1994 all over again

Congressional midterm elections are just around the corner, and there's a lot of dissatisfaction with the Democrats right now. That's understandable considering what little of their 'progressive' agenda they've gotten accomplished so far, not to mention their incessant pandering on the platform of 'the least worst,' but that doesn't mean things will be any better with the Republicans back in power.

Of course, getting anything useful done in Congress is like pulling teeth regardless of the party in charge, but seriously, these people are more dangerous to personal freedom than they've ever been. They might say they want to reduce the size of our government because it's such a drain on national resources and inhibits economic growth, and are totally against government intrusion, but then they turn around and try to use the very same bloated government to force their conservative/religious values on the entire country.

If the Republicans get back into power again, they'll pull all the same old tricks like trying to prevent gay people from having equal rights; telling women what to do with their bodies; go back to pushing abstinence-only sex-ed; limiting or eliminating federally-funded stem-cell research; extending tax cuts that will only add to the growing deficit; increasing an already bloated military budget at the cost of everything else they can dismantle (e.g., public education, Medicare, Social Security, etc.); you get the idea. Heck, they'll probably even start another war just for the hell of it.

While the majority of Democrats in Congress are almost as bad, I think things will be far, far worse if the Republicans manage to sweet-talk their way back into power with their Pledge to America. It'll be 1994 all over again with Newt and his Contract with America, only worse because they'll have the Tea Party Express behind them, condemning masturbation, Muslims and the evil socialists on the left who want all Americans to actually have access to healthcare like they do in every other wealthy, industrialized nation on Earth.

In fact, conservatives are already bemoaning the threat of 'big government,' and promising to repeal the recent insurance reforms passed by Congress and signed by the president, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. The question is, What would Republicans do to improve healthcare if they were in charge?

Well, at one end of the spectrum, there's Mike Huckabee. According to him, people with preexisting conditions are like houses that've already burned down, so I think his plan would be to essentially allow insurance companies to tell people with preexisting conditions to go fuck themselves since they'll just eat into their ridiculously large profit margins.

At the other end, there's Mitt Romney, who actually signed into law an insurance reform program when he was governor of Massachusetts that's similar to the reforms Obama signed into law this year, so he'd repeal 'Obamacare' and replace it with 'Romneycare,' which would basically be the same thing, but since he's a Republican, his individual mandate would somehow be more constitutional.

As for the rest, they'll probably fall somewhere in between these two positions, which means their ideas for improving healthcare in the U.S. will lie somewhere between cutting corporate taxes and letting insurance companies do whatever the hell they want, and instituting some half-assed reforms like Obama and the Democrats did, but just calling it something different like 'Common-sense Healthcare Reforms Our Nation Can Afford.' Then Fox News will hail them as the saviours of democracy and the free market. Oh, and abortion will be illegal.

Unfortunately, these things are cyclical, and each party's half-ass attempts to implement their agendas almost always seems to make things worse. It's sad and it makes me sick that the most we can do it pick the 'lesser of two evils' at any given election instead of having some real choices and the power to immediately recall our elected officials when they're not getting the job done. But I'd like it even more if I didn't have to worry about right-wing fundamentalists gaining popular support with their puritanical, anti-gay, anti-Muslim rhetoric. That stuff's poison, pure and simply.

I truly wish that the Republicans were what they purport to be—fiscal conservatives who want limited government involvement in public and private affairs. At least I can respect and tolerate that, even if I disagree with their positions ideologically. But since the GOP has allowed itself to be captured by the religious right, or at least panders to them to the point of adopting many of their stances on social issues, I'm honestly afraid of the damage they'll do if we, as a nation, allow ourselves to be duped into voting them back into power again.

ethno-religious race baiting needs to stop

I'm sick to death of all this manufactured hullabaloo about Obama secretly being a Muslim and Islam being more violent and less tolerant than Christianity. The right in America has been searching for a new boogieman since the end of the Cold War to replace the evils of communism — which, in the words of the late Sen. Absalom Robertson, "seek simultaneously to destroy our democratic way of life and the faith in an Almighty God on which it is based" — and they've found one in Islam. But I say, "Enough already!"

