, and the foreclosure fraud crisis. They are literally destroying communities, and the social ties of people and families to them. But the problems existed before the crash, which has only hastened the effects of the radical social and economic changes already underway.

In addition, there are cultural gaps between American Main Street perspectives and beliefs, and the perspectives and beliefs of urban and suburban communities more integrated into the globalized economy. These gaps relate to perspectives on religion, science, education, the role of Government in the economy, and immersion in the new developing Information Technology. In Kornhauser's terms, the effects of these various gaps among segments of American society are to disrupt authority relations, communities, and social ties, leaving many citizens and potential voters detached from the social context in which they lived their lives before. This detachment also makes them susceptible to mobilization by counter-elites (such as the leaders of various tea party factions) using the tools of ideology, propaganda, and people-to-people organizing efforts to mobilize people in support of the goals of the counter-elites.

We see this happening in the tea party mobilization going on right now around the symbols of American individualism, and I suspect it will not be too long before we start to see mass movements organized around the symbols of social and economic justice, rather than small government and individualism, appear. The only reason why the latter hasn't happened yet is because the election of Barack Obama has co-opted leftist activism for awhile, and channeled it through organizations and structures who believe they must work through him to represent their memberships. However, as the gap between social justice ideology and the reality of the Administration's accomplishments sinks in, people looking for justice will also look for new organizations to relate to, or else the old organizations will leave the “veal pen,” and try to mend relationships with those they are attempting to mobilize, and whose loyalties they are now rapidly losing.

The main point here is that the breakdown in social ties experienced by large numbers of Americans makes them available for mass movements and mass behavior, and depending on what's happening in the area of intra-elite fragmentation that availability could support either the emergence of mass society, or, in the worst case, totalitarian society itself, if one faction of the elites can gain the upper hand in political struggles among themselves so that it is no longer constrained by other factions.

The elites in America are not yet so unified that this has occurred, but the convergence of political, corporate, and media elites around corporatism, and their ability in a post-Citizens United world, in George Soros's terms, to manipulate the cognitive functioning of citizens to distort perceptions of reality, suggests that the time of unification may be coming. In fact, the corporate elites themselves may be manipulating the conditions for such unification by creating a faux challenge to their authority from a tea party mobilized in back of the candidacy of a figure like Sarah Palin, who seems so unacceptable to a majority of people that they will fall into the arms of a thoroughly corporatist candidate. The corporatist would then continue the extraction of financial resources and entitlements from America's middle class as it has already done with its poor, while simultaneously and gradually restricting the civil liberties of dissenters using the danger from terrorism as a rationale, and increasing their manipulation of the cognitive functioning of the American people so that fewer and fewer are willing to challenge the trends supporting the transition from mass to totalitarian society.

The IVCS, Mass, and Totalitarian Society

From the point of view of the theory of mass society, what has happened to America is that its pluralist democratic society, what Popper and Soros called its Open Society and Kornhauser called its pluralist society, has gotten hollowed out, in the sense that the institutions creating and maintaining social ties: the informal group relationships, mediating voluntary associations and interest groups, and accessible interest groups, and political parties standing between individuals and the State have disappeared. Now lonely individuals stand naked before extremely powerful and inaccessible institutions including modern lobbying organizations and political parties. These individuals are disaffected by social trends and open to mobilization by ideological appeals and astro-turfing organizations funded by a financial oligarchy. The result has been a transition away from open/pluralist society to mass society, which while still having the form of democracy, no longer supports the social and psychological requisites for it. Depending on what happens in the arena of elite conflict, mass society in the US can even transform itself into totalitarian society if current trends continue.

The movement towards mass society and totalitarianism has been driven by social and economic discontinuities that have destroyed social ties and the social ecology of interaction among Americans, the first step in creating counter-trends that can drive America back towards pluralism and Open Society is to re-integrate people into a social context which will relate them to their fellow citizens, and also provide them some way of influencing their fate by gaining access and influence to the political elites, in order to make them accountable once again to non-elites.

