Momentum is building for preferential voting (PV) systems, that let voters rank-order their preferred candidates or outcomes. This option is being forced on the Democratic Party, for example, by their flood of candidates who must be sorted-out in just a couple of 2020 primary months.
PV -- or rank-choice voting -- would let a state's voters make multiple choices, maybe five in-order, so the election might stumble a bit toward actual consensus, instead of an insipid first-past-the-post that would leave the sane 70% of the country simmering with resentment, instead of enthusiasm. Below I will talk about efforts to implement PV in the US... and why it's even more important... in Britain.
But first, something you really have to watch.
== The great failure mode of all democracies ==
== The great failure mode of all democracies ==
An amazing video on staggering wealth inequality. Left out... the context of 6000 years, when this was the principle aim of princes. Only the recent enlightenment realized a core truth, that while property is a vital incentive for creative competition... it is inevitably toxic when too-concentrated. (Like any good thing: food, water, air.) When it concentrates too much, human nature rears its ugly head and cheating ensues. (And this is not "left-right"! Communist commisars behave in exactly the same ways as kings, sheiks and zillionaires.)
The video claims that Senator Warren's proposed wealth taxes are new. But I quibble. The American founders seized and redistributed up to 1/3 of all the land in the former colonies in order to stymie feudalism! (And it was feudalism, not 'bureaucrats' who Adam Smith denounced and the Founders rebelled against.) Especially the Greatest generation (see below) found ways to stimulate a vast middle class.
The rich need to decide whether to follow their smartest peers (Gates, Buffett, Bezos) etc. and keep that social contract. It can be done without pitchforks and torches, tumbrels and guillotines. But there isn't much time.
=
== Democrats, this "mere process" means survival ==
Lawrence Lessig and Equal citizen ran a campaign to bring ranked choice voting (RC) to the New Hampshire presidential primary. And it's on the verge of
succeeding, with your help. RC voting - or preferential balloting - has been used by us super-wise and forward-thinking science fiction folks for the Hugo and Nebula awards for four decades and it is standard in Australia and a few other nations.
RC/PV doesn't always come down to the best candidate. But it will always prevent the worst from happening -- a horrible monster squeaking by with 40%, though hated by a divided 60%.
RC/PV doesn't always come down to the best candidate. But it will always prevent the worst from happening -- a horrible monster squeaking by with 40%, though hated by a divided 60%.
This potential reform in Iowa and New Hampshire takes on special
importance given the vast field of Democrats attempting to run for president.
The present system is simply insane at parsing out front-runners! What? Is a
candidate who got a whole 16% the “front-runner” ahead of rivals who got 15%,
14%, 12% and 12%? Does that let a fringe constituency control the divided
majority? Democrats could help themselves considerably and us, by arm twisting
both of those states into trying a preferential ballot process just for that DP
primary, to see how it goes.
BTW,
Lessig will give the conference keynote at the Future of the Open Web
conference n Friday, May 17,at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco hotel.
Oh, as an aside: this article told about a similar time – 80 years ago - when an
"American populist" threw giant rallies - under superficial
patriotism - actually boosted the interests of foreign fascist plotters and
divisive hate. "When Nazis Took Manhattan: In 1939, an event at Madison
Square Garden was billed as a "Pro-America Rally". It was, in fact, a
rally in support of Hitler and fascism." It tells of one brave fellow who
infiltrated the rally in New York... as my father did when they threw a similar
bund-fest in Chicago. And yes, the parallels with today are creepy. (Especially if you've been watching "The Man In The High Castle.")
While we’re historical… Extra History is one of the best things on YouTube. Quick, animated
summaries of past eras that shaped our age. A 6-parter filled in my gaps about
Sun Yat-sen and the Chinese Revolution. Another swept me across the end of the
samurai era. This one about the Gracchi brothers shows how oligarchy undermined
the Roman Republic, which was then torn up by radical populism. It all makes
clear how fevered and harsh was "history" and why our present
oligarchy plots against the new, modern, grownup ways of doing things.
The animations are way fun, but the narration is so good that I get
everything while turning my back to cook or do busywork at the computer.
And now, back to those ranked voting processes that are essential, for democracy to get functional again.