A recent survey shows that a growing number of Americans think that Obama is a Muslim. To begin with, a person's religious affiliation shouldn't matter, it's their actions that count. Moreover, it's completely irrelevant to public office considering that the First Amendment creates, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, a "wall of separation between church and state."

What truly bothers me, however, is that not only do people care what religion Obama professes to practice, but they can't even get it right! Either the majority of these people are so easily misled by right-wing hack-jobs that they're willing to accept he's a closet Muslim who was born in Kenya (despite the fact that he has a Hawaiian birth certificate) or they're unwilling to say that they don't know and guess (making themselves look even dumber when they get the answer wrong).

If there are 'educated' people who think Obama is Muslim, I'd seriously question their so-called education, and I'd think it's more likely they're using the label pejoratively in order to attack Obama and sway public opinion away from him, which is a disgusting and ultimately racist political maneuver if you ask me. Has the right so quickly forgotten their last contrived controversy surrounding Rev. Wright and the charge that Obama was a racist Christian attending a 'radical black church'?

As if that weren't bad enough, we have washed-up Jim Jones wannabes like Terry Jones going around threatening to burn Korans and claiming that Islam is a more violent and less tolerant religion than Christianity. Never mind that, historically speaking, Christianity hasn't been very tolerant of other faiths, either, e.g., the various Crusades, which we against fellow Christians, Jews and Muslims; medieval pogroms against the Jews, etc.; and then there are things like Uganda's anti-homosexual bill that was inspired in part by an American, evangelical conference, held a month before, whose theme was "the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda."

And if you think that the holy books of Judaism and Christianity are any warmer and fuzzier than the Koran (which, by the way, forbids persecution of "people of the Book," i.e., Jews and Christians), just read things like Deut 20:16-18, Deut 22:13-21 and Deut 22:23-24. Then there's this heart-warming utterance of Jesus: "But these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them in my presence." (Luke 19:27). As Jesus said, "He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone" (John 8:7).

If Jews and Christians took their holy books more seriously (i.e., literally), they'd be stoning people to death as well. The real difference, I think, isn't in the substance of the three Abrahamic religions themselves, but in the cultures that are influenced by these religious traditions. Islamic society was, during the Middle Ages, arguably more tolerant and prolific than their Christian contemporaries. It was mainly Muslims that helped to preserve the works of Aristotle, for example; and the Muslims were far more tolerant of Jews in places like Spain than their Christian counterparts (for more on this, see Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy, 323 & 419-31).

I think it's fair to say that certain people and cultures are more intolerant and prone to use religious teachings to justify violence, but I don't think it's fair to single out Muslims or Islam as being less tolerant/more violent than Christians or Christianity. People should be judged by their actions, not by what they chose to call themselves. Yes, the Constitution guarantees religious freedom, but singling out a particular religion like this only shows the world how intolerant we, as a country, can be.

being a bit of a luddite isn't so bad after all

I guess you could say that I've always been a bit of a Luddite, but I never really realized how dependent I am on the internet (via my girlfriend's computer, of course) until I recently moved and was forced to go a week without it. I literally use the internet for everything. (Ironically, I had to google 'Luddite' to find out what it meant after I received a letter from a good friend of mine saying, "Sorry for ruining you hippie, socialist, Luddite, Buddhist lifestyle with this newfangled phone.")

I don't even know how people lived before the internet. You know, the days when you found a job through a friend who knew someone who knew someone who was hiring or an ad in the classified section of the newspaper. (Do they even have those anymore?)