Another and very important way of looking at IVCS is that it can provide an environment that will perform that re-integration, remove the vulnerability of people to cognitive manipulation and political propaganda, make non-elites unavailable for mass behavior, and make political elites accessible and accountable once again to the people they are supposed in democratic theory to represent. Let's take a closer look at IVCS capabilities to see how it can restore social ties making non-elites unavailable, and also create the influence relationships necessary to make political elites accessible.

A person wanting to use IVCS will do so because he or she is dissatisfied with the behavior of the elites and the outcomes of their dominance of government decision-making, and wants to do something about it. They will have seen a problem or problems and want to have their say in proposing a solution(s). The system will provide facilities (e.g. forums, web conferencing) that people can use to communicate about the problems they concerned about with other people, in an effort to clarify and state them clearly for themselves. In the process of communicating, people will align themselves with or against others, create a social context, social relationships, and social ties, which they did not have before using IVCS.

IVCs’s cognitive mapping capability will allow people to compare the cognitive profile of their own policy agendas with other policy agendas available in the Knowledge base. This will help people place their agendas in the context of the views of others, and prepare the way for social interaction and collaboration with them in voting blocs. People using IVCS will also be able to use social networking capabilities like those in such well-known applications as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster. In addition, they will be able to access their social network graphs, use social software such as blogging, micro-blogging, wiki participation and origination, sharing videos, images, and policy agendas, create communities and discussion groups, exchange ideas, and search for and locate experts. Finally, using capabilities based on text and data mining, and also the cognitive mapping capability mentioned earlier, people using IVCS will be able to find, contact, and create social relationships with other voters having statistically and/or conceptually similar priorities. These capabilities are a gateway to other people. They can help in creating new social ties integrating people into communities once again AND in building winning voting blocs, political parties and electoral coalitions that have the voting strength to elect representatives who will enact their priorities into law.

If an individual wants to join with others to form a voting bloc to solve any problems the voting bloc may uncover, or to influence office-holders or turn the voting bloc into a primary force or a political party, then that’s going to take collaboration, and collaboration over time creates friendship, mutual identification, and, frequently enduring social bonds. The IVCS system will offer individuals a wide range of collaboration capabilities and opportunities so that voting blocs and the individuals in them will be able to function. The more general collaborative capabilities in the IVCS will include team-based workflow to allow teams of people to plan and implement common tasks involving specialization. This capability can be very powerful in campaigns and also in complex problem solving processes also involving specialization. In addition membership and participation in teams often creates strong social relationships, as well.

IVCS will also include virtual team workspaces. These are like forums, but have more comprehensive capabilities. IVCS will include application and desktop sharing in virtual collaborative sessions. Users will be able to collaborate on documents such as policy agendas, policy options, impact analyses, and blog posts. Wikis, which are inherently collaborative will be available, as well. Again, there will be discussion forums for people to use in creating voting bloc coalitions. Project, Task, and Event Management tools will be provided, as will tools for web-conferencing for online meetings to recognize and formulate problems, develop solutions, criticize them, and mobilize support for policy agendas and for voting bloc campaign activities. IVCS will support collaborative prioritization of policy options as well as planning and prioritization of political initiatives to get policy options passed into law. It will also support a voting/polling capability. The capability can be used in any number of collaborative contexts, but for IVCS its most important application is for getting agreement in voting blocs, and then using the agreed upon policy agendas as a legislative mandate for elected representatives and electoral candidates.

IVCS will provide a collaborative e-learning facility that will support people in getting access to content fragments gathered from across the Internet that are relevant to a problem they’re trying to solve. The facility will provide a variety of virtual environments for collaborative learning for teams.

Finally, while IVCS will allow voting blocs to safeguard confidentiality to the extent that seems reasonable to them, it will also emphasize the importance of transparency and inclusiveness in most voting bloc processes. These characteristics are essential for open and pluralistic societies, and open collectivities of all kinds, because, in contrast to secrecy, they create mutual trust and reinforce social relatedness. At least a moderate level of trust, along with a minimum of honesty in public affairs are important for the functioning of open society, and for facilitating the way back from mass society and the trend towards totalitarianism, because trust supports the maintenance of social ties and the ability to interact with others in political and problem solving contexts.

