|
Subsidiarity:
A word for now
Buy
local drive helping independent businesses
The
local: where the action is
The town meeting comes back to
New York City
200 crowds celebrate International
Cash Mob Day
Right and left join to fight developer
seizure of property
Study finds local businesses better
for local economy
The virtues of government decentralization
Federal abuse of National Guard
leaves Vermont without rescue helicopters
Good things one town did and others
can do
125 communities take on corporate
personhood
Local business spurs growth
Vermont considering its own healthcare
plan
Democrats trying to create two
states out of Arizona
THE STARFISH VS SPIDER APPROACH
TO ORGANIZATION
THE ISSUE THAT'S KILLING THE LEFT
RECOVERY ACT INTERFERES WITH STATE
BUDGETING
LOCAL DEMOCRACY AS WELL AS LOCAL
LETTUCE
AMERICA IS BECOMING LESS TRANSIENT, MORE
LOCAL
2010
STATES REDISCOVERING TENTH AMENDMENT
OBAMA WEAKENS GOVERNORS' CONTROL
OVER STATE NATIONAL GUARD
THE ISSUE THAT'S KILLING
THE DEMOCRATS
Sam Smith
Rasmussen Reports has come out with a fascinating
poll that goes a long way to explaining why not only liberals
are doing so badly, but the left in general, the Democratic Party
and Barack Obama. Here's what the poll found:
- Forty-three percent
of U.S. voters rate the performance of their local government
as tops compared to its counterparts on the state and federal
level.
- Nineteen percent say
state government is better than the other two.
- Just 14% think the federal
government does a better job.
- And 25% aren't sure.
- Fifty-six percent of
all voters believe the federal government has too much influence
over state government. Only 12% percent say the federal government
doesn't have enough influence over states, and another 26% say
the balance is about right.
This is a huge matter
that Democrats don't even discuss and which helps to create the
sort of popular anger that has developed over the past year.
Nearly two thirds of the voters think state and local governments
are better than the federal version.
There are two ironies
in this:
- The Democrats could
do everything they should be doing - only far better - if they
paid more attention to the level and manner in which it is done.
- Those expressing outrage
at what the Democrats are doing think the level and manner determines
its underlying virtue and thus end up opposing programs that
would serve them well. They are being easily manipulated into
illusions such as that national healthcare is a bad idea. And
so they serve the interests of the very centralized authority
they think they are opposing.
Neither side seems able
to separate the question of what needs to be done from who should,
and how to, do it. The liberals think it can only be done at
the federal level and because they don't like that idea, conservatives
think it shouldn't be done at all.
As a devolutionary progressive,
this is something I have been dealing with for decades. If you
don't think the devolution of power is alien to liberal thinking,
just try advocating it. It's been pretty much a dead end.
And it's not just traditional
liberals. My fellow Green Party members - heavily decentralist
in many ways - fail to see the possibility for new alliances
with others if the devolutionary principle was raised in a more
visible and universal fashion. Similarly, localism is quite popular
among environmentalists, but it only seems to apply to growing
food and not to saving democracy.
And now we have a Democratic
president who has, in one short year, managed to mangle two of
the issues his party used to be good at - heath care and reviving
the economy - in no small part because of an assumption that
he and his grad school retinue are far better equipped to decide
how to do it all than, say, the mayor of Cleveland or the governor
and state legislature of Montana.
The end result is that
his programs fail and the policies behind get a bad name.
How much saner it would
be to recognize the desire of people to share not only in the
benefits, but the exercise, of power and adjust one's policies
to reflect this.
The point here is not
to argue any particular solution, but to say that the ever increasing
centralization of decisions at the federal level - thanks to
both major parties - is a fundamental cause of both our problems
and the anger about them.
As I wrote some time back,
"What works so well in the manufacture of a Ford Taurus
-- efficiency of scale and mass production -- fails to work in
social policy because, unlike a Taurus, humans think, cry, love,
get distracted, criticize, worry or don't give a shit. Yet we
keep acting as though such traits don't exist or don't matter.
We have come to accept the notion that the enormous institutions
of government, media, industry and academia are natural to the
human condition and then wonder why they don't work better than
they do. In fact, as ecological planner Ernest Callenbach pointed
out, 'we are medium-sized animals who naturally live in small
groups -- perhaps 20 or so -- as opposed to bees or antelopes
who live in very large groups. When managers or generals or architects
force us into large groups, we speedily try to break them down
into sub-units of comfortable size.'"
It's time for liberals
and progressives to bring their politics down to the 'hood. They'd
be surprised at the friends they would make.
JANUARY 2010
LIBERALS SHOULD STOP DISSIN' TENTH
AMENDMENT
LOCAL HEROES: BIPARTISAN EFFORT
TO RESTORE OREGON'S CONTROL OVER NATIONAL GUARD
STATES REDISCOVERING THE TENTH
AMENDMENT
MONTANA COURT UPHOLDS DOCTOR ASSISTED
SUICIDE
WHY BRITISH PUBS ARE STILL IMPORTANT
Social Issues Research
Center - In the
late 1930s Tom Harrisson and his colleagues at the Mass-Observation
Unit conducted what is probably the earliest, and certainly the
most extensive, study of pub-going. The team of social anthropologists
did little else for nearly two years but sit in pubs and observe
the complex rituals of behaviour that subtly underlie everyday
life in the local. . .
Harrisson and his colleagues
showed [clearly that] the pub as a British institution towered
over its rivals for attention, commitment and, indeed, 'donations':
"Of the social institutions that mould men's lives between
home and work in an industrial town, such as Worktown, the pub
has more buildings, holds more people, takes more of their money,
than church, cinema, dance hall, and political organizations
put together."
Today, little in reality
has changed. There may now be rather fewer pubs in relation to
the population and many certainly look rather different from
the vaults and taprooms of old. But . . . the pub retains its
unique position in British society, and for much the same reasons
as in Harrisson's day. As he noted then, it is "the only
kind of public building used by large numbers of ordinary people
where their thoughts and actions are not being in some way arranged
for them; in the other kinds of public building they are the
audiences, watchers of political, religious, dramatic, cinematic,
instructional or athletic spectacles. But within the four walls
of the pub, once a man has bought or been bought his glass of
beer, he has entered an environment in which he is a participator
rather than a spectator.". . .
The special features of
the local - the layout, the decor, the music in some cases, the
games, the etiquette and ritual practices and, of course, the
drinking - are all designed to promote positive social interaction,
reciprocity and sharing. In this sense the British pub has much
in common with dedicated drinking places in other parts of the
world. In Austrian lokals, for example, the anthropologist Thomas
Thornton observed that "intimate social groups. . . come
into being there, even if only to last the night. Benches surround
the tables, forcing physical intimacy between customers. Small
groups of twos or threes who find themselves at the same or adjoining
tables often make friends with their neighbours and share wine,
schnapps, jokes and game-playing the rest of the evening."
In almost all drinking-places,
in almost all cultures, the unwritten laws and customs involve
some form of reciprocal drink-buying or sharing of drinks. This
practice has been documented in drinking-places from modern,
urban Japan and America and rural Spain and France to remote
traditional societies in Africa and South America and has long
been recognized by anthropologists, sociologists and even zoologists
- so fundamental is this practice to the survival of any social
species. . .
The British pub, like
its 'foreign' counterparts, meets timeless and global human needs
- that is why it survives and will continue to do so despite
the many other opportunities we have for 'joining' and for networking.
We may sign up to an online community to communicate with like-minded
people who share our interests across the globe, or we may reveal
selected aspects of ourselves on Facebook. These are, however,
'non-local' by definition. They are what the late urban planner
Melvin Webber, predicting over thirty years ago the internet
trends that we witness today, called 'community without propinquity'.
They are, in a very significant sense, different. They may extend
our social and professional lives and allow much wider patterns
of interaction, but they do not replace the more traditional
and timeless face-to-face activities that take place in the special
social institutions created to facilitate them - central among
them, the pub.
CROSSING BORDERS BY CHANGING TABLES
Bldg Blog - Baarle-Hertog
borders the Netherlands - but, because of its unique history
of political division, the town is sort of marbled with competing
national loyalties. In other words, pockets of the town are Dutch;
most of the town is Belgian. You can thus wander from country
to country on an afternoon stroll. . .
Wikipedia Apart from the
main piece (called Zondereigen) located north of the Belgian
town of Merksplas, there are twenty Belgian exclaves in the Netherlands
and three other pieces on the Dutch-Belgian border. There are
also seven Dutch exclaves within the Belgian exclaves.
The border is so complicated
that there are some houses that are divided between the two countries.
There was a time when according to Dutch laws restaurants had
to close earlier. For some restaurants on the border it meant
that the clients simply had to change their tables to the Belgian
side.
Sarah Laitner, at the
Financial Times, adds that "women are able to choose the
nationality of their child depending on the location of the room
in which they give birth." Another website, apparently drawing
from the Michelin Guide to the Netherlands, explains the origins
of Baarle-Hertog's bizarre geography: it can all be traced back
to the 12th century, it seems, when the town was first divided.
The northern half of the town became part of the Barony of Breda
(later home to the Nassau family), and the southern half went
to the Duke of Brabant (Hertog means Duke in Dutch). But that
same website also mentions this:
"The municipality
limits are very complicated. Nowadays, each municipality has
its city hall, church, police, school and post office. The houses
of the two nationalities are totally mixed. They are identified
by the shield bearing their number: the national flag is included
on it.". . .
While we're on the subject
of micro-sovereignties, though, be sure to check out Neutral
Moresnet, a tiny, politically independent non-state formed around
a zinc mining operation in eastern Belgium. There's also Cospaia,
"a small former republic in Italy" which "unexpectedly
gained independence in 1440" after Pope Eugene IV sold the
land it stood on. "By error," we read, "a small
strip of land went unmentioned in the sale treaty, and its inhabitants
promptly declared themselves independent." The Free State
Bottleneck, Åland Islands, and the Sovereign Military Order
of Malta are all also worth checking out.
