Democracy

Good riddance to “professional” politicians

It appears that the “traditional” and “vitally important” political parties and cohorts will be ousted from their comfort zone on Saturday 29th.

Before, in, and after the “meltdown” voters found their public servants somewhat lacking when it came to serving the public, and actually that they had reversed the roles, i.e. that the public should serve them and of course pay for the deliberate, callous and premeditated (reptilian) crimes committed by their sponsors.

It will be most gratifying to see politicians join the common people on the dole queue and thus share with the people what their “vitally important” brilliance has accomplished.

“playing with their minds gives me such a pleasure”
x-Æ

The Comedians

For almost two years now, we have been blessed by a “problem” which has shielded us from looking at our own selfs. The haunting shadow of our own failure of our own weakness has been but forgotten.

Somehow, I’ve been reminded of Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians. There are similarities to our own fate. The country was governed for a very long time by “Papa Doc” and his “Tontons” have been woven into the fabric. There is a sustained denial of any wrong doing. Nothing which was done in the years up-to the crash may be personalized or even given a name. Or as Stieg Larsson put it, “fraud that was so extensive it was no longer merely criminal—it was business.”

We the Demos handed over our responsibility to Representatives,just as in the days when the horse was the fastest form of communication. Now we look at our representatives in horror and only 13% or less have any faith in their abilities or intentions. Professionally educated people have been prominent in this saga. Few questions have been asked about the state of their education. Science or Junk are we shielding educators that have forgotten the search for knowledge, and  replaced it with the manufactured truth?

In crawling our selfs out of this quicksand there will be no grand victories, only small ones, if we are lucky.

Will The Truth Report alleviate any of my trepidations??
Hoodwinked: An Economic Hit Man Reveals Why…
… a tide in the affairs of men
Infinite representative wisdom

Victory for Democracy

Democracy hasn’t been doing well lately, or as Arundhati Roy put it “the crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder”.

The priesthood for the private banker’s theology is all pervasive, and governments have become little more than “escorts” on their payroll. This is all the more peculiar as it should be the legal prerogative of governments of the people by the people to give money its value.

But today we celebrate victory, the people say NO 93,3% – Yes 1,7% to the bailing out of private banks that have pretended to work on the behalf of the people, and in their infinite arrogance, have claimed to be doing Gods Work.

Congratulations Iceland with the National Referendum the first in the history of the Republic.

The Referendum
Birgitta Jonsdottir On the edge with Max Keiser [1] [2]

For the Love of Democracy

January 6, 2010 I wrote: The “political class” is franticly trying to abort the referendum in Iceland because of the dangerous precedence it would set for other plebeians, and God save our “principal men” from Democracy.

This is now confirmed in a classified letter from the US Embassy in Reykjavik published on Wikileaks. It is easy to demonize the president and forget about the 56,089 Icelanders (23,3% of Icelandic voters), that petitioned him to refer the law to a national referendum. Will our “principal men” succeed in breaking the Constitution in these remaining days?
—
May the hand wither that works against the inherent rights of the people.
—
New form WikiLeaks: UK-NL “profiteering” from deal. (pdf)
—
REF: REYKJAVIK 9

Classified By: CDA SAM WATSON FOR REASONS 1.4 (B) AND (D)

1. (C) Summary. CDA met with Ministry of Foreign Affairs Permanent Secretary Einar Gunnarsson and Political Advisor Kristjan Guy Burgess January 12 to discuss Icesave. After presenting a gloomy picture of Iceland’s future, the two officials asked for U.S. support. They said that public comments of support from the U.S. or assistance in getting the issue on the IMF agenda would be very much appreciated. They further said that they did not want to see the matter go to a national referendum and that they were exploring other options for resolving the issue. The British Ambassador told CDA separately that he, as well as the Ministry of Finance, were also looking at options that would forestall a referendum. End Summary.

SUBJECT: LOOKING FOR ALTERNATIVES TO AN ICESAVE REFERENDUM

Skuggathing (Shadow Parliament)

Skuggathing or Shadow Parliament is a social networking portal based on Open Active Democracy a system which in turn is a merger between: NationBuilder and Open Direct Democracy.

Bills and discussions are collected from Alþingi (Parliament) and added onto the web

Everyone can participate in the discussions, vote for or against arguments and add their own”bills” to the Skuggathing (Shadow Parliament).