The cumulative effect of these various IVCS capabilities is to create an environment that provides opportunities for people to create new social relationships and to re-integrate into society. IVCS enables ordinary people to recreate the mediating socio-political institutions at the community level that prevent democratic institutions from being captured by plutocratic elites. People who join voting blocs in IVCS and become active in them, will no longer feel isolated and alienated, and will no longer be available for mass behavior. They will identify with their voting blocs and the people in them, and will be far less susceptible to mass propaganda appeals coming from the corporate media or anywhere else, because they will use their IVCS social networks to filter and evaluate the propaganda that is sent their way.

In addition to its effects in blocking the availability of individuals for mass behavior, IVCS will also restore the accessibility of elites. Right now, the channel of elite accessibility proceeding from the people to political elites, to elites in the private sector appears to be broken, since political elites seem increasingly to be ignoring the interests of their constituents in favor of accommodating the desires of those elites funding their campaigns. The channels of accessibility can be restored by IVCS, because the aggregation of political power in its voting blocs and electoral coalitions, will occur within the IVCS environment, and outside of the reach of the corporate media and its channeling of elite world views and propaganda to people. The IVCS will disrupt the cognitive manipulation of non-elites proceeding from the corporate media on a continuous basis, by exposing its members to a variety of points of view freely available with the IVCS. Because cognitive manipulation will be less ubiquitous in the IVCS, the possibility of voting blocs emerging that hold and support different narratives than are being pushed in the corporate media will be very much greater than in pre-IVCS politics, and policy agendas different from those favored by elite officeholders and candidates are more likely to emerge from these narratives.

At that point, the creation of new accessibility channels is facilitated by IVCS tools for communicating with officeholders and candidates. When people running for office are contacted by voting blocs with many thousands and in some cases even millions of members, the numbers in these blocs will get the attention of those running. When bloc leaders ask for commitments to bloc policy agendas and make clear that these agendas will be viewed as mandates for the blocs, and that the performance in office of those elected will be evaluated in terms of these mandates, the influence of big money raised to pay for mass media propaganda will radically decrease, because the only thing that talks louder than money in politics is the ability to deliver masses of votes. Since voting blocs in the IVCS will have that ability, the influence channel that now goes from well-funded interest groups to politicians, will be eclipsed by one that goes from voting bloc members to voting bloc leaders to politicians, making political elites once again accessible to people. And once that link is forged, it will be possible once again to influence the behavior of economic and other private sector elites through the political elites.

Conclusion

In the United States today representatives in both the Legislative and Executive branches of Government seem to have escaped the bonds of influence relating them to working people and making them accountable to them. Replacing those bonds is the growing influence of the wealthy and major corporations in a variety of economic sectors. In turn, events set in motion by globalization and other corporate activities have damaged or destroyed the social ties and intermediate organizations relating people to the State. Individuals stand naked and isolated and subject to cognitive manipulation and mass mobilization, by huge multi-national corporations and the very wealthy, the astro-turfing organizations they create to do their bidding, the dominant political parties, and the big Government that today serves them and not the people.

One way to look at this problem is from the viewpoint of cognitive manipulation controlling political participation causing the breakdown of Open Society: The Popper/Soros way. Another way to look at it is through Kornhauser's framework suggesting that we have to re-build social ties and influence channels to move mass society back toward pluralist society. I think the Interactive Voter Choice System can help to both re-build social ties and provide effective new influence channels making political elites accountable once again. The sooner we can implement the IVCS and get it used by many millions of people, the sooner we still stop the trend toward mass behavior and totalitarianism. American Society moves very fast these days. It has moved rapidly toward the destruction of democracy and Open Society. It can move just as rapidly back toward pluralist/Open Society. The IVCS can make a difference by 2012. And, soon after that, the American people will have their democracy back entirely.