And now, back to those ranked voting processes that are essential, for democracy to get functional again.
== Perplexidus Albion ==
Regarding Brexit, sure, the blatant next move is for the UK to hold another referendum, with the following in mind:
* The British people were not aware, the first time, that Brexit was powerfully backed by Putin's Kremlin. Guilt-by-association is as valid a point as any other element in this argument.
* Brexit showed the insipid absurdity of deciding complex issues with binary ballots.
Hence, any second Brexit vote should offer Britons a multiple choice ballot:
1. Hard Brexit with no deal.
2. Theresa May's deal.
3. Remain in the EU under the old treaty.
4. Remain providing the EU is willing to negotiate more state sovereignty over residency.
Blatantly, #4 would win the automated runoff, even if millions gave first preference to something else. Moreover, European leaders already know that universal residency mobility was a Bridge Too Far. They are already backpedaling on that and rule-complexity and would signal a willingness to oblige.
Some technologies and solutions are only tried once the old ways have calamitously failed. Preferential referenda weaken Parliament, which deserves it, and will exile a generation of obsolete politicians. That's not a bug, but a feature.
== Ties go deep ==
Trump’s deep Russian ties go at least to when a Putin ally-oligarch in 2013 paid DT $10 million to bring the Miss
Universe pageant to Moscow, and many stinking hijinks commenced.
In EARTH (1989) I portrayed
a coalition of developing nations finally getting fed-up and declaring war upon
the money-laundering mafias – like Zurich and the Caymans and the State of
Delaware – that have helped rob trillions from poor populations across the
globe. It’s still possible for one – just one – president of a small country to
do something epic and historic and transforming, and I could map how. But you
should read this article from The Atlantic by Franklin Foer that starts with showing
Further: “The collapse of communism
in the other post-Soviet states, along with China’s turn toward capitalism,
only added to the kleptocratic fortunes that were hustled abroad for secret
safekeeping. Officials around the world have always looted their countries’
coffers and accumulated bribes. But the globalization of banking made the
export of their ill-gotten money far more convenient than it had been—which, of
course, inspired more theft. By one estimate, more than $1
trillion now exits the world’s developing countries each year in
the forms of laundered money and evaded taxes.”
In effect, this has meant
the impoverishment of billions of human beings, higher taxes for you and me,
and the outright deaths of tens of millions, making these thugs among the
world’s worst outright murderers. And making all of this genuinely a
“war.” See also British journalist
Oliver Bullough’s Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back.
Don’t skimp. Read the whole thing! Because there’s items like this, toward the end:
“In her important
history, Corruption in America, Zephyr Teachout, a legal scholar and
liberal activist, argues that during the country’s first 200 years, courts
maintained the Founders’ vigilance against corruption. For a good chunk of
American history, a number of states criminalized lobbying in many forms, out
of a sense that a loosening of standards would trigger a race to the bottom.
That near-phobia now looks quaint, and also prescient. The political culture,
the legal culture, the banking culture—so much of the culture of the
self-congratulatory meritocratic elite—have long since abandoned such prudish
ways.
“The defining document of
our era is the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010. The
ruling didn’t just legalize anonymous expenditures on political campaigns. It
redefined our very idea of what constitutes corruption, limiting it to its most
blatant forms: the bribe and the explicit quid pro quo. Justice Anthony
Kennedy’s majority opinion crystallized an ever more prevalent ethos of
indifference—the collective shrug in response to tax avoidance by the rich and
by large corporations, the yawn that now greets the millions in dark money
spent by invisible billionaires to influence elections.”
It’s not that it’s hopeless.
Some real measures happened in 2001 and in 2007. And almost all of this would
end – returning tens of trillions of stolen wealth and giving law-abiding
citizens a huge tax holiday – if we had one simple, two sentence worldwide law:
“If you own something, say
so publicly. Anything not claimed by a living person, government or accountable
foundation is abandoned property.”
It is likely that all the
world’s outstanding debt, acting as a lamprey on the arteries of all the
world’s economies, could be erased by that simple measure, ending the masks and
shells and laundering scams, allowing tax rates for all law-abiding citizens to
be slashed, everywhere, and erasing most kinds of corruption.