STATES WITH FOREIGN
POLICIES
MARK K. MATTHEWS, STATELINE -
Maine may not have a seat at the United Nations, but its state
lawmakers are dealing with Caracas, Havana and Khartoum as if
those foreign capitals were nearby Boston. In the past few months,
Maine Gov. John Baldacci (D) has engineered a controversial oil
deal with Venezuela, met with maligned Cuban dictator Fidel Castro
and supported an effort to divest state funds from Sudan to protest
human rights violations there. . . The diplomacy isn't limited
to Maine. States increasingly are becoming more assertive on
the international stage.
More than 30 states now
export goods to Cuba despite tight U.S. trade restrictions. Organizations
in eight states brokered deals to import heating oil for the
poor this winter from Venezuela, despite strained relations between
the White House and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Three states
-- Illinois, New Jersey and Oregon -- passed laws to divest state
funds from companies with interests in war-scarred Sudan. In
the Southwest, states are engaging in bilateral talks with Mexico
to stop crime along the border.
COMMISSION RECOMMENDS GOVERNORS
HAVE CONTROL OF ALL MILITARY IN STATE DURING DISASTERS
|
POCKET PARADIGM
What works so well in the manufacture
of a Ford Taurus -- efficiency of scale and mass production --
fails to work in social policy because, unlike a Taurus, humans
think, cry, love, get distracted, criticize, worry or don't give
a shit. Yet we keep acting as though such traits don't exist
or don't matter. We have come to accept the notion that the enormous
institutions of government, media, industry and academia are
natural to the human condition and then wonder why they don't
work better than they do. In fact, as ecological planner Ernest
Callenbach pointed out, "we are medium-sized animals who
naturally live in small groups -- perhaps 20 or so -- as opposed
to bees or antelopes who live in very large groups. When managers
or generals or architects force us into large groups, we speedily
try to break them down into sub-units of comfortable size."
- Sam Smith |
COMMUNITY
LAND TRUSTS
SCHUMACHER SOCIETY - A
Community Land Trust is a form of common land ownership with
a charter based on the principles of sustainable and ecologically-sound
stewardship and use. The land in a CLT is held in trust by a
democratically-governed non-profit corporation. Through an inheritable
and renewable long-term lease, the trust removes land from the
speculative market and [encourages] multiple uses such as affordable
housing, village improvement, commercial space, agriculture,
recreation, and open space preservation. Individual leaseholders
own the buildings and other improvements on the land created
by their labor and investment, but do not own the land itself.
Resale agreements on the buildings ensure that the land value
of a site is not included in future sales, but rather held in
perpetuity on behalf of the regional community.
The first community land
trust was formed in 1967 in Albany, Georgia by Robert Swann and
Slater King, seeking a way to achieve secure access to land for
African American farmers. The movement has grown to include over
200 community land trusts throughout the US and is widely understood
as the best model for developing permamently affordable homeownership
opportunities in regions of escalating land prices.
http://www.schumachersociety.org/clts.html
SWITZERLAND
DIETRICH FISCHER, PROGRESSIVE
REVIEW, 1991: [A] conflict developed in the 1950s in the canton
Bern in Switzerland, where a French speaking Catholic minority
in the Jura region felt constantly overruled by the German speaking
Protestant majority. The cantonal government in Bern sought to
persuade the French speaking minority that it was in their own
best interest to remain with the canton, since they received
economic subsidies.
But only the people of
the Jura themselves could decide what they valued more, economic
subsidies or self-government. As the process dragged on, demonstrations
became more frequent, and some cases of politically motivated
arson occurred. No one was killed, but there is little doubt
that if the conflict had remained unsolved, it could ultimately
have developed into a civil war like that in Northern Ireland.
After a long delay, the
Bernese government finally agreed to hold a referendum to let
the people in the Jura decide whether they preferred to form
their own canton or to remain within the canton Bern. The first
vote was about evenly split. So a second vote was held separately
in each of six districts. Three districts, bordering on the German
speaking part of the canton, had majorities preferring the old
arrangement, while the three districts that were farther removed
from the center preferred separation.
After that vote, each
community along the borderline was allowed to choose whether
it preferred to stay where it was or switch sides. Some switched.
In 1978 the new canton Jura was founded and welcomed by the voters
of Switzerland as a member of the confederation. Since then,
the violence has subsided, since most people got what they wanted,
or respected the verdict of the voters.
Self-determination is
an effective means of conflict resolution. It does not guarantee
that the optimal decision will be taken in all cases. But if
people make a mistake and suffer the consequences, they have
nobody but themselves to blame, and they simply have to try to
do better at the next opportunity. If, however, some far removed
central government makes a decision for the people and they suffer,
they have good reason to project their anger at those responsible.
. .
The secret of Switzerland's
long-lasting unity and stability may lie in its diversity. It
does not impose uniformity from a center, but allows a great
deal of local self-determination. Cooperation is the result of
negotiations between all of the parties involved and is entirely
voluntary, not forced upon them.
SWITZERLAND VS. THE
MIDDLE EAST
DIETRICH FISCHER, PROGRESSIVE
REVIEW, 1991 - A number of factors involved in the Swiss case
have been absent in the Middle East:
- Opportunity for self-determination
- Flexibility in drawing
borders based on small scale preferences that reflect community
desires rather than those of nation states.
- The substantial devolution
of power so that subcultures call their own shots wherever possible.
- Change by negotiation
and cooperation.
LOCAL
CURRENCIES
Widely used in the United States in the early 1900s, local currencies
are a legal, but underutilized tool for citizens to support local
economies. Local currencies function on a regional scale the
same way that national currencies have functioned on a national
scale - building the regional economy by creating a protective
membrane that is defined by the currency itself. Local businesses
that accept the currency are distinguished from chain stores
that do not, building greater affinity between citizens of the
region and their local merchants. Individuals choosing to use
the currency make a conscious commitment to buy locally first,
taking personal responsibility for the health and wellbeing of
their community, laying the foundation of a truly vibrant, thriving
local economy.
Deli Dollars, a single store scrip issued in Great Barrington,
Massachusetts in 1989 with help of E. F. Schumacher Society staff,
drew national media to the Berkshire region, helped renew public
interest in local currencies as a tool for community economic
revitalization, and led to the current issue of Berkshares, a
local currency for the Southern Berkshires. Berkshares are exchanged
for federal dollars at participating local Berkshire banks and
circulate at a wide variety of local businesses.
BERKSHARES
http://www.berkshares.org
EF SCHUMACHER SOCIETY
http://prorev.com/www.schumachersociety.org/
ITHACA HOURS
http://www.ithacahours.org/
LOCAL CURRENCIES
TIME DOLLAR NETWORK
http://www.cfg.com/timedollar
TIME DOLLAR
http://www.timedollar.org/
DEVOLUTION
IN THE U.S.
WIKIPEDIA - In the United
States region of New England, cities and towns practice limited
home rule and, for the most part, govern themselves in a directly-democratic
fashion known as the New England town meeting.
In Texas, counties do
not have home rule. Cities are not allowed home rule until population
reaches 5,000, whereupon the city may vote to adopt home rule
via a city charter.
The Wisconsin Constitution
gives cities and villages the right to determine their own local
affairs and government; counties, however, are given their powers
by legislative acts. The state legislature, in addition to powers
specifically granted to it by the constitution, can only pass
laws of state-wide interest which uniformly affect all cities
and villages.
In the United States only
the federal government and the state governments are recognized
by the United States Constitution. The Tenth Amendment to the
United States Constitution implies that local governments are
regulated by the state or the people.
Local governments such
as municipalities, counties, parishes, boroughs, school districts,
and other types of local government entities are devolved. They
are established, regulated, and subject to governance by the
laws of the state in which they reside. U.S. state legislatures,
in most cases, have the power to change laws that affect local
government structures. In some states, the governor may also
have power over local government affairs.
Puerto Rico, Guam, the
U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and other territories are
subject to their governments being directly regulated by congressional
acts. Unlike state governments which have reserved powers according
to the U.S. Constitution, U.S. territorial governments can constitutionally
be directly regulated by Congress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolved_government
WIKIPEDIA - In the United
States region of New England, cities and towns practice limited
home rule and, for the most part, govern themselves in a directly-democratic
fashion known as the New England town meeting.
In Texas, counties do
not have home rule. Cities are not allowed home rule until population
reaches 5,000, whereupon the city may vote to adopt home rule
via a city charter.
The Wisconsin Constitution
gives cities and villages the right to determine their own local
affairs and government; counties, however, are given their powers
by legislative acts. The state legislature, in addition to powers
specifically granted to it by the constitution, can only pass
laws of state-wide interest which uniformly affect all cities
and villages.
In the United States only
the federal government and the state governments are recognized
by the United States Constitution. The Tenth Amendment to the
United States Constitution implies that local governments are
regulated by the state or the people.
Local governments such
as municipalities, counties, parishes, boroughs, school districts,
and other types of local government entities are devolved. They
are established, regulated, and subject to governance by the
laws of the state in which they reside. U.S. state legislatures,
in most cases, have the power to change laws that affect local
government structures. In some states, the governor may also
have power over local government affairs.
Puerto Rico, Guam, the
U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and other territories are
subject to their governments being directly regulated by congressional
acts. Unlike state governments which have reserved powers according
to the U.S. Constitution, U.S. territorial governments can constitutionally
be directly regulated by Congress.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devolved_government
GETTING
LIBERALS & PROGRESSIVES TO THINK SMALL
SAM SMITH, PROGRESSIVE
REVIEW, 1993 - A couple of summers ago at the annual convention
of the longtime liberal group, Americans for Democratic Action,
I proposed a resolution on the decentralization of power. Permit
me to recycle a portion:
|||| There is growing
evidence that old ideological conflicts such as between left
and right, and between capitalism and communism, are becoming
far less important as the world confronts the social and economic
results of a century marked by increasing concentration of power
in countries of widely varying political persuasion. A new ideology
is rising, the ideology of devolution -- the decentralization
of power. Already it has swept through the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe.