(Cross-posted at All Life Is Problem Solving and Fiscal Sustainability).

The Threat to Open Society and the Interactive Voter Choice System

Joseph M. Firestone — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:17:30 -0500

The Problem

The biggest problem for Americans in our time is the increasingly dangerous threat to open society posed by the trend toward plutocracy and its effects on the political system. George Soros described the antecedents of these threats in The Age of Fallibility (pp. 100-101):

“Gradually, the methods developed for commercial purposes found a market in politics. This changed the character of politics. The original idea of elections was that candidates would come forward and announce what they stood for; and the electorate would decide whom they liked best. The supply of candidates and the preferences of the electorate were supposed to be independently given, just as in the theory of perfect competition. But the process was corrupted by the methods adopted from commercial life: focus groups and framing the messages. Politicians learned to cater to the desires of the electorate instead of propounding policies they believed in. The electorate did not remain unaffected. They chose the candidate who told them what they wanted to hear, but at the same time they could not avoid noticing that they were being manipulated; they were not surprised when their elected leaders deceived them. But there was no escape. The increasing sophistication of communication methods was built into the system. That is how America became a feel-good society. It was fostered by politicians seeking to be elected.”

One of the most damaging effects of the “feel-good society” is that the people are unable to keep politicians in check (p.96):

“In a democracy, it is the electorate that has to keep the politicians and the political operatives honest. That is where America is failing. A feel-good society, far from being committed to the pursuit of truth, cannot face harsh realities. This leaves it vulnerable to all kinds of false ideologies, Orwellian newspeak, and other deceptions.”

In the years since The Age of Fallibility appeared, we've seen dramatic increases in the amount of money spent on elections. Money is used to shape and distort the public's view of reality, and the problem of its influence has been exacerbated by the Citizens United decision. Elected officials of both parties are influenced by campaign contributions, and a media bought by corporate money, to such an extent that there is no prospect of solving America's many problems in ways that serve the public interest and benefit most people. Some even think that we now live in a plutocracy, and not in a democracy, and that both parties are corrupt, and now represent only the financial oligarchy. So, the central issue of our time is how we can overcome the influence of money on politics and make our political system more responsive once again.

This problem threatens open society in two ways. First, because the ability of the people to change leaders is now illusory, since the new elites are just as much influenced by a financial oligarchy, as the elites previously “in control” were. And second, because the ability for voters to see the truth is severely compromised by the influence over messaging and communications of the financial oligarchy. More and more, elite-dominated communications creates 'reality' for Americans. The actual reality of elite performance and the causes and cures of poor outcomes are viewed through a glass darkly, only.

For open society to function well, the truth about the reality of elite performance must be much more available and accessible to the efforts of citizens to arrive at it. But, increasingly, it is not. So, the two most important underlying conditions of open society, the ability for people to arrive at the truth (their cognitive function), and their ability to act on the truth to change elites (their participative function) are both undermined increasingly over time. As Soros rightly asks (p.110), “Who will enlighten the public” when these functions are compromised? And if the public cannot become enlightened, how will it keep the politicians and political operatives honest and focused on protecting the common good and the public trust? If nothing is done to stop this process of reality construction in the interests of the rulers, the end will certainly be the transformation of open society in America to a closed plutocracy. And given the speed of that transformation, its end may well come sooner rather than later.

Requirements for a solution

We won't be able to stop the march toward plutocracy unless we can create a new institutional framework that allows us to change those aspects of our present situation that support plutocracy and undermine open society. It's no good proposing or wishing for changes in the present legal system where such changes require the consent of the elites, because they have no incentives other than self-interest, except very occasional and intermittent altruism, and perhaps a low level of fear of mass movement-induced violence to motivate them to provide their consent for such changes. So, we need a framework that will operate within the context of existing rules and laws to create changes that will swing the dynamics of change away from plutocracy and toward open society.