I mean, we found our new apartment on Craigslist, which is where I also found my job three years ago. Instead of wasting time waiting in line at the DMV to change our address, we spent five minutes doing it online. Same with USPS. I use Moviefone to see what's playing in my area, and IMDb to see if anything's actually worth watching. (My girlfriend won't bother seeing anything rated under 7.0.) Anytime I need some computer/tech-related advice (which, admittedly, isn't all that often), I head over to Icrontic. Hungry and looking for a good breakfast place in southeast PDX (that's Portland, OR for those of you not in the know)? Yelp is good for that. (It's also good for finding dentists.) And if I'm ever in need of a phone number, directions, to know if a word is spelled correctly or a quick education on the labour theory of value, there's the all-knowing Google.

Yep, the internet has made my life a lot more convenient. Thanks to Facebook, I spent Christmas eating an amazing dinner and sipping on some Oban at a friend's house instead of alone, gnawing on a veggie burger from BK (couldn't afford to visit my family back in MI), and I never even knew their phone number. But, as I've also come to realize, relying so much on the internet has had it drawbacks as well.

I've noticed, for example, that my spelling has really gone downhill since I began relying on Google and spell check. I seem to make far more mistakes than I used to. (My theory is that my brain is using the internet like an external hard drive, dumping my vocabulary for simple HTML codes and logical fallacies to throw at people who are wrong on the internet.) I've noticed that my attention span has suffered as well. I tend to skim newspaper articles (when I bother to read them) way more than before, and I have trouble reading a book for more than an hour. (I used to be able to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy in a few days.) I even find myself getting irritated when I can't hit 'control F' to find something I read a few pages back that I want to look up again.

But it hasn't just affected my memory and attention span, it's affected what passes for my social skills these days too. As shy as I was before, I have an even harder time interacting with people in real life social situations since discovering the world of social media, where I can take hours to perfect a witty comment from the anonymous safety of my own home (or local coffee shop); not to mention the fact that in real life, I don't have the luxury of deleting the dumb things I say before someone has the time to read them. Plus, it's way easier to just 'like' something than it is to have an actual conversation.

The good news (or the bad news depending on how you look at it) is that I'm not the only one who's noticed these things. (I thought I'd simply crossed into 'old geezer' territory). Just the other day I heard a story on NPR about a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly (subtly titled, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?") that reaches a similar conclusion. And you know what, it's got me thinking that being a bit of a Luddite isn't such a bad thing after all.

As convenient as technology can make our lives, I think there's a limit to how much we can depend on it until it becomes a psychological crutch—one that we know we don't need, but one that we've become so dependent on we can't seem to function without it. Convenience is a type of pleasure, mostly in the Epicurean sense of being the absence of displeasure, and the key, I think, is to find a happy medium between technological asceticism and becoming the human equivalent of the Borg. I guess the moral of the story is that you really can have too much of a good thing; although I'm sure most people have already figured this out by now.

(A version of this post also appears as an article on Icrontic Life.)

a froggy (faulty) comparison

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the value of life — not just human life, but life in general — and it all started with a casual status update that had to do with a pool full of frogs. Someone jokingly mentioned poison, and another agreed, saying something about there being "enough frogs in the world." I countered that it can be argued there are more than enough people in this world and asked if poison was a good solution for that too.

Of course, I realize they were just kidding, and I was being hyperbolic; but even so, I still think it's a valid point. From my point of view, a frog and a human are both living beings, and even in jest, I find the idea of euthanizing frogs simply because they're numerous troubling. Not only that, but I think the notion that our lives are inherently worth more should be challenged as well.

I imagine most people might see it differently, but I fail to see how a human life is objectively more valuable or important than the life of any other kind of living creature. Certainly we differ from other animals in a variety of ways — from our ability to produce things, especially our means of subsistence, to our levels of culture and communication — but that doesn't mean our lives are worth more in some universally objective sense.

In fact, I'd argue that the idea human beings are more important than other animals is an arbitrary and human-centric position, and in the grand scheme of things, the overpopulation of humans is more of a danger to the planet than the overpopulation of frogs. As far as I'm aware, there have been no recorded cases of frog-caused extinctions, but there have been a number of human-caused extinctions, many of them due to destruction of habitat and overhunting.