Its voice is heard in
Spain, in Quebec and in Northern Ireland. It is the voice of
people attempting to regain control over societies that have
become increasingly authoritarian, unresponsive, and insensitive,
a revolt of ordinary humans against the excesses of the state.
. .
All around us is evidence
of the disintegration of effective government and a growing alienation
of the people from that government as a result. Our systems of
governance have become too big, too corrupt, too inflexible and
too remote from democratic concerns to respond equitably and
rationally to the changing needs of the people. Government has
many beneficial functions it can perform, but these can only
be achieved when the government itself is structured so as to
reflect -- and not thwart -- the will of the people.
Therefore we embrace the
devolutionary spirit of the times and, recognizing that the ideology
of scale must now be considered as carefully as the ideology
of liberal and conservative, we urge that this nation begin devolving
power back to the people -- that we correct a decades-long course
which has too often led to increasingly centralized power with
increasingly ineffective and undemocratic results. To this end,
we propose the following critical issues to fellow liberals and
progressives to consider, debate and act upon while there is
still time to reverse the authoritarian course of the American
government:
- How do we end the growing
concentration of power in the presidency and return to the tripartite
system of government intended by the Constitution? How can Congress
reassert its constitutional role in the federal government?
- How do we prevent federal
government green-mail of the states -- the granting or withholding
of federal funds to force state legislation -- from being used
as a way around the powers constitutionally granted the states?
- How can we decentralize
federal agencies to the state and local level?
- How do we create a new
respect for state and local rights? The bitter struggle to establish
the federal government's primacy in the protection of civil rights
of all its citizens has been used far too long as an excuse to
concentrate all forms of power in Washington. That legal battle
has been won. We must now recognize the importance of state and
local government in creative, responsive governance and not continue
to assume that good government can only come from within the
Beltway.
- How do we reduce restrictions
on federal funds granted states and localities in order to foster
imaginative local application of those funds and to prevent the
sort of federal abuse apparent, for example, in restrictions
on family planning advice?
- How do we encourage
-- including funding -- neighborhood government in our cities
so that the people most affected by the American urban disaster
can try their own hand at rebuilding their communities?
The principle that all
government should be devolved to the lowest practical level should
be raised to its proper primacy in the progressive agenda. We
cannot overstate the peril involved in continuing to concentrate
governmental power in the federal executive.|||||
The resolution proved
too much for the traditional liberals of ADA and the resolution
was roundly defeated in committee. Many voters, however, have
divined the problem of excessive scale while remaining, unsurprisingly,
confused as to what to do about it. False prophets on the right
tout a phony "empowerment," The media muddles the matter
with its usual in-depth cliches. What is lacking is not devolutionary
theory, nor grand schemes, nor useful experiments, but rather
a practical progressive politics of devolution. We need to apply
our theories and our experience to the every day politics of
ordinary citizens. If we do, I think we will surprise ourselves
and others in a discovery of where the American mainstream really
flows.
Here, for starters, are
a few suggestions of devolutionary issues progressives could
press:
- Public schools: In the
sixties there was a strong movement for community control of
the schools. Because it came largely from minority communities
and because the majority was not adequately distressed about
public education it faltered.
- Neighborhood government:
Real neighborhood government would not be merely advisory as
is the case with Washington DC's neighborhood commissions. It
would include the power to sue the city government, to incorporate,
to run its own programs, to contract to provide those of city
hall, and to have some measure of budgetary authority over city
expenditures within its boundaries. Not the least among its powers
should be a role in the justice system, since it is impossible
to recreate order in our communities while denying communities
any place in maintaining order.
We should create the "small
republics," that Jefferson dreamed of, autonomous communities
where every citizen became "an acting member of the common
government, transacting in person a great portion of its rights
and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important, and entirely within
his own competence."
- States' rights: While
maintaining federal preeminence in fields such as civil rights,
progressives should be strong advocates of states' rights on
issues not properly the federal government's business such as
raising the drinking age or the 55 mph speed limit. Such advocacy
would help to form new coalitions and stir up the ideological
pot. In particular, progressives should oppose the use of federal
green-mail -- forcing states and localities to take measures
at the risk of losing federal funding -- as a clear end run around
the 10th amendment of the Bill of Rights. As the Supreme Court
noted in Kansas v. Colorado, this amendment "discloses the
widespread fear that the national government might, under the
pressure of supposed general welfare, attempt to exercise powers
which had not been granted."
- Federal spending: In
an important and necessary break with liberal thinking, progressives
should become advocates of a much smaller federal government
by pressing for the direct distribution of funds to the state
and local level. Whatever problems of malfeasance or nonfeasance
may result, they are almost guaranteed to be less than the misuse
of these funds at the federal level. As Congress' own auditor,
Comptroller General Charles Bowsher, recently told a hearing
that "there are hardly any [federal] agencies that are well
managed." The flaw in liberal thinking is that federal housing
funds are used for housing, agriculture funds for farmers and
so forth. In fact, an extraordinary percentage of these moneys
are used to maintain a superstructure to carry out poor housing
policy or bad farm policy. The basic principle should be to get
the money to the streets or the farms as quickly -- and with
as few intermediaries -- as possible.
Further, progressives
should challenge the presumption that the feds know best. At
the present time, much of the best government is at the state
and local level. It could do even better without the paperwork
and the restrictions dreamed up in Washington to fill the working
day. And even when that doesn't prove true, you don't have to
drive as far to make your political anger known.
- Small business: Many
progressives act as though an economy isn't necessary. It would
pay great dividends if the progressive agenda included support
for small businesses. Small businesses generate an extraordinary
number of new jobs. Further, small business is where many of
the values of the progressive movement can be best expressed
in an economic context. While ideally many of these businesses
should be cooperatives, even within the strictures of conventional
capitalism they offer significant advantages over the mega-corporation.
Writing in the New York Times, brokerage firm president Muriel
Siebert said recently: Unlike monolithic Fortune 500 companies,
small businesses behave like families. [A study] indicated that
one reason for the durability of businesses owned by women is
the value they place on their workers. It showed that small businesses
hold on to workers through periods when revenues decline. Rather
than eliminate workers, they tend to cut other expenses, including
their own salaries... Nearly half of the workers laid off by
large companies have to swallow pay reductions when they find
new full-time work; two out of three work for at least 20 percent
less money than before."
As Jon Rowe says of Korean
family-run groceries, "a family operates on loyalty and
trust, the market operates on contract and law."
- Decentralizing the federal
government: There are a number of federal agencies that are already
quite decentralized. Interestingly, these agencies are among
those most often praised. The National Park Service, the Peace
Corps, the Coast Guard, and US Attorneys all have dispersed units
with a relatively high degree of autonomy and a strong sense
of turf responsibility by their employees. A further example
can be found within the postal service. While many complain about
mail service, you rarely hear them gripe about their own mail
carrier, who is given a finite task in a finite geographical
area. I stumbled across this phenomenon while serving in the
Coast Guard. At the time, the Guard had about 1800 units worldwide
but only 3000 officers, with many of the officers concentrated
on larger ships and in headquarters units. Thus there were scores
of units run by enlisted personnel who rarely saw an officer.
The system worked extremely well. It worked because, once training
and adequate equipment had been provided, there was relatively
little a bureaucratic superstructure could do to improve the
operations of a lifeboat or loran station. As with education,
a bureaucracy in such circumstances can do itself far more good
than it can do anyone in the field.
Similarly, a former Peace
Corps regional director told me that in his agency's far-flung
and decentralized system, there was no way he could control activities
in the two dozen countries under his purview, yet the Peace Corps
became one of the most popular federal programs in recent times.
Can the success of these decentralized agencies be replicated,
say, in housing or urban development? Why not give it a try?
If federal housing moneys were distributed by 50 state directors
who were given considerable leeway in the mix of policies they
could fund and approve, we would, for starters, begin to have
a better idea of which programs work and which don't.
- Raising the issue: Every
policy and piece of legislation should be subjected to evaluation
not only according to the old rules of right and left but according
to the ideology of scale. We must constantly be asking not only
whether what is proposed is right, but whether it is being done
at the right level of society's organization.
These are just a few examples
of how a politics of devolution might begin to develop. It is
needed if for no other reason than it is our best defense against
the increasing authoritarianism of the federal government and
the monopolization of economic activity. It is also needed because,
without it, democracy becomes little more than a choice between
alternative propaganda machines. In the 1960s, Robert McNamara
declared, "Running any large organization is the same, whether
it's the Ford Motor Company, the Catholic Church or the Department
of Defense. Once you get the certain scale, they're all the same."
And so, increasingly to our detriment, they are. We must learn
and teach, and make a central part of our politics, that while
small is not always beautiful, it has -- for our ecology, our
liberties, and our souls -- become absolutely essential.
EUROPEAN
UNION
Subsidiarity was established
in EU law by the Treaty of Maastricht, 1992. The present formulation:
"The Community shall act within the limits of the powers
conferred upon it by this Treaty and of the objectives assigned
to it therein. In areas which do not fall within its exclusive
competence, the Community shall take action, in accordance with
the principle of subsidiarity, only if and in so far as the objectives
of the proposed action cannot be sufficiently achieved by the
Member States and can therefore, by reason of the scale or effects
of the proposed action, be better achieved by the Community.
Any action by the Community shall not go beyond what is necessary
to achieve the objectives of this Treaty."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
THE
DC STATEHOOD PARTY PLATFORM
In the early 1970s, your
editor drafted a platform that formed the basis for one approved
by DC's new third party, the DC Statehood Party, which would
city council and/or school board seasts for 25 years. The platform
was perhaps the most eclectic, radical and prescient collection
of policies one could have found anywhere at the time and a number
of the planks dealt with devolution to the local level. Among
them:
- Neighborhood authorities
and neighborhood housing banks
- Elected neighborhood
legislative councils and neighborhood executives with power over
selection of neighborhood police officials, selection of neighborhood
school superintendent, school site selection and proposed roads.
- Low-rent facilities
in new commercial centers for small businesses
- Enclosed and open stalls
for artisans, craftsmen and other small operators.