The new institutional framework must provide a meta-level of political interaction and networking that places ecological constraints on the current system, driving it back towards a condition in which the ability of individuals to both arrive at more accurate constructions of reality, and act on these constructions, is dominant. Here are the requirements for such a framework.

-- It must provide social contexts and milieus within which people can organize themselves and others around public policy agendas, comprised of policy options and policy priorities, into voting blocs and electoral coalitions ranging from very small to very large blocs of millions of voters without needing sizable financial resources from sources external to these social milieus, and without being subject to external mass media communications influenced by the financial oligarchs and other special interests.

-- These social contexts and milieus must provide the possibility of informal group and social network formation around these policy agendas.

-- These social contexts and milieus must be largely transparent and inclusive in providing participants with previously developed data, information, and knowledge, and in allowing them the freedom to participate in communicating, organizing, collaborating, critically evaluating, problem solving, and decision making within voting blocs and electoral coalitions.

-- The social contexts and milieus must provide a modicum of trust for participants, in contrast to the two political parties, both of which are widely distrusted by a majority of Americans.

-- The new institutional framework must enable participants and voting blocs to communicate their policy agendas (comprised of policy options and priorities) to candidates for public office and office holders, and also secure either commitments to these agendas or clear refusals to support the policy agendas from them.

-- The framework must also enable participants and voting blocs to continuously monitor and rate performance of office holders against the agendas and to decide whether to continue to support office holders after performance ratings are arrived at.

-- The framework must also provide enabling tools for voting blocs and electoral coalitions to organize efforts to get both major party and third party candidates and initiatives onto ballots, and to get people to the polls to vote. In other words, it must provide tools to enable voting blocs to do all the things political parties and factions now do to support candidates they want to elect and ballot initiatives they want to pass.

In short, the new institutional framework must provide an alternative to the contemporary world of political parties and established interest groups for analyzing political situations and issues, and for organizing people for political action. The alternative world must embody the key attributes of open society, which means it must provide an informal communications and knowledge network that is very much independent of the mass media, and also capable of enabling the creation of highly cohesive voting blocs and electoral coalitions of many millions of people, and even new political parties, which can offer decisive support to candidates and office holders in return for their continuing support of voting bloc agendas.

The Solution

We can use the Internet and the Interactive Voter Choice System (IVCS), to create the alternative world I've just outlined, a network of voter-driven political organizations to counter the influence of money in politics, including the cognitive distortions created by using big money to frame debates and constantly introduce distractions from key issues. The collective action power of the Internet when combined with IVCS will make the creation of such organizations feasible. When fully developed IVCS will provide voters free policy agenda-setting and consensus-building tools to:

-- Define their own policy options and prioritize them to create policy agendas,

-- Social network with others who have similar agendas to their own,

-- Collaborate and solve problems with others to create collective policy agendas, voting blocs, and electoral coalitions that work within existing parties or build new political parties, and

-- Hold elected representatives accountable by monitoring and evaluating how well their performance matches the policy agendas of the voting blocs that have elected them to office.

The result of using IVCS will be voting blocs of various sizes and influence, formed by voters across the political spectrum. People will use the system to formulate common policy agendas, and then create self-organizing transpartisan voting blocs, electoral coalitions, and political parties around those agendas. They can use the system’s search/data mining tools to locate others whose policy agendas are most like their own, and join with them.

From the viewpoint of an individual, it may not be easy at first to organize voting blocs that develop cohesiveness and staying power, because people will have to negotiate out their differences to join together. But negotiating common agendas, and crafting winning electoral strategies at the grassroots, gives voters a lot more power than being hamstrung by the two major parties. The system will support such negotiations, and create the potential for so many policy agendas and voting bloc coalitions to form that it is virtually certain that new and powerful blocs, and even political parties, will emerge, grow rapidly, and begin to acquire national influence.