Subjectively speaking, I can see how the idea that the life of a human is equally as valuable as that of any other species simply because they're both living organisms may seem ridiculous. But the fact that most living creatures share a rudimentary desire to be free from pain (the highest pleasure in the Epicurean sense) makes it hard for me not to be empathetic towards all living creatures and respect them as much as possible. It's not that I think frogs or other animals are on the same 'playing field' with people, but I do think their lives are equally valuable simply for the sake of being alive (which is a bit of a tautology I suppose).

Don't get me wrong, I understand that all living things must consume/feed in order to survive, and some are dangerous and survival instincts almost always trump empathy. But the more I see that other animals are just as capable of feeling pain as we are, and considering our superior level of intellect and our ability to change and shape the environment, I've come to see our role on this planet differently. We've essentially become the caretakers of this planet and all the life on it, and our responsibility has transcended our position on the food chain.

In the past, we've failed to realize how much impact we actually have on the environment and it's been a costly mistake, not only in terms of environmental degradation but species extinction as well. Of course, I'm not talking about some frogs in a pool now, but the general attitude that we as a species have towards nature.

Sadly, it seems to be far easier for us to destroy what we consider to be a nuisance and 'lower' forms of life (i.e., everything else) than it is to respect them and treat them as if they also have a right to live alongside us. Many people think this is only natural, and in a sense they’re right, but it's my hope that we’ll eventually develop a less human-centric view—one that takes the lives of other creatures more into consideration.

national day of prayer unconstitutional?

The recent decision by a federal judge in Wisconsin that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional was brought to my attention by friend of mine today, who happened to post a couple of status updates about it on Facebook. Apparently, many Christian groups are outraged and wrongly accusing Obama of cancelling the National Day of Prayer service, never mind the fact that Obama is actually the defendant in this case.

Nevertheless, I think this case does raise an important question about the place of religion in government, and I have to say that I agree with the judge on this one. On matters of church and state, I take a position similar to that of Thomas Jefferson — author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the U.S. — who held that the First Amendment builds a "wall of separation between church and state," and said that "civil powers alone have been given to the President of the U S. and no authority to direct the religious exercises of his constituents."

Of course, it can be argued that "recommending" a day of prayer doesn't technically violate the letter of First Amendment, and many presidents have done so in our nation's history, but I agree with the judge that the National Day of Prayer — a statute passed by Congress in 1952 and signed into law by President Truman — is "an inherently religious exercise that serves no secular function." In designating a day for the nation to "turn to God in prayer and meditation at churches, in groups, and as individuals," I believe that it violates the spirit and intent of the "Establishment Clause" of the First Amendment and, as such, it exceeds the power given to both the legislative and executive branches of government.

Not only that, but the bill itself was a blatant attack on atheists and political free speech — which is also protected by the First Amendment by the way — as evidenced by Sen. Absalom Robertson's (Pat Robertson's father) comment when introducing the bill in the Senate in 1952 as a measure against "the corrosive forces of communism which seek simultaneously to destroy our democratic way of life and the faith in an Almighty God on which it is based."

The President can still issue a proclamation calling for a national day of prayer without it violating the Constitution. The judge herself made it clear that the plaintiffs had "standing to challenge section 119, but not to challenge presidential prayer proclamations generally." This is supported in part by the Supreme Court’s decision in 1983 case of Marsh v. Chambers, where the Supreme Court ruled that the practice of opening legislative sessions with a prayer lead by a government funded chaplain was constitutional. But a federal statute (i.e., an act of Congress) mandating the president establish a national day of prayer almost certainly crosses the line.

While I strongly support religious freedom, I also support freedom from religion when it comes to the role of the state in public affairs. To be honest, I fail to see how the federal statute that establishes the National Day of Prayer has managed to remain standing for this long.

Sources: Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptist Association (1802), Jefferson's letter to Rev. Samuel Miller (1808) and Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. v. Obama.

obama authorizes assassination of u.s. citizen

According to a recent article at Salon.com, the Obama administration has authorized the assassination of a U.S. citizen "no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield." Due process, what's that?