- The end of the forced
displacement of small business.
- The construction of
public markets
- The conversion of banks
and public utilities to cooperatives.
- Ownership of liquor
stores by neighborhood cooperatives
- Division of police into
a uniformed crime-fighting force and a neighborhood constabulary
- Community control of
the schools
- Creation of an equal
service commission to ensure equal distribution of public services
throughout the city
- Ward balance in capital
improvements and government personnel
- Varied curriculum, services
and teaching methods in the schools
THE
PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF VERMONT
IAN BALDWIN AND FRANK BRYAN, WASHINGTON
POST - The winds
of secession are blowing in the Green Mountain State. Vermont
was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We
think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years,
the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive
toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic
institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders
and eroded Americans' fundamental freedoms.
Vermont did not join the
Union to become part of an empire. Some of us therefore seek
permission to leave.
A decade before the War
of Independence, Vermont became New England's first frontier,
settled by pioneers escaping colonial bondage who hewed settlements
across a lush region whose spine is the Green Mountains. These
independent folk brought with them what Henry David Thoreau called
the "true American Congress" -- the New England town
meeting, which is still the legislature for nearly all of Vermont's
237 towns. Here every citizen is a legislator who helps fashion
the rules that govern the locality.
Today, however, Vermont
no longer controls even its own National Guard, a domestic emergency
force that is now employed in an imperial war 6,000 miles away.
The 9/11 commission report says that "the American homeland
is the planet." To defend this "homeland," the
United States spends six times as much on its military as China,
the next highest-spending nation, funding more than 730 military
bases in more than 130 countries, abetted by more than 100 military
space satellites and more than 100,000 seaborne battle-ready
forces. This is the greatest military colossus ever forged. .
.
The two of us are typical
of the diversity of Vermont's secessionist movement: one descended
from old Vermonter stock, the other a more recent arrival --
a "flatlander" from down country. Our Vermont homeland
remains economically conservative and socially liberal. And the
love of freedom runs deep in its psyche.
SECOND VERMONT REPUBLIC
- The Second Vermont Republic is a peaceful, decentralist voluntary
association and think tank opposed to the tyranny of multinational
corporations and the U.S. government, and committed to the return
of Vermont to its status as an independent republic, and more
broadly, to the peaceful dissolution of the United States as
an empireSupporters of the Second Vermont Republic subscribe
to the following set of principles:
1. Political Independence.
Our primary objectives are political independence for Vermont
and the peaceful dissolution of the Union.
2. Human Scale. We believe
life should be lived on a human scale. Small is still beautiful.
3. Sustainability. We
celebrate and support Vermont's small, clean, green, sustainable,
socially responsible towns, farms, businesses, schools, and churches.
We encourage family-owned farms and businesses to produce innovative,
premium-quality, healthy products. We also believe that energy
independence is an essential goal towards which to strive.
4. Economic Solidarity.
We encourage Vermonters to buy locally produced products from
small local merchants rather than purchase from giant, out-of-state
megastores. We support trade with nearby states and provinces.
5. Power Sharing. Vermont's
strong democratic tradition is grounded in its town meetings
. We favor devolution of political power from the state back
to local communities, making the governing structure for towns,
schools, hospitals, and social services much like that of Switzerland.
Shared power also underlies our approach to international relations.
6. Equal Access. We support
equal access for all Vermont citizens to quality education, health
care, housing, and employment.
7. Tension Reduction.
Consistent with Vermont's long tradition of "live and let
live" and nonviolence, we do not condone state-sponsored
violence inflicted either by the military or law enforcement
officials. We support a voluntary citizens' brigade to reduce
tension and restore order in the event of political unrest and
to provide assistance when natural disasters occur. We are opposed
to any form of military conscription. Tension reduction is the
bedrock principle on which all international conflicts are to
be resolved.
8. Mutuality. Both our
citizens and our neighbors should be treated with mutual respect.
http://www.vermontrepublic.org/
DEVOLUTION
IN THE NETHERLANDS
WIKIPEDIA - The constituent
countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands are: The Netherlands,
Netherlands Antilles, Aruba. Each of the three constituent parts
has its own constitution. Each of the three constituent parts
also has its own administration and parliament. Together, they
form a federation under a monarch as a single head of state.
The Kingdom of the Netherlands
is a member of the European Union. However the Netherlands Antilles
and Aruba are not considered part of the EU, but rather have
the status of overseas countries and territories. Since citizenship
is handled by the kingdom, and not distinguished for the three
constituent countries, citizens from all three constituent countries
are also EU citizens.
THE
DEVOLUTION OF POLITICAL & SOCIAL ACTIVISM
Avoiding the systems
we're trying to change
Sam Smith
Like other systems, our
systems of political and social organizing have become greatly
inflated and excessively complicated in recent years. Part of
it has been due to television - which has moved us from actual
to only virtual contact with one another; part of it has been
a cost of population growth; and part has been a result of mental
and verbal seepage from the reactionary capitalism of the past
quarter century.
It is hard to talk about
because so many have known little else and have bought into assumptions
of which they may not even be aware, such as believing that social
and political change is largely the product of marketing and
advertising or of management practices promulgated by business
schools.
Although people still
talk about grass roots organizing, there is far less of it going
on and it is hard to generate excitement on its behalf. There
is ritualistic talk of movements but in too many cases, a movement
is little more than a mailing list being asked constantly for
money and an occasional letter to members of Congress. The leadership
of these so-called movements often have more in common with Washington
corporate lobbyists than with those they are supposed to be leading.
And whatever their inner desires, their outer manner is heavily
influenced by the centrist foundations that feed them.
It is not a conscious
thing; it has just become part of the contemporary culture of
activism. Even Green Party members, hardly part of the establishment,
seem far easier to engage on the topic of which presidential
candidate they favor to get all 2 percent of the vote next time
than in how you elect Greens to school boards and state legislatures.
We have been taught in so many ways that only the large matters.
Over the years, I have
approached this topic from a number of angles. Here are a few
excerpts:
WHY BOTHER, 2001 - One of the bad habits we have
acquired from the bullies who now run the place is undue reliance
on traditional political, legal and rhetorical tools. Politically
active Americans have been taught that even at the risk of losing
our planet and our democracy, we must go about it all in a rational
manner, never raising our voice, never doing the unlikely or
trying the improbable, let alone screaming for help.
We have lost much of what
was gained in the 1960s and 1970s because we traded in our passion,
our energy, our magic and our music for the rational, technocratic
and media ways of our leaders. We will not overcome the current
crisis solely with political logic. We need living rooms like
those in which women once discovered they were not alone. The
freedom schools of SNCC. The politics of the folk guitar. The
plays of Vaclav Havel. The pain of James Baldwin. The laughter
of Abbie Hoffman. The strategy of Gandhi and King. Unexpected
gatherings and unpredicted coalitions. People coming together
because they disagree on every subject save one: the need to
preserve the human. Savage satire and gentle poetry. Boisterous
revival and silent meditation. Grand assemblies and simple suppers.
WHY BOTHER - Sometimes
democracy's guerrillas take just a small piece of our disabled
and distorted culture to revive -- a school, a neighborhood,
an untried idea, or a group the larger society has rejected.
These people will tell you they are not politicians, but in their
very choice of community over institutions they have become another
cell of transformational politics. And they instinctively accept
the notion that John L. McKnight put well in a 1987 issue of
Social Policy:
"The structure of
institutions is a design established to create control of people.
On the other hand, the structure of associations is the result
of people acting through consent. . . You will know that you
are in a community if you often hear laughter and singing. You
will know you are in an institution, corporation, or bureaucracy
if you hear the silence of long halls and reasoned meetings."
Here are some of the characteristics McKnight found among associations
in contrast to institutions:
- Interdependency. "If
the local newspaper closes, the garden club and the township
meeting will each diminish as they lose a voice."
- Community is built around
a recognition of fallibility rather than the ideal.
- Community groups are
better at finding a place for everyone.
- Associations can respond
quickly since they lack the bureaucracy of large institutions.
- Associations engage
in non-hierarchical creativity
THE POLITICAL REPAIR
MANUAL, 1997 -
Liberals are afraid to criticize big government because they
think it makes them sound like Republicans. In fact, the idea
of devolution -- having government carried out at the lowest
practical level -- dates back at least to that good Democrat,
Thomas Jefferson. Even FDR managed to fight the depression with
a staff smaller than Hillary Clinton's and World War II with
one smaller than Al Gore's. And conservative columnist William
Safire admits that "in a general sense, devolution is a
synonym for 'power sharing,' a movement that grew popular in
the sixties and seventies as charges of 'bureaucracy' were often
leveled at centralized authority."
The modern liberals' embrace
of centralized authority makes them vulnerable to the charge
that their politics is one of intentions rather than results
-- symbolized by huge agencies like the Department of Housing
& Urban Development that fail miserably to produce policies
worthy of their name. Conservatives, on the other hand, often
confuse the devolution of government with its destruction. Thus
while the liberals are underachieving, the conservatives are
undermining.
In fact, a sensible and
democratic devolution of power should be high on the American
repair list. The question must be repeatedly asked of new and
present policies: how can these programs be brought close to
the supposed beneficiaries, the citizens? And how can government
money go where it's supposed to go?
Because such questions
are not asked often enough, we find huge disparities in the effectiveness
of federal programs. For example, both social security and the
earned income tax credit function well with little overhead.
In such programs, the government serves primarily as a redistribution
center for tax revenues.
On the other hand, an
environmentalist who ran a weatherization program told me that
she figured it cost $30,000 in federal and local overhead for
each $1600 in weather-proofing provided a low income home.
Similarly, a study of
Milwaukee County in 1988 found government agencies spending more
than $1 billion annually on fighting poverty. If this money had
been given in cash to the poor, it would have meant more than
$33,000 for each low income family -- well above the poverty
level.