Voting blocs will at first have only a virtual identity in the IVCS. But the social ties formed in these self-organizing blocs will be real, and much stronger than the ties between political interest groups and the members they communicate with using marketing e-mails and other top-down methods of mobilization. When bloc members start to take their blocs into political party organizations and primaries, the transition will be made from virtual to full social reality. The system and the website built around the system will support agenda formation and political organization better than the legacy political parties because its Policy Options Database enables voters to formulate written policy agendas, and use their agendas as legislative mandates to select candidates and oversee those they elect. (Prototypes of the Policy Options Database and the website can be viewed by clicking here and here.)

In addition, it will provide consensus-building and collaborative tools that legacy parties have never sought to provide their supporters. The content management tools will be better than any political party’s. The social networking tools will be far superior. The problem solving and knowledge processing tools supplied will also be better than those of any existing political party’s, and will support people informing each other about critical issues during the problem solving process. In the context of the IVCS, the answer to the question “Who Will enlighten the public?” is that people will tell one another as part of their everyday interaction. Finally, state-of-the-art campaign organizing tools (and services) will be provided by third party service providers with proven track records.

The IVCS application will supply a richer virtual environment for new voting blocs to emerge from than anything now available. It will also support transparency, and political inclusiveness within its voting blocs, as well as whatever degree of privacy and security a voting bloc wants. Voting blocs will make decisions and resolve conflicts either by consensus or by using the IVCS Voting Utility.

They can also use the Utility to vote on proposed political alliances and coalitions. Since voting bloc members can always “vote with their feet,” by forming new blocs or joining other already existing blocs, and since new voting blocs will always be coming into existence, the dynamic environment of the IVCS will always be biased toward bottom-up organization, problem solving, and influence, rather than top-down control. Since problem solving in the system will be distributed and not centralized, blocs will be able to adapt to their environments better than traditional voting blocs, transcend the awkward stages of initial growth, and develop into new political organizations that can successfully challenge the legacy parties and the special interests as the driving force in the American political system.

The likelihood that national voting blocs will form and maintain themselves is great, because the yearning in America for change is great, as is the potential for many, many groups to form and fail, while giving up their members to those that survive. Most Americans want to do something about the mess we’re in. They want the political system to be responsive to the people. They’ll take advantage of IVCS because it will be the only practical way, in this time of corporate dominance of the mass media and the major political parties, that they can build winning voting blocs, electoral coalitions and political parties they control; select candidates for office on the basis of their own criteria (their written policy agendas); evaluate those they elect; influence them; and, finally, hold them accountable.

Since it will cost little more than time to organize and get one’s messages out by using it, the system will eliminate the need for voting blocs, political parties, and candidates to rely on contributions and special interest campaigns to get support. They'll be able to spread their message using the facilities of the IVCS alone. The system will de-fang the Citizens United decision, and the influence of special interests more generally, because mass media-based propaganda campaigns will conflict with, and be critically evaluated by IVCS-based interactions and messaging within informal social networks and voting blocs.

Since the social ties within IVCS will be much stronger and more intense than the ties between individuals and organizations in mass media campaigns, such propaganda campaigns will become less and less effective in framing debates and influencing the cognitive functioning of individuals. Their role will diminish over time because spending a fortune on them won't work to influence elections, once the IVCS is available and widely used. In the longer run, the transparency, inclusiveness, self-organizing tendencies, and intense political and social interaction within IVCS-enabled voting blocs, parties and coalitions will revitalize open society and assert open society controls over the electoral, legislative, and political processes.

Implementation

The IVCS can be implemented by integrating already developed and commercially available software using Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA). The systems integration work will deliver functionality that fulfills the above requirements, and provides content management and integration capabilities that people can use to track how well knowledge claims about policy options and impacts have survived criticism and evaluation in the past. IVCS will also include a security architecture to prevent its penetration by people who want to disrupt, take over, or manipulate the way it works.

A continuing worry is the ability of people in politics to avoid reality by framing their own narratives for interpreting both it and their own performance. There's no way to stop attempts at that sort of thing from going on. But IVCS will allow people to incorporate counter-narratives and evaluations against the interpretations by the wealthy and powerful of their own performance on an equal footing. This sort of capability to expose everyone's views to critical evaluation in the context of a neutral exchange platform is essential to restoring the effectiveness of the cognitive function in open society.