I understand that Anwar al-Awlaki may be involved with Al-Qaeda and therefore a potentially serious threat, but they're not even trying to hide their disregard for the Constitution anymore, they're coming right out and saying, "We don't give a damn about the 14th Amendment" with this "presidential assassination program."

Of course, most of us already knew that, but you'd think they'd at least pretend to uphold the Constitution or something. I guess even that’s too much to ask. It's not all bad, though. As someone I know put it: "Well, at least [the U.S. government] can only legally assassinate you if you're overseas... so, this is really a step towards equality, in a way. We'll now have the same rights as the citizens of all the countries that the U.S. has occupied over the past century!"

Seriously though, I find it deeply troubling that Obama has chosen to continue this abhorrent policy, which was started by George W. Bush, although never actually implemented by him. If Obama didn't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize then, he most certainly doesn't deserve it now.

a sprawling mess of politics, history and healthcare

On the Oregonian's public blog, My Oregon, Paul G. Rollis wrote:

"A Rose by Any Other Name..." (socialism, corporatism, progressivism, marxism, etc.)

You can also throw in communism, for good measure.

As people argue for and against each of the above, most seem either to ignore or are completely ignorant of the one thing that they ALL have in common. Each is based upon the basic idea that government should have constantly increasing, perhaps all, power to run a society. This, in turn, is based upon the idea that the government knows what is best for you, regardless of if you like it or want it or not. This is a proven form of creeping dictatorship with the concomitant decrease of individual rights and freedoms and the total loss of any meaningful power of the people in a democratic system. It gradually eviscerates and makes meaningless the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Some of the proponents of these systems knowingly work for imposing these systems of government upon a society, but they rarely are open and honest about their goals, because they know that most people do not want to lose their rights and freedoms. This often causes the supporters of these ideas to operate in secret and with deception in order to gain their goals.

Does this have any bearing on the 2700+ page health care reform bills currently proposed by the Democratic Party in congress? I think so, and if you actually know what the bills contain, you would probably think so, too.

What a surprise. Someone using the word "socialism" pejoratively is equating healthcare reform with big government, and big government with the "loss of any meaningful power of the people in a democratic system." So, liking a good debate every now and then, I replied with:

Technically speaking, socialism is an economic system, not a form of government. While governments can be more or less socialistic, socialism itself is a mass movement towards economic democracy — collectively owned and democratically controlled production based on need rather than profit — and the creation of an egalitarian, classless society.

While some types of socialism have taken the form of state socialism, whereby the state becomes the sole capitalist in the name of the people, this method has proven to be the best way to unsuccessfully implement socialism and lead to the installment of repressive totalitarian regimes that exploit their citizens more than capitalism ever could (e.g., the authoritarian and militaristic style of socialism that dominated China and Russia). Democratic socialists (e.g., Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, etc.), on the other hand, actually push for a more decentralized and directly democratic economy and political system.

What this has to do with the [current] healthcare debacle, however, I have no idea. As far as I'm concerned, it misrepresents a host of socialists' politics by utilizing the same socialism = statism straw man argument that almost everyone propagates to death—as if every extreme form of government intervention in the economy in which production is dominated by an authoritarian political regime or state is equivalent to socialism. This is exactly the same kind of red-baiting Reagan used in his 1961 LP recording for the Operation Coffee Cup campaign against medicare, or as Reagan called it, "socialized medicine." As if medicare was some kind of danger to democracy and individual liberty. Pfft.

And even if the universal healthcare like they have in those horrible places like Britain, Canada, France, etc. can be considered "socialist," the kind of aggressive government intervention that has taken place in this country with the trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street should really be called something like "corporatism," "state capitalism" or "state corporate capitalism" because it's pretty much doing the exact opposite of what socialism entails when it takes money from average workers via taxes and gives it to giant, multinational corporations.