SHADOWS OF HOPE, 1994 - Not surprisingly, public advocacy
groups have taken to responding to the establishment's legalisms
with more of their own. Go back to the 60s and Ralph Nader was
about the only public interest lawyer in town who wore a suit
and his wasn't pressed. Today, many advocacy groups have drifted
into the lawyerly style and pace of the establishment they are
supposedly trying to change. They have, in their own way, become
capital institutions, part of the ritualized, status-conscious,
and very safe, trench warfare of the city. . .
GREEN HORIZON QUARTERLY
- America's third
parties have been immensely important to the country as catalysts
of political and social progress. Their efforts lent weight to
the anti-slavery movement, to the institution of an income tax,
and to women's rights. While most of the power in 20th century
politics was held by centrist or conservative white Protestants
and Irish Catholics, the major reforms of that period stemmed
from three third party movements: the Populists, the Progressives
and the Socialists.
One reason journalists
and historians tend to discount the impact of third parties is
because of their obsession with apexes of power and those who
inhabit them. In reality, however, change often comes not from
the top or the center but from the edges. Ecologists and biologists
appreciate the importance of edges as sources of life and change,
whether they be the boundary of a forest, the shore of a bay
or the earth's patina so essential to our being that we call
the atmosphere. The political edge, at least metaphorically,
has many of the same critical attributes. . .
If you want to affect
national politics with a national third party presidential run,
history suggests that getting over 5% - preferably closer to
10% - is a good way to start. Otherwise, you can probably expect
a less direct impact for your efforts, perhaps decades in the
future. And, in any case, you can expect your swing at presidential
politics to be fairly short-lived.
That does not mean, however,
that these parties - like certain insects - were merely born,
had sex, and then died. In fact, some of the third parties had
long, healthy lives, in large part because they were as concerned
with local as with national results. The Socialist Party is the
most dramatic recent example, with a history dating back over
100 years. The party's own history suggest that eclecticism didn't
hurt:
<<< From the
beginning the Socialist Party was the ecumenical organization
for American radicals. Its membership included Marxists of various
kinds, Christian socialists, Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish
socialists, foreign-language speaking sections, single-taxers
and virtually every variety of American radical. On the divisive
issue of "reform vs. revolution," the Socialist Party
from the beginning adopted a compromise formula, producing platforms
calling for revolutionary change but also making "immediate
demands" of a reformist nature. A perennially unresolved
issue was whether revolutionary change could come about without
violence; there were always pacifists and evolutionists in the
Party as well as those opposed to both those views. The Socialist
Party historically stressed cooperatives as much as labor unions,
and included the concepts of revolution by education and of 'building
the new society within the shell of the old.'" >>>
By World War I it had
elected 70 mayors, two members of Congress, and numerous state
and local officials. Milwaukee alone had three Socialist mayors
in the last century, including Frank Zeidler who held office
for 12 years ending in 1960. And the party reports that Karen
Kubby, Socialist councilwoman, won her re-election bid in 1992
with the highest vote total in Iowa City history.
PROGRESSIVE REVIEW,
2004 - At present
the Green Party seems exceedingly concerned with whom it will
run for president, if anyone. This is a time-consuming, agenda-skewing,
image-monopolizing business. . . But what if the Green Party
declared itself the party of the countryside, of free America,
and set its sights on organizing not just the survival, resistance,
and rebellion of the unoccupied homeland, but its revival, its
discovery of self-reliance, and its energetic practice of democracy
and decency? There is a wealth of electoral opportunity. For
example, in 15 states more than half the state legislative seats
are presently won without a contest. . .
SHADOWS OF HOPE - Come with me for a moment to a
time of when politics was so much a part of New York City that
Tammany Hall had to rent Madison Square Gardens for its meetings
of committeemen - all 32,000 of them. In contrast, when the Democratic
National Committee decided to send a mailing to its workers some
years back, it found that no one had kept a list. The party had
come to care only about its donors.
One 19th century Tammany
politician, George Washington Plunkitt, claimed to know every
person in his district, their likes and their dislikes:
"A young feller gains
a reputation as a baseball player in a vacant lot. I bring him
into our baseball club. That fixes him. You'll find him workin'
for my ticket at the polls next election day. . . I rope them
all in by givin' them opportunities to show themselves off. I
don't trouble them with political arguments. I just study human
nature and act accordin'."
In the world of Plunkitt,
politics was not something handed down to the people through
distant intermediaries. What defined politics was an unbroken
chain of human experience, memory and gratitude.
So the first non-logical
but necessary thing we must do to reclaim politics is to bring
it back into our communities, into our hearts . . . to bring
it back home.
We must not only make
politics a part of our culture but make our culture a part of
our politics. . .
TALK TO MONTGOMERY
COUNTY GREENS, MD , 2005 -
We must bear in mind that most politics today is largely based
on acceptance of the tyranny of television and other forms of
mass media. This is, among other things, extremely costly. It
is also inevitably top down politics. You can't have a decentralized
democratic movement run by TV. But viral politics - whether done
through traditional local organizing or through more modern tools
such as the Internet - has not been eliminated by the media but
merely obscured. It is widely used, for example, by the Christian
right. And Howard Dean didn't do badly with it, either. . .
SECURING THE HOMELAND
- Even in these
dismal times, a few lights shine. More than a hundred communities
and several states have voted resolutions deeply critical of
the so-called Patriot Act. In California all the major candidates
in the gubernatorial race supported a position on medical marijuana
strongly opposed by the federal government. And the Washington
Post reports that "in Seattle, the public library printed
3,000 bookmarks to alert patrons that the FBI could, in the name
of national security, seek permission from a secret federal court
to inspect their reading and computer records -- and prohibit
librarians from revealing that a search had taken place. . .
In Hillsboro, Ore., Police Chief Ron Louie has ordered his officers
to refuse to assist any federal terrorism investigations that
his department believes violate state law or constitutional right."
When one reviews such
brave acts and words of Americans still loyal to the ideals of
their land and its constitution, it is striking is how few of
them emanate from the nation's capital. Officials and the media
in Washington have generally accepted the assault on constitutional
and democratic government with all the adaptability of the Vichy
French of Paris getting used to the Germans. . .
Strange as it may seem,
it is in this dismal dichotomy between countryside and the political
and economic capitals that the hope for saving America's soul
resides. The geographical and conceptual parochialism of those
who have made this mess leaves vast acres of our land still free
in which to nurture hopes, dreams, and perhaps even to foster
the eventual eviction of those who have done us such wrong. .
.
Almost all great changes
in American politics and culture have had their roots either
in the countryside or among minorities within the major cities.
From religious 'great awakenings' to the abolitionist movement,
to the labor movement, to populism, to the 1960s and civil rights,
America has been repeatedly moved by viral politics rather than
by the pyramidal processes outlined in great man theories of
change promulgated by the elite and its media and academies.
Successfully confronting
the present disaster will require far more than attempting to
serially blockade its serial evils, necessary as this is. There
must also be a guerilla democracy that defends, fosters, and
celebrates our better selves - not only to provide an alternative
but to create physical space for decent Americans to enjoy their
lives while waiting for things to get better. It may, after all,
take the rest of their lifetimes. We must not only condemn the
worst, but offer witness for the better. And create places in
which to live it. . .
I found myself reflecting
on the Solidarity movement of Poland. We will get out of this
mess, I thought, when we can do in our own way what the Poles
did in theirs.
I had occasion to test
these thoughts as I read John Rensenbrink's excellent contemporary
account of the movement: Poland Challenges a Divided World. For
all the differences - for one thing we confront right-wingers
instead of communists - I was pleasantly surprised to find myself
encouraged again.
At the heart of the Solidarity
achievement was something with which the Internet has made us
familiar - a form of politics that spread not by the precise
decisions of a small number of rulers but by the aggregated tiny
and vaguer decisions of a mass of citizens. In a sense, Solidarity
was an early unwired flash mob. . .
Rensenbrink tells me that
some of Solidarity's early organizing took place on the trains
that many of the workers rode to the shipyards. In our own history,
there are innumerable examples of change owing a debt to the
simple serendipity of people of like values and sensibilities
coming together. For example, the rise of the Irish politician
in this country was aided considerably by the Irish bar's role
as an ethnic DMZ and a center for the exchange of information.
Here is another example from the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute:
<<< Mother Jones
often organized the women in mining towns to become an active
and vital part of the struggle for worker's rights. One tactic
she used was the "dishpan brigade." When coal miners
were on strike in Arnot, Pennsylvania, in 1900, Mother Jones
organized the women to prevent replacement, or scab, workers
from taking the striking workers' jobs. The women gathered at
the mine, banging together their pots, pans, brooms and mops,
while screaming and shouting at the scab workers. "From
that day on the women kept continual watch of the mines to see
that the company did not bring in scabs. Every day women with
brooms or mops in one hand and babies in the other arm, wrapped
in little blankets, went to the mines and watched that no one
went in. And all night long they kept watch," wrote Mother
Jones. >>>
We tend to discount the
importance of unplanned moments because of our fealty to the
business school paradigm in which change properly occurs because
of a careful strategic plan, an organized vision, procedures,
and process. During the past quarter century when such ideas
have been in ascendancy, however, America has demonstratively
deteriorated as a political, economic, and moral force. In reality,
many of the best things happen by accident and indirection. While
it may be true, as the Roman said, that "fortune smiles
on the well prepared" part of that preparation is to be
in the right place at the right time. In other words, it is necessary
to create an ecology of change rather than a precise and often
illusory process. . .
We can not at this moment
imagine the manner in which America's recovery could occur. To
attempt to do so, in fact, invites an apathetic fatalism for
there seems no solution. What exists, however, are the means
by which to cultivate an environment in which solutions may sprout.
This may not seem as glamorous but it is absolutely necessary.
And it is work that by its nature devolves to the smallest places
of our land where change is still possible, where ideals are
still preserved, and where imagination still exists. Where the
soil of freedom and democracy are still fertile and unpolluted
and where spring can show its wonders once again.
http://prorev.com/securing.htm
SHADOWS OF HOPE Writer John Gall has said that
"systems tend to oppose their proper functions." The
ideal proper function of the American system is life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. Yet as it gropes its way through
its third century, the system in reality increasingly endangers
human life, denies personal liberty and represses individual
happiness. . .