IVCS will also possess strong viral marketing and “political strategizing” capabilities, since its tools and services will be made available via a social networking platform. These will enable it to grow very quickly in membership and participation after its launch, both to influence the 2012 elections, and to defend itself against attempts to marginalize or neutralize it. The combination of systems integration and software work, strategizing, and marketing needing to be accomplished in a short time means that IVCS's development and implementation must proceed at top speed in the coming months.

Conclusion

The IVCS web site can be developed as a host for a network of inter-connected voter-driven political organizations (voting blocs and electoral coalitions) to counter the influence of money in politics, including the cognitive distortions created by special interests using big money to frame debates and constantly introduce distractions from key issues. The network will provide a meta-level of political interaction that places ecological constraints on the current system so that it is driven back towards a condition in which the ability of individuals to both arrive at more accurate constructions of reality, and act on these constructions is dominant.

In the first quote above from The Age of Fallibility, George Soros identifies what is probably the most important cause of the movement away from open society and towards plutocracy, namely the deliberate manipulation of voters’ perceptions of reality. IVCS will be a powerful counter to this technology of political manipulation. By introducing a transparent, inclusive layer of networked social interaction, insulated from mass media manipulation, emphasizing problem solving and critical evaluation, and giving rise to legislative mandates backed by very large and powerful voting blocs and electoral coalitions, we can introduce open society epistemological and political controls into our electoral and political processes and make our representatives accountable once again. We can enable voters themselves to reverse the movement of the United States toward plutocracy, and move it in the direction of open society once more.

(Cross-posted at All Life Is Problem Solving and Fiscal Sustainability).

The Case Against Jamie Dimon: Oligopoly, Pain, and Systemic Risk in Five Slides

Richard Eskow — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 13:57:04 -0400

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon knew what he was talking about when he said that ""large corporate America is in very, very, very, very good shape." It's a crude and insensitive remark, but an accurate one.

Unfortunately, the rest of us are still paying for the party. We bailed out the big bankers once, and if Dimon has his way we'll probably be forced to do it again. Despite his company's record first quarter, he's complaining. He thinks that asking banks to cover the cost of their own potential failure is "punitive." Dimon, once known as the "Democrats' banker," is throwing more cash to the GOP these days, and in return his wishes are being slavishly carried out by the likes of Mitch McConnell.

How dangerous are Dimon and his colleagues? Using data from Robert Litan's valuable study of derivatives, as well as source data from the Comptroller of the Currency (plus some handy tips from Mike Konczal), I put together some pie charts.

1. "Too Big to Fail" is Worse Than You Think

The misuse of derivatives nearly brought down the economy, and the concentration of these instruments in a few hands forced the government to bail out their holders. Are we any safer today? Here's the market share held by the top five banks trading in derivatives:

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you. The top five banks hold nearly 96% of the entire derivatives market. And we're not talking about small numbers here. The projected value of the market in over-the-counter derivatives is over $500 trillion dollars. (In "real" terms it's $3.3 trillion, which isn't chump change either. Here's a good explanation of what figures like these really mean. Short version: It's a lot of money.)

These "too big to fail" megabanks make up what Litan calls the "Derivatives Dealers' Club." Led by Dimon, they have the motive and the will to impede meaningful change -- and to do an end-run around whatever rules are eventually passed. Who are these "dealers"?

2. Meet the Derivatives Overlords

Here are the top four traders in derivatives (number five is much smaller), along with the share of the market they command. Notice that each one of them individually is bigger than "everybody else" put together.

If you're inclined to be impressed by Dimon's competence (which impresses mainly because basic competence seems to be rare in bank CEOs), look at the other companies in this chart. Ken Lewis at Bank of America and Chuck Prince at Citigroup were textbook examples of runaway in-competence. For that matter, so was Citi's "strategic" guru Robert Rubin. As for Goldman Sachs, that would be the same Goldman Sachs that just got indicted for securities fraud by the SEC. How safe do you feel?