What is truly leading the loss of democracy in this country is the lack of civic participation on the part of its citizens. For example, people can't just vote once a year and think that's the end of their obligation. But hell, they don't even do that. Here in Oregon, for example, we can vote by mail. We don't even have to leave our house to vote and we still can't reach 100% turnout!

But we need to do even more than that. We need to call and write our representatives. We need to go to their offices and talk to them face to face. We need to organize with other like-minded individuals and push for the policies we want. I vote, but I'm not under the illusion that my one vote can change as much as my activism can. Nevertheless, I'd be much happier about our electoral system if we had public financing of elections and the ability to immediately recall representatives if we felt that they weren't doing their jobs effectively. That would not only help to remove all of the big-monied interests from Washington, it would help put power back into the hands of the people.

Rollis responded:

Obviously you can not see the pervasive correlation between the increase of socialist "economic" goals and the loss of personal rights and freedoms, or the ever-increasing power of government. Where, if anywhere, do you see the tipping point when the people no longer are in control of the government, and, instead, the government has total control over the people?

Also, I see that you very conveniently left out of your description of socialism one of its most important characteristics, namely, the allocation of resources.

That is the source of concern of the American people regarding the health care reform bills, because this "allocation of resources" concept is the basis of inevitable rationing, or worse yet, the complete denial of medical care to those who need it. This is the current practice in all of those European countries that already have socialized medicine.

To which I answered with this sprawling rebuttal:

The allocation of resources is an inherent part of any type of economy. In free-market capitalism, for example, the allocation of resources is controlled primarily through the price mechanism. In mixed economies, resources are allocated through a combination of the price mechanism and allocation via various government agencies (e.g., think of a public resource like water that needs to be used for public consumption as well as things like irrigation, etc.).

As for resource allocation in our current healthcare system, insurance company bureaucrats routinely deny coverage and "ration" care. That is how insurance companies make their profit, after all. The real question is, who do we want to be in charge of approving medical care, an insurance company bureaucrat or a government bureaucrat? Each has its own pros and cons, but for the most part, more "socialized" healthcare systems that cover everyone have proven to be quite efficient and reliable.

According to the World Health Organization, for example, France has the best overall health care system in the world, excelling in 4 areas: (1) universal coverage, (2) responsive health care providers, (3) freedom of choice and (4) overall health and longevity of the population.

In 2005, France spent $3,926 per capita on healthcare, and of that, approximately 80% was government expenditure. The U.S., in comparison, spent $6,347, and of that, approximately 45% was government expenditure. Yet France has a higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate than the U.S. (Although, to be fair, I've heard it mentioned that the U.S. counts premature births whereas France doesn't, and these differences can't be attributed to the differences between the two systems alone as there are undoubtedly other factors involved, e.g., eating habits, stress levels, etc.)

Or how about Spain's healthcare system? Spain's constitution guarantees the right to universal healthcare and requires the state to provide it, it's ranked 7th best by the WHO, and according to one study published last year in the U.S. journal Health Affairs, there are a third fewer deaths caused by delayed access to health care than in the U.S.

And then there is Canada's healthcare system, which was quite similar to ours before they adopted a single-payer system. It's not only ranked higher than the U.S. system by the WHO (30th v. 37th out of 191 nations), but like France, Canada has a higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate than the U.S. (Again, these differences can't be attributed to the differences between the two systems alone, but I think it at least goes to show that Canadians seem to be doing OK with the system they've got.)

In addition, a 2006 peer-reviewed study of healthcare access in Canada and the U.S. done by the American Journal of Public Health concluded that "U.S. residents are one third less likely to have a regular medical doctor, one fourth more likely to have unmet health care needs, and are more than twice as likely to forgo needed medicines." Of course, every system has its problems, but I'd still say that Canada's system is pretty damn good considering it covers everyone and costs less per person than ours.