Unfortunately, complex
failing systems have little capacity to save themselves. In part
this is because the solutions come from the same source as the
problem. The public rarely questions the common provenance; official
Washington and the media honor it. Even a failure as miserable
as that of Vietnam had little effect on the careers of its major
protagonists, those men who not only were wrong but were wrong
at the cost of 50,000 American lives. . .
Complex systems usually
try to save themselves by doing the same they have been doing
badly all along -- only harder. This is because the salvation
of the system is implicitly considered far more important than
the solution of any problems causing the system to fail. . .
Ironically, we have come
to our present unhappy state in no small part because of our
willingness to turn over individual and communal functions to
the very systems we now ask to save us. . .
Bart Giamatti, long before
he became baseball commissioner, wrote:
"Baseball is about
going home and how hard it is to get there and how driven is
our need. It tells us how good home is. Its wisdom says you can
go home again but that you cannot stay. The journey must always
start once more, the bat and oar over the shoulder, until there
is an end to all journeying."
True politics, in imitation
of baseball, the great American metaphor, is also about going
home. Members of Congress consider it the sine qua non of their
routine. Presidential candidates engage in an elaborate if disingenuous
ceremony of finding the American home during primary season.
And in between, everyone in politics pays extraordinary attention
to political shamans like Gallup and Roper whose magical powers
center upon their understanding of what's happening "at
home."
Yet like so much in our
national life, we are only going through the motions, paying
ritualistic obeisance to a faith we no longer follow. In fact,
we have lost our way home.
UNITED
KINGDOM
WIKIPEDIA - The constituent
countries of the United Kingdom are England, Northern Ireland,
Scotland, Wales. These four constituent countries of the United
Kingdom are sometimes also referred to as Home Nations. The word
country does not necessarily connote political independence (thus
Basque country), so that it may, according to context, be used
to refer either to the UK or one of its constituents. Thus, for
example, the website of the British Prime Minister refers to
"countries within a country", stating "The United
Kingdom is made up of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales
and Northern Ireland. . .
All four have always had and continue to have distinctive variations
in legislative and administrative status and England and Scotland
were originally independent states. All four are still generally
regarded as possessing distinct nationalities, although they
have no distinct citizenships. . . .
Northern Ireland was the
first part of the UK to have a devolved government, under the
Government of Ireland Act 1920, until the Parliament of Northern
Ireland was suspended in 1972. Subsequent attempts at reinstating
a form of devolved government in Northern Ireland have stalled,
and the area is currently governed directly by the UK government.
. .
Scotland and Wales adopted
devolved governments in the 1990s, but have long been described
as countries in their own right. Although England lacks a devolved
government of its own, and no real legal existence, except as
part of "England and Wales", it is almost universally
thought of as a country and a nation.
All four constituent countries
of the United Kingdom have political parties campaigning for
further self-government or independence. In the case of Northern
Ireland, both the desire for union with the Republic of Ireland
and a small movement for independence from both the Republic
and the UK have existed. There is a movement for self-government
in Cornwall which has campaigned for Cornwall to be recognized
as a constituent country of the UK, rather than its current status
as an English county.
SPAIN
WIKIPEDIA - Spain's fifty
provinces are grouped into seventeen autonomous communities,
in addition to two African autonomous cities. Centralism, nationalism
and separatism played an important role in the Spanish transition.
For fear that separatism would lead to instability and a dictatorial
backlash, a compromise was struck among the moderate political
parties taking part in the drafting of the Spanish Constitution
of 1978. The aim was to appease separatist forces and so disarm
the extreme right. A highly decentralized state was established,
compared both with the previous Francoist regime and with most
modern territorial arrangements in Western European nations.
The autonomous communities
have wide legislative and executive autonomy, with their own
parliaments and regional governments. The distribution of powers
is different for every community, as laid out in the "autonomy
statute". There is a de facto distinction between "historic"
communities and the rest. The historic ones initially received
more functions, including the ability of the regional presidents
to choose the timing of the regional elections. As another example,
the Basque Country and Catalonia have full-range police forces
of their own. . .
URBAN
STATEHOOD
Sam Smith
What does New York City
have more of than Rhode Island, Montana, South Dakota, Delaware,
North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming, all put together?
People.
What do New Hampshire,
Rhode Island, Montana, South Dakota, Delaware, North Dakota,
Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming have that New York City doesn't
have?
Sixteen US Senators.
New York City gets to
share two senators with the residue of New York state, which
is also larger than all these other states put together. In fact,
there are 18 states with a combined population less than New
York in its entirety.
This discrimination is,
of course, not unique to New York. The larger states of California
and Texas have it worse. And the capital colony of Washington
DC lacks even partial representation in the Senate.
The results of this constitutional
but crazy apportionment of America's upper house means, among
other things, that ethnic minorities are underrepresented in
a manner officially permitted hardly anywhere else in American
culture. If the Senate had been a school district it would have
been under court-ordered bussing for the past few decades. If
it were a private club, you'd want to resign from it before running
for public office.
In fact, the malapportionment
of the Senate is perhaps the most important, undiscussed issue
in the country today for there is hardly a matter of political
importance that would not be affected if that body were to reflect
21st century rather than 19th century demographics.
Curiously, however, leaders
of constituencies that would clearly benefit - with cities at
the top of the list - show little interest.
One reason for this is
misunderstanding. It is widely believed that admitting new states
requires a constitutional amendment and that a state, once created,
can't be split. In truth, it is easier to spawn a new state than
it was to give women the right to vote or to pass an income tax.
A simple majority in Congress and the president's signature -
plus approval of an affected state's legislature - and the job
is permanently done.
Then there is the argument
that creating new states is a political impossibility. But it
has happened 37 times since the creation of the republic and
in a number of cases - Kentucky, Vermont, West Virginia, and
Maine - new states were formed out of existing ones.
If you don't care about
history, think of the future. In not too many years, white Americans
will cease to be in the majority. Even leaving moral questions
aside, how much longer will it be politically practical to tell
blacks and latinos that the rules can't be changed to let them
into the Senate in some reasonable number?
Despite Washington's small
size, ethnic prejudice and all the other problems faced by weak
and debilitated colonies, a statehood movement got far enough
to win editorial encouragement from the New York Times and Washington
Post, hold a constitutional convention, attract the transitory
enthusiasm of presidential candidate Bill Clinton, win a respectable
number of votes in its one House test, and even elect Jesse Jackson
to the only electoral office he ever held, albeit briefly --
the position of surrogate or "statehood senator," a
popularly elected lobbyist for prospective states. The DC Statehood
Party, which later merged with the DC Greens, held a city council
seat for over 25 years.
If citizens of such weak
clout as those in DC can get this far, imagine what the powerful
folk of New York City could do if they rose up in righteous anger
against their lack of equitable representation in the US Senate.
Imagine a Million Mensch March - led perhaps by Abe Bloomberg
and Al Sharpton -- descending on Washington to press the cause,
a cause which is not just that of New York but of every American
city and every group frustrated by the undemocratic hereditary
power of the landed states that got there first. Urban states
are the sina qua non of a better America. Let a dozen of them
bloom.
[The original version
of this article appeared in the NY Press]
BRINGING
DEVOLUTION TO THE 'HOOD
Sam Smith
[Remarks at a conference
on neighborhood commissions in 2006]
WASHINGTON'S advisory
neighborhood commissions came out of a time that seems distant
today, a time before 9/11, George Bush, the closing of DC's public
hospital and the socio-ethnic cleansing of DC.
Sure, we were still recovering
from the riots, but the very word 'recover' - one you don't hear
much today - implied that there was a least a chance you would.
The writer Dorothy Allison described the spirit of the times:
"I had the idea that if you took America and shook it really
hard it would do the right thing."
And so you proposed all
sorts of new ideas and just talking about them made you feel
hopeful. Central to a lot the talk was devolution - the idea
that people could control things better if they were brought
down to the local level. We tend to forget this now, but back
then, decentralization and community power were important progressive
ideas.
I wrote about them a lot
the 1960s and suggested that Washington needed neighborhood councils
with members representing small districts that would get to approve
the local police commander, help direct the schools, set up a
neighborhood development corporation and so forth.
In the early 1970s, those
of us in the new DC Statehood Party added the idea to our platform.
We wanted:
- Neighborhood authorities
and neighborhood housing banks
- Elected neighborhood
legislative councils and neighborhood executives with power over
selection of neighborhood police officials, selection of neighborhood
school superintendent, school site selection and proposed roads.
- Community control of
the schools
We even suggested that
liquor stors be turned into neighborhood cooperatives.
Then, as sometimes happens
with ideas, something happened. Don Frasier, a progressive member
of Congress from Minneapolis - where they already had advisory
neighborhood commissions - added the plan to the DC home rule
bill then under consideration.
It wasn't well received
by the local powers that wannatobe, the ones who were in line
to personally benefit from the pending congressional approval
of an elected mayor and council for the District colony. For
all their talk of democracy, they weren't happy to see some of
their pending power being distributed to others. . .
The home rule bill passed
and the ANC referendum was easily approved but the legislation
had not fully defined the nature and power of the commissions.
That was to be left to the new city government.
A group of us formed a
citizens lobby to proposed rules under which the ANCs would function.
At one meeting, someone suggested that the commissions' views
be given "great weight" by the city government.
"What does that term
mean," asked a lawyer.
"Damned if I know,"
I replied, "but let's put it in and find out."
As luck would have it,
the court case deciding what it meant would come out of my neighborhood
commission district and I, as the commissioner, would be one
of the plaintiffs. It was a tough one for me for not only did
it force me to betray my roots - it involved an Irish bar - but
one of the owners, the bar's lawyer and all of the complaining
petitioners lived in my district. I had tried to get them all
together but it didn't work. In the end, the court handed down
a decision on "great weight" that favored the commissions.
Our new commission worked
remarkably well considering that all of us were playing it by
ear. We made some simple rules that helped. For example, we would
only deal with local issues. That way our national and citywide
conflicts wouldn't ruin our meetings.