In a TV interview the authors said that the Skuggathing (Shadow Parliament) portal came out of frustration with the lack of opurtunity ordinary people had to participate in the discussions after the Crash, in a way other social networking portals did not provide.

+ Is something good coming out of the Crash?
– “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.” Henry David Thoreau

e-Voting

I have long envied the Swiss for their tradition of direct Democracy, we however, with no such tradition, can we vote Yes or No to save us from a Systemic failure ?

By Systemic I mean all the components in a society where, the government, parliament, legal-, financial-, public-, private-, educational institutions, the media, and the voters have failed in their duties.

Can we put our trust in an all but a bankrupt corporation with a history of public relations stunts, to provide the technical environment for this vote ? By technical environment I mean proprietary software with no known public auditing, pair-reviews, version control or public controls of any kind?

Has there been a serious debate on the consequences of the result? Is the international financial empire just a Paper tiger or will they send in the jackals ?

This all smells of politicians wanting to score cheep points in a very serious affair in which we apparently have learned nothing, and while we are distracted over questions of no importance, our own jackals continue their scavenging for the spills.

Electronic voting
Black Box Voting
E-Democracy
Sur le e-vote à Genève ..1.. ..2..
E-stonia’s m-voting
Simpson (_8(|)

No Such Thing as a Random Sample

Opinion Makers are preparing a “National Assembly” (whole 0.3%) to flash out ideas of how we should mark our future after the horrific failure in our past.

At first look this appears to be a grand idea, Democracy at Work, – finally.

The selection process has been trumpeted as random sample out of the National Registry, i.e “having no definite aim or purpose; not sent or guided in a particular direction; made, done, occurring, etc., without method or conscious choice; haphazard”.

To start off, large sections of people have opted out of being included in ‘samples’ of any kind and the rest just don’t bother or have no knowledge of the possibility. People of foreign nationality although legible to vote in local elections automatically drop out, a primitive ‘random’ record collector is used, and there are many more limitations on the ‘randomness’.

Then there is the simple question of the organizers, who are they (Chamber of Commerce?), and the question who decided on those, who are the specially preselected representatives of special interests, and who decided on the general framework of the meting (consumer panels)?

So we are back to the “Propaganda model”, Agenda Setting by Predetermine, Select, Shape, Control and Restrict by: Selection of Topics, Distribution of Concerns, Emphasis, Framing of Issues, Filtering of Information and Bounding of Debate

Bankers in the Selling Role

The Engineering of Consent

The Silence of the Web

The latest trend in our ‘democratic’ and ‘crime free’ society is the hostility expressed towards bloggers / reporters. The self appointed ‘elite’, financial or otherwise, id est those who have acceptable opinions are mightily indignant over inappropriate comments and leaks in the blogger sphere and want it stopped. The old tools they are so grief-stricken for are the mass media, proper academics and of course their legal technicians (as they are now called).

I my self find Chomsky’s explanations illuminating when he writes: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

Nemesis on visit

The Icelandic nation is thunderstruck. The much acclaimed experiment in neocon-free-market-capitalist -governance has collapsed. People in this long-standing parliamentary democracy are now asking; Who knew? Who was informed? Who gave the permission for this to go on to its inevitable conclusion?

I for one would want to ask every single member of parliament these two questions.

  1. Did you know that Private Corporations where operating abroad backed by state guaranties?

  2. Did you ever inform your electorate of this fact? *

The only information I’ve got is that these are the rules of the EU and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). – Which justifies it?

It seams to me that we as a nation have lost our reputation much like a rape victim, that “we the people” have been led into debt slavery for generations to come, and finally, to sweeten the blow will be the first ‘developed’ nation in years, having to ask the IMF for ‘help’.

Is this a prime example: of shock doctrine and disaster capitalism, of corrupt politicians in bed with corporations, of idiot ideologues, of marginalized public, or are the answers to be found in the sacred texts of the Chicago School of Economics (…which of course were not followed to the Marxist letter)?

If you are living in a privileged country like we were, maybe it’s time to come out of the hypnotic trance so lovingly catered for by the mass media. – After all, the bursting of the ‘fractional reserve’ and/or derivative bubble’s is waiting for all of us.

* Deep (legal) Thought is already hard at work disputing the nature of reality in general and of facts in particular.

Scroll to Top