But power is just capability. We all have it and need it. The problem is over-concentration of power.

The potential vehicle for change is moral outrage about the over-concentration of power. The over-concentration of power is immoral because:
1) When the few hoard privilege and resources, they constrain the many from having rights and capabilities to reduce their suffering (from housing, environmental, health, reproductive rights, same-sex marriage and other issues)
2) It is very often used to limit the distribution of power, adding to 1)
3) It is very often used to further concentrate power, adding to 1) and 2)

The big idea is for the secular progressive think tanks to provide the analysis of the network of “1%” power influences and the actual suffering that that causes, and then can distribute that information to the liberal and progressive media, who in turn can feed that information to the Christian left, who are highly motivated right now behind the “occupy wall street” movement.

This initiative, the application of moral judgment to the over-concentration of power, can be summarized in the slogan “Question the morality of power”.

What’s going on here is “Shock Therapy”, and if you don’t know what that is, you had better find out now, because it is directing our very lives, and the direction it is taking leads only to further disaster.

To thoroughly understand our political/economic position in our country today, either you must be one of a few elite Disaster Capitalists who seek to erase and remake the world for their own enrichment, or you need seriously to read Naomi Klein’s THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: THE RISE OF DISASTER CAPITALISM, [Copyright 2007, published by Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.]

Klein chronicles over three decades of imposition of the Shock Doctrine upon many countries around the world, from Chile and other South American countries, to Russia, to Iraq and more. She sheds a light on the economic doctrine of Milton Friedman (1912-2006), “grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism. . . credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper mobile global economy.” He called New Orleans’ Katrina tragedy “an opportunity for a permanent reform”, beginning with privatization of public institutions and services. Klein calls these “raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, ‘disaster capitalism‘.”

For more than three decades, Friedman and his powerful followers had been “perfecting the strategy of a fundamentalist version of capitalism: waiting for a major crisis, then selling off pieces of the state to private players [for pennies on the dollar] while citizens were still reeling from the shock, then quickly making the ‘reforms’ permanent.”

The shock doctrine asserts, “only a crisis–actual or perceived–produces real change.” First, free-market ideas are stockpiled. Then “when crisis has struck, act swiftly to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slips back into the ‘tyranny of the status quo‘.” It gives new meaning to Rahm Emanuel’s remark, “You never want a serious crisis go to waste.”

Beginning in the mid-seventies, Friedman advised Chilean dictator Pinochet, following his violent coup, “to impose rapid-fire transformation of the economy–tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation.” Sound familiar? “This extreme capitalist makeover became known as a “Chicago School” revolution, since so many of Pinochet’s economists had studied under Friedman at the University of Chicago. Friedman predicted that the speed and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions in the public that ‘facilitate the adjustment’, an all-at-once tactic he called economic ‘shock treatment‘, or ‘shock therapy‘, to which were added economic shocks that impoverished millions and an epidemic of torture that punished hundreds of thousands of people.”

Shock doctrine was imposed in many countries throughout the world for the following thirty years, “the formula reemerging with far greater violence in Iraq, starting with the ’Shock and Awe’ military doctrine“, followed by “radical economic shock therapy–mass privatization, complete free trade, a 15% flat tax, a dramatically downsized government.”

Amidst these decades of crises–whether natural or created–while the “nexus of Republican politicians, think tanks and land developers started talking about ‘clean sheets’ and exciting opportunities, it became clear that the preferred method of advancing corporate goals [profits] was to use moments of collective trauma to engage in radical social and economic engineering.”

Through 587 pages of text accompanied by 74 pages of exhaustive documentation, Klein vividly details how, for decades, the right-wing followers of Milton Friedman Chicago School’s Shock Doctrine exploited economic, social and human crises via the strategy of Disaster Capitalism’s shock therapy–enriching the few powerful super-rich at the expense, torture and disempowerment of the many.

What are the Republicans supporting and calling for in America today? Lower taxes; privatization of government services; free trade; reduction or elimination of so-called entitlements and programs benefiting the needy; reducing the size of government while maintaining the military industrial complex and endless war-profiteering; using “safety” to justify torture, loss of freedoms, and extension of the Patriot act; financing and bailing out banks which hoard enormous amounts of capital that could be used to start new businesses and create countless desperately-needed jobs; and deregulation of financial institutions so that they can continue the same policies that created the economical disaster we are trying to deal with today. Is this not shock doctrine, shock therapy and Disaster Capitalism at work–here and now? I submit that it is.

Congress is controlled by and dances to the tune of the powerful corporations that finance their election campaigns. The recent Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United vs. FEC (Federal Elections Committee) case, stating that corporations are people, having the same rights as people, and the right to spend unlimited amounts of money to control elections, must not be allowed to stand. To overturn the Supreme Court’s decision, a Constitutional amendment stating that corporations are not people is imperative and urgent. Support the party and progressive candidates which pledge to enact this amendment.

I respectfully urge you to consider supporting candidates from the Green Party, the only party which is supported by and serves ONLY the people.

Betty Schier

There are many “ideas” of different ways for the government to spend money. But in the end, they are all just ways for the government to spend money, and when people do NOT want the government to spend more money all of those ideas become less relevant to a discussion.

Is the total amount of work going to stay the same (and either have riots or welfare), or will it go up even by introducing inefficiency, or will it go down by sharing work.

This dichotomy can easily be described in basic terms, but most “paradigms” do not even address this point. All “paradigms” that involve introducing inefficiency can ‘solve’ the jobs crisis and artificially reduce income inequality, but all of these paradigms are also unpopular with the public. One can declare by fiat that a certain idea is clearly visionary and would introduce a brave new paradigm, but no one feels it would advance their goals, that intellectual victory resides only in your head.

Now, the same argument would apply to ‘ideas’ that involve one of the other options, of reducing the total amount of work done: http://pastebin.com/Wy8B0hK9

…but in contrast to “paradigms” that involve more spending, that would does not seem like it should be unpopular with the public for any reason. Unpopular with economists, perhaps, because it does not make the magic GDP number go up, but perhaps supporting it would hurt them professionally somehow so it isn’t so important if no economists support something that would fix unemployment.

This “popular election and control” idea is a pretty old one and some think a pretty good one – how we did and continue to allow it to be circumvented needs to be addressed because its so fundamental to our government actually being a democratic republic in more than name alone.

Interview ME!

– Scott Baker, president of Common Ground-NYC, New York State Coordinator for Public Banking

The other big question; do we have the government we deserve because we ourselves do not wish to make tough choices necessary?

It’s really an introspective question, I know, but it’s something we all need to ask ourselves, in my opinion.

http://pas.sagepub.com/content/38/2/152.full.pdf+html

Makes the same point you make in this post – policy is beings influenced by and for the benefit of those at the very top.