And we also developed
some good habits, such as retiring to the Zebra Room to debrief
over drinks after each meeting. We accepted our differences and
played by the rules, remained friends, and it all worked pretty
well.
I was named chair of the
education, recreation, and agriculture committee. I added that
last term because we had the largest community garden in DC.
Soon I wished I hadn't because a big dispute developed over how
long people should retain their garden rights on public land.
I proposed what I thought was a modest compromise - seven years
- but the gardeners saw that proposal as the moral equivalent
of eminent domain.
I had more luck with the
Great Hearst Playground Dispute. A hundred and fifty tennis players
came to me with a petition to have a backboard constructed at
Hearst playground. Knee jerk politician that I was, I successfully
pressed for the backboard. The Recreation Department, however,
constructed the backboard without consulting anyone and made
a huge cinderblock wall that blocked some of the neighbors' view
of the playground. Next thing I knew, there was a petition from
150 neighbors wanting the backboard removed.
The matter was ultimately
resolved during a five hour meeting with the Rec Department and
disputing parties. I proposed that a new backboard be placed
at a 90 degree angle so it didn't block anyone's view. Geometry
worked where politics had failed.
I was overwhelmed with
problems, some solvable, many not. I had far less clout that
many residents thought but I worked overtime to conceal the fact.
This didn't help. Their expectations just seemed to mount.
As I looked around the
city, things weren't going as well as I had hoped. For one thing,
the rules the city council had passed deliberately restricted
the councils' power: no incorporation, no spending of public
funds in joint projects with other commissions and so forth.
From the beginning, and
to this day, the city government considered the ANCs to be an
annoyance to be controlled more than to be included. I had argued
from the start that our prime goal should be to take the "A"
out of ANC. . . to make these bodies functioning units of government
rather than merely advisory. Instead they were dismissed by the
media and co-opted by politicians and bureaucrats until only
the bravest and most self-reliant commissions dared act as the
law had envisioned.
From the start in 1974,
city officials began to set up bureaucratic and fiscal hurdles
for the fledgling commissions to jump over and they adopted the
view that the ANCs were just another part of the city bureacracy.
At workshops and in regulations, they treated the ANCs as subservient
and ancillary. Many commissioners, unschooled in either ANC history,
law, or politics accepted this more menial role without question.
They also accepted the gross and widespread falsehood that ANCs
were banned from meeting with one another. In fact, the law only
prohibited them from spending city money to do so.
Instead of seeing themselves
as a sleeping giant -- a grassroots political system that could
actually be run from the grassroots -- the ANCs tolerated a lesser
role.
This subservience continues
to today.
The situation has not
been helped by gentrification. There are unhappy reports of ethnic
and cultural conflicts being played out in commissions just as
elsewhere.
We seem to have forgotten
how to share space with others. For example in one part of town
we have churchgoers mad at a gay bar and gentrifiers mad at churchgoers'
double-parked cars. As a heterosexual agnostic I have no money
on this race, but I know the answer is most likely to come when
both sides accept the notion of reciprocal liberty - that we
can't be free to do what we want unless we grant others a similar
right. Out of such an attitude can come, for example, valet parking
on Sundays and a hefty contribution to a local rec center by
the gay bar.
ANCs can be important
mediators at such times or they can add to the conflict. It's
one of the many choices their members have to make.
ANCs are still a sleeping
giant. Don't believe what city hall tells you about what they
can and can't do. They can do almost anything if they do it the
right way.
For example, the chairs
in a ward could get together each month at someone's house and
share what their commissions agree about. If they have differences,
forget them for the time being. Look for the unity and then let
your councilmember, school board member, mayor, and media know
about it.
Practice this awhile and
then try it citywide. Three dozen commission chairs working together
could become a de facto lower house of the city government. .
.
And it's not just a local
matter. In increasingly corrupt and anti-democratic America,
local solidarity and action are oases of freedom and decency
from which a new future can grow. As we find ourselves in a post-constitutional
society where our leaders in politics and business consider themselves
immune from either morality or legislation, we must constantly
tend these community gardens of hope.
Just as during Washington's
century of segregation with no home rule, neighborhood organizations
in DC were the voice and organizing strength of this city, so
today our communities are where we must begin to make things
work again with decency, democracy and fairness.
Our neighborhood commissions
can be central to this if they remember the words of Jane Jacobs:
"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody,
only because, and only when, they are created by everybody."
ITALY
WIKIPEDIA - The Regions
of Italy were granted a degree of regional autonomy in the 1948
constitution, which states that the constitution's role is: to
recognize, protect and promote local autonomy, to ensure that
services at the state level are as decentralized as possible,
and to adapt the principles and laws establishing autonomy and
decentralization.
However, five regions
have been granted a special status of autonomy to establish their
own regional legislation on some specific local matters; based
on cultural grounds, geographical location and on the presence
of important ethnic minorities. The other 15 ordinary regions
were effectively established only in the early 1970s. . .
The regions primarily
served to decentralize the state government machinery. A constitutional
reform in 2001 remarkably widened the competences of the regions,
in particular concerning legislative powers and most of state
controls were abolished.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_Italy
WHEN
NATIONS GET TOO BIG
GAR ALPEROVITZ, NEW YORK TIMES
- Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger seems to have grasped the essential truth that
no nation - not even the United States - can be managed successfully
from the center once it reaches a certain scale. Moreover, the
bold proposals that Mr. Schwarzenegger is now making for everything
from universal health care to global warming point to the kind
of decentralization of power which, once started, could easily
shake up America's fundamental political structure.
Governor Schwarzenegger
is quite clear that California is not simply another state. "We
are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens
and Sparta," he recently declared. "We have the economic
strength, we have the population and the technological force
of a nation-state." In his inaugural address, Mr. Schwarzenegger
proclaimed, "We are a good and global commonwealth."
Political rhetoric? Maybe.
But California's governor has also put his finger on a little
discussed flaw in America's constitutional formula. The United
States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy.
What does "participatory democracy" mean in a continent?
Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization
of the federal system may be all but inevitable.
A recent study by the
economists Alberto Alesina of Harvard and Enrico Spolaore of
Tufts demonstrates that the bigger the nation, the harder it
becomes for the government to meet the needs of its dispersed
population. Regions that don't feel well served by the government's
distribution of goods and services then have an incentive to
take independent action, the economists note. . .
Few Americans realize
just how huge this nation is. Germany could fit within the borders
of Montana. France is smaller than Texas. Leaving aside three
nations with large, unpopulated land masses (Russia, Canada and
Australia), the United States is geographically larger than all
the other advanced industrial countries taken together. . .
If the scale of a country
renders it unmanageable, there are two possible responses. One
is a breakup of the nation; the other is a radical decentralization
of power. More than half of the world's 200 nations formed as
breakaways after 1946. These days, many nations - including Brazil,
Britain, Canada, China, France, Italy and Spain, just to name
a few - are devolving power to regions in various ways. . .
CROSS-OVER
POLITICS AND THE IDEOLOGY OF SCALE
Sam Smith
In an age of conglomeration
and domination, the cross-political nature of devolution - or
the ideology of scale - attracts little attention. One can go
through a whole political campaign and never consider it. But
that doesn't mean the issue is not there.
Consider two current examples:
the assault on local control of public schools and the smart
growth movement. Both are driven by a curious alliance of liberal,
conservative and corporate interests. And both attempt to replace
the decentralization of decision-making with centralized, bureaucratic
choices.
For example, only Vilsack
among the Democratic candidate for president has challenged the
No Child law despite it being based on absurdly inadequate justifications,
proposed by the least qualified president ever to hold office
and pushed by a bunch of child profiteers who will probably be
the only clear winners under the legislation.
Similarly, the smart growth
movement is being increasingly driven by a dubious alliance between
"we know what's good for you" liberal planners and
developers who initially resisted the idea until they realized
how many new high-rises might result.
Liberals and conservatives
who favor America's two centuries of local school control, or
wish to resist the transformation of successful communities into
high-rise factory farms for globalized serfs, find themselves
ignored, ridiculed as NIMBYs or considered behind the times.
One developer's Power
Point even declared that "fear and loathing of density is.
. .ironic, dangerous, counter-productive." In other words,
preferring the lifestyle predominant in 99.9% of human history
is now dangerous and counter-productive. Further, in the tradition
of the new managerial mullahs, anyone who doesn't like what they're
up to is suffering from fear and loathing of positive change.
No Child Left Unregimented
The assault on community
controlled public education is not only a result of Bush's No
Child law. Bill Kauffman once noted in Chronicles that it was
liberal Harvard president President James Conant who produced
a series of postwar reports calling for the "elimination
of the small high school" in order to compete with the Soviets
and deal with the nuclear era. Says Kauffman, "Conant the
barbarian triumphed: the number of school districts plummeted
from 83,718 in 1950 to 17,995 in 1970."
Writing in Principal Magazine,
Kathleen Cushman pointed out that the small school movement was
driven by "the steady rise in school size that has seen
the average school population increase five-fold since the end
of World War II. A push to consolidate schools has reduced the
number of districts by 70 percent in the same period. Ironically,
this trend toward big schools coincides with research that repeatedly
has found small schools - commonly defined as no more than 400
students for elementary schools - to be demonstrably better for
students of all ability levels, in all kinds of settings. Academic
achievement rises, as indicated by grades, test scores, honor
roll membership, subject-area achievement, and assessment of
higher-order thinking skills. For both elementary and secondary
students, researchers also find small schools equal or superior
to large ones on most student behavior measures. Rates of truancy,
classroom disruption, vandalism, theft, substance abuse, and
gang participation all are reduced in small schools, according
to a synthesis of 103 studies."
Education is one of those
human activities clearly centered on two people (teacher and
student). As the system surrounding this experience becomes larger,
more complex and more bureaucratic, the key players become pawns
in a new and unrelated bureaucratic game. The role of the principal
also dramatically shifts - from being an educational administrator
to being a cross between a corporate executive and a warden.
It is such a transformation that helps to bring us things like
what happened at Columbine.