Let's look at Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Chase place in the pecking order:

3. Dimon's Dangerous Dominance

A single bank, JPMorgan Chase, has 44% of the derivatives market. This is the concentrated power and leverage that Dimon's fighting to protect. That's one reason why Simon Johnson calls him "The Most Dangerous Man in America". Moreover, as Johnson points out, Dimon knows how to present a great PR case for this irresponsible financial structure he represents. He's the friendly public face of a dangerous and greedy system.

And for you Dimon fans out there, remember: He's not going to be in the job forever. There could be a Chuck Prince or Ken Lewis waiting in the wings even now.

4. Here in the Real World

While Dimon's doing the victory dance - "large corporate America is in very, very, very, very good shape" - how's the rest of the country doing? These folks aren't doing so well:

Long-term unemployment is at levels we haven't seen since the Great Depression. These 6.5 million people face a future where they may never be able to return to the lives they once enjoyed.

5. Who Are the Unemployed?

(This slide and the one above: Bureau of Labor Statistics)

44% of all jobless people meet the definition of "long-term unemployed." Many of these people are too old to realistically start over. Their lives have been ruined. As for the wonderful state of large corporate America that Dimon celebrates, it came in part because Fortune 500 companies laid off more than 800,000 people in 2009. For these people, life is "very, very, very, very" grim.

That's the damage caused by greed. Here's the danger: George Soros says another, bigger crash is coming. (via ZeroHedge) Three of the Federal Reserve's regional heads say that we need to do something about "too big to fail" banks. The centralization of risk and power is leading us right into another disaster. We need to get the banking oligopoly under control. But Jamie Dimon is fighting back tooth and nail.

And that's why we must fight Jamie Dimon.

How I Became a "Soros Operative"

Cliff Schecter — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:45:57 -0400

Fox News personality John Gibson said I was one—which means, of course, it is true. On his radio show the other day, he opined that because I once worked at Brave New Films (which may get some George Soros money) and the publisher of my new book, The Real McCain, is a friend of Soros', well then case closed. I am on Soros' payroll, which is why one of the two cars my wife and I drive is a Subaru with 125,000 miles on it.

But this is a great anecdote to point out a larger virus that infects conservatism, and has for a long time now: Paranoia. For that, Soros is perfect. Jewish, of foreign birth, living in New York and a "financier," he is a fourfer!

If only he were gay too.

One of the books I have found most useful in understanding the modern Right is The Paranoid Style In American Politics, written by one of the preeminent historians and social commentators of the 20th Century, Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter did not live to see his warnings about the Bircher Wing of the GOP come to fruition to become a full-fledged menace to society (although, in truth, he underestimated their appeal in that he did not realize that having a vast fortune and media megaphone behind these conspiracy theories could do wonders to keep them alive). But he knew what he saw, and related it to our history as a nation better than anyone I have ever come across in prose.

This paranoia is what allows Gibson to write a fantasyland tome called "The War On Christmas," because hordes of Jews and Muslims plan each year—after eating the youngest member of their family for Thanksgiving—how they can cream Santa Claus in the coming month. In reality, as you probably know, Gibson is simply appealing to the worst in people. What Karl Rove has made a career of doing. What Sen. John McCain's friend Pastor John Hagee does on a weekly if not daily basis. (I have a whole chapter on the conspiracy preachers in my book—McCain is knee deep in their influence.)

Tell people that their lot in life has waned because of a conspiracy among some evil group that is holding them back. Liberals. Jews. Muslims. Gays. Blacks. Abortion. People For The American Way. You know, the people Jerry Falwell blamed for 9/11.

If you can do that, then they might never question why CEO salaries have skyrocketed, health care has disappeared and their job is in China. In any case, I am honored to be on Gibson's list. But for the sake of our democracy, we must expose this vile conspiracy-mongering whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head.

Cliff Schecter is the author of The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him And Why Independents Shouldn't. Buy a copy (for only $10!) and keep both his 18-month old son and John McCain in diapers.