As for the for the idea that we're losing our democracy to the tyranny of "big government," you can't lose what you've never really had. What we're really losing is the fight for economic and political democracy in the U.S. The state has been skewed in favour of the ruling class from the very beginning. Although some of the Founders, namely Thomas Paine, did advocate for things like the abolition of slavery, free public education, progressive taxation, social safety nets (e.g., old-age pensions), etc., for the most part, the Founding Fathers, while arguably great men, weren't fighting for universal freedom and suffrage, they were fighting for the freedom of white, male property owners from the tyranny of the British monarchy.

Like most forms of government centered around property rights, the basic principle behind the establishment of our form of representative democracy had more to do with the ruling elites wanting to protect the small minority of property owners (including themselves) from the majority of the propertyless than anything else. As James Madison put it in Federalist No. 10, "… the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society."

The Federalist Papers, as you might know, were a series of essays arguing for the ratification of our Constitution. Federalist No. 10, written by Madison, addresses the question of factions, which he defines as "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."

Believing that an individual's "interest would certainly bias his judgement, and not improbably, corrupt his integrity," he saw a groups of individuals, or factions, as an even greater threat to individual liberty, even though paradoxically, he saw liberty as the cause by which factions arise. His solution, then, was to try to control the effects of factions within American society. This could be accomplished, he argued, by the establishment of a republic in favour of a direct democracy. And the representatives in this new republic were initially elected by a select few, namely white, male property owners.

While I agree with Madison, albeit somewhat reluctantly, about the dangers of having a majority of citizens who are united and motivated by a common interest who can take away the rights of the minority of other citizens, this can just as easily lead to the reverse, e.g., a minority of wealthy/propertied interests excluding the majority of poor/propertyless from voting, or in our case, from influencing the political process (e.g., the 5-to-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that overturned certain longstanding limits on political campaign spending by corporations, effectively giving them even more lobbying power).

One of the few things I think Andrew Jackson got right (as opposed to his support of slavery and the Indian Removal Act) was his support for expanded suffrage, which at that time meant extending the right to vote to include all white males instead of just white, male property owners. Without removing this form of class antagonism, civil unrest on the part of the poor and disenfranchised could have gotten to the point where revolt was a serious possibility. Removing this restriction, however, allowed more people to become directly involved in the political process, giving them (at least in theory) a more constructive way to address their grievances than violence. It was the first step in the ongoing fight for equality and universal suffrage.

But as a general principle, the ruling class seeks to do as little for the average citizen as it can. It wasn't until 1870, for example, that African American males were allowed to vote. And women weren't allowed to vote until 1920. 1920! So what changed? Was it the interests of the ruling class? Perhaps in some cases, but the vast majority of changes came after long, hard struggles by average men and women seeking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. From the abolition of slavery to the right of women to vote to the 40 hour work day, it was due to the bravery of ordinary, everyday men and women who were willing to stand up and fight for what they believed in that we have these things today.

Regardless of where one stands on economic democracy and private ownership v. collective ownership of the means of production, I think it can be agreed upon that part of the reason we're losing the battle for political democracy in the U.S. is the lack of civic participation on the part of its citizens. [As I said before], people can't just vote once a year and think that's the end of their civic obligation. But hell, most of the time they don't even seem to do that much. Here in Oregon, for example, we can vote by mail. We don't even have to leave our house to vote and we still can't reach 100% turnout! Voter turnout [in the U.S.] for the 2008 presidential election was only 63%. And many statewide elections are decided by even less.

But we need to do even more than that to win and secure our political freedom. We need to call and write our representatives. We need to go to their offices and talk to them face to face. We need to run for office [ourselves]. We need to organize with other like-minded individuals and push for the policies we want. We need to take to the streets in rallies and protests if need be. I vote, but I'm not under the illusion that my one vote can have as much of an impact as my activism can.

That said, I'd be much happier about our electoral system if we at least had public financing of elections and the ability to immediately recall representatives if we felt that they weren't doing their jobs effectively. It would not only help to remove all of the big-monied interests from Washington, it would help to finally put real political power into the hands of the people. But that will only happen if people demand it, which is why I believe apathy and complacency are the real enemies of freedom in the U.S.