Consider, for a moment,
that not a single private school has merged with five or ten
other academies in the name of efficiency and improved learning.
No one has suggested a Andover-Exeter-Groton-Milton-Choate-Kent
School Administrative District.
If conglomeration of schools
really helped, why would such places not give it a try? I once
asked the head of one of the top private girl's schools in the
country what he considered the maximum size of a school he'd
like to run. His reply: 500 students. . ."Remember, that
means 1,000 parents."
Yet not only do we find
George Bush, with lots of Democratic support, actively destroying
local control over public schools, mayors and governors rushing
to join the attack.
For example, inspired
by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg who has yet to produce
convincing results for his corporatization of public education,
DC's 36-year old new mayor Adrian Fenty is following suit. He
wants to abolish the elected school and put the system under
his control despite his impressive inexperience in education.
But Fenty, like many in politics and business, is absolutely
convinced that certainty is an adequate substitute for competence.
How little he really understands
was well described by Colbert King in the Washington Post:
"If governance and
lack of accountability are the main problems, why do students
attending Lafayette and Murch elementary schools, which are west
of Rock Creek Park, exceed proficiency targets in reading and
math by wide margins while students at Ketchum and Stanton elementary
schools, east of the Anacostia River, fall far short of the mark?
The four schools are in the same governance structure. Their
principals report to the same superintendent and are guided by
the same school board policies. True, Lafayette and Murch, located
in middle-income neighborhoods, have more white students. But
before going off on a racial tangent, consider this: Black students
attending Lafayette and Murch, in contrast to their counterparts
in Southeast, also excel in reading and math." King asked
Fenty why his takeover would help matters: "His bottom line:
he has the energy, determination, and sense of urgency that he
feels are missing among school leaders to make those things happen."
In other words, he thinks what the schools really need most is
himself.
Perhaps even more bizarre
is what is happening in Maine. The plan itself is familiar: the
pursuit of the false god of educational efficiency through the
concentration of school districts as ordered by the governor.
290 school districts would be merged into 26 regional administrative
units.
What makes it stranger
is that Maine is one of a handful of New England states where
one can still find the remnants of American democracy functioning
at human scale thanks to such institutions as town meetings and
lots of small villages that do what they want without excessive
interference from above. This tradition has produced in recent
years more independent governors (although not the present one)
than just about any state and a culture of honest independence
in politics and governance that would best be emulated rather
than reorganized.
And who suggested the
course that the governor is following? None other than representatives
of that citadel of Washington anti-democratic elitism, that hospice
of prematurely aging MBAs and political science majors: the Brookings
Institution. This is like Arianna Huffington coaching the Chicago
Bears.
To add to the oddity,
it is all being done in the name of "smart growth."
To give a sense of how
alien this is to traditional Maine culture, consider a town meeting
I attended a few years back in Freeport. I got there a little
late and the respectables had taken all the chairs, so I stood
in the hall outside with the baseball cap and pencil in the ear
set, all intensely interested and exchanging play by play among
themselves. It was a heated discussion that eventually produced
the resignation of a couple of council members but I tired of
standing and so returned to my quarters to watch it on TV. At
11 pm, when I thought the citizen input was almost over, two
people showed up to testify explaining they had become so perturbed,
they had gotten out of bed, dressed and braved the ice and cold
to join the fray at town hall.
Now that's the way democracy
is meant to work, but it's damn seldom that you see it any more.
And when you do, the sensible reaction should be: don't mess
with it.
Although the Maine media
has seemed to give implied blessing to the school reorganization
scheme, there is life in the state yet as public comment illustrates.
One Brunswick school board
member called Governor Balducci's plan "totalitarian."
Said another, "To lose our local control, I think it would
be devastating." Asked one citizen: "Tell me folks,
right here in Brewer, do you want somebody from Alton, Bradley
or Bangor telling you how we should run our school system?"
A school superintendent,
according to the Brunswick Times Record, "warned the plan
could mean a higher per-student cost for Brunswick, possible
budget cuts that would affect teaching staff, and a potential
clash of educational philosophies between Brunswick, Freeport
and the towns of School Administrative District 75 that would
share one administrative office and one school board under the
proposed plan. [The superintendent] also criticized the governor
and Education Commissioner Susan Gendron for producing a plan
that glossed over the loss of more than 600 teachers, hundreds
of jobs for administrative office staff and the educational impact
of superintendents.
Other comment, as reported
by local press:
Roger Shaw, superintendent
of the Mars Hills schools: "All small schools are struggling
for survival and all small schools are in danger. Whether by
chance or design, we are in the crosshairs of state policy."
Harvey Shue, a junior
at Hampden Academy called it an "extreme act" to merge
his 2,200-student school district into a 16,000-student district
based miles away.
Richard Farrell of Monhegan
"said it would be unworkable to relocate the management
of its seven-pupil elementary school to the mainland. He said
parents would be hard-pressed to attend meetings and that the
island's overall cost would be bound to increase."
Andrew Geranis of York
"asked lawmakers to reject any proposal that would change
the way schools are now governed. 'Local control is the heart
of our life in Maine,' he said.
Angela Iancelli of Monhegan
Island "said she feared that district consolidation would
lead to the closing of the island's small school, which she said
manages to operate efficiently while turning out students who
perform well on state achievement tests."
This is not a left-right
struggle but one that may far more important for our future:
a struggle between communities and bureaucracies and between
humans and systems. At present, the communities and humans are
not winning.
Smart Growth
The tie-in with smart
growth is quite revealing. The smart growth movement started
as a largely well-intentioned movement led by planners and environmentalists.
Many of their proposals made sense but it had some serious problems,
beginning with the insulting manner it treated suburban communities
in which many Americans lived, had improved their lives and educated
their children. As is traditionally the case with planners, these
citizens were expected to adapt to a purportedly ideal physical
model - even at the cost of having to move or being evicted -
instead of having the emphasis placed on improving - for them
as well as the environment - the communities in which they currently
lived.
This is not a new problem
with planners. In 1910, G. K. Chesterton described two characters,
Hudge and Gudge, whose thinking evolved in such a disparate manner
that the one came to favor the building of large public tenements
for the poor while the other believed that these public projects
were so awful that the slums from whence they came were in fact
preferable. Wrote Chesterton:
"Such is the lamentable
history of Hudge and Gudge; which I merely introduced as a type
of an endless and exasperating misunderstanding which is always
occurring in modern England. To get men out of a rookery, men
are put into a tenement; and at the beginning the healthy human
soul loathes them both. A man's first desire is to get away as
far as possible from the rookery, even should his mad course
lead him to a model dwelling. His second desire is, naturally,
to get away from the model dwelling, even if it should lead a
man back to the rookery.
"Neither Hudge nor
Gudge had ever thought for an instant what sort of house a man
might probably like for himself. In short, they did not begin
with the ideal; and, therefore, were not practical politicians."
Much of American politics
and planning follows the Hudge-¬Gudge model, producing
failure for both conservatives and liberals -- the former offering
us an army of the homeless and the latter presenting us finally
with drug-infested housing projects.
In the case of smart growth,
the Hudge-Gudge conflict could have been avoided by considering
not just a community's ecological liabilities but its assets,
and then figuring out how to lessen the former without harming
the latter. This might lead not to large scale redevelopment
but towards ways of making it less necessary for people to move
around so much in order to fulfill a day's tasks, permitting
accessory apartments in single-family neighborhoods and easing
zoning restrictions on community-serving small businesses. In
many suburbs wastefully designed shopping strips can provide
more than enough room for high-rise density without imposing
them on communities that don't want them.
It is helpful also to
bear in mind that next to economists, no profession has been
so consistently wrong and harmful to the human spirit as urban
planning.
There was, for example,
zoning that destroyed the mixed use city in the name of cleanliness
and health and that laid the groundwork for the sprawl of which
planners now complain.
There were decades of
racist federal housing lending policies that created ghettoes
in cities as the money fed the expansion of the suburbs.
There was the destruction
of magnificent streetcar systems on behalf of the automobile.
There was urban renewal
that destroyed communities instead of rebuilding them.
There was anti-human public
housing.
There were - and continues
to be - grandiose "economic development" programs that
overwhelmingly favored the upper class and a small coterie of
developers but which left less wealthy urban residents increasingly
victims of neglect and of gentrification.
Each of these schemes
were based on physical solutions to human, social and economic
problems - conceived by planners and politicians stunningly indifferent
to their affect on actual people.
The human, the community,
the small were repeatedly considered archaic, insignificant and
regressive.
From the progressive movement
of the early 20th century on, well-meaning but excessively self-assured
members of the elite have controlled the debate, the money and
the plans, with barely restrained contempt for the reservations,
concerns and resistance of the less powerful. And so it is with
smart growth.
Listen to Grow Smart Maine:
"Many of Maine's
smaller cities and towns are experiencing unplanned growth but
lack the resources and experience to manage that change in ways
that protect the character of their community. . . The Model
Town Community Project will work with a selected town during
2006 and 2007 to provide tools and advice that will help the
town shape its future. The project will mobilize local, state
and regional resources, enable the town to explore new growth
strategies and fully engage local residents by combining the
best elements of New England town meetings with ground breaking
new technologies."
In other words, we'll
come in and show you how to run a town meeting our way, just
like we learned at business school.
But if smart growth is
meant to be about environmentally sound planning, how come we
have to consolidate our school districts and our town offices?
Because once you put your
faith in the sort of expertise that a planning-managerial elite
offers, once you turn to MBAs like others turn to Jesus, then
you don't really need democracy, town meetings or small schools.
What you need is efficiency and managerial skill and you have
been promised that, so why worry?
Further, even over smart
growth's short life, a disturbing alliance has developed between
some liberals and developers thanks to the latter discovering
that the environmentalists didn't really want to stop them from
building, they just want them to build somewhere else and most
likely in a place where they could get more per square foot.
Washington, DC offers
a good example and, once again, the Brookings mafia is hard at
work. In fact, it even wants to eliminate something that make
Washington one of the most appealing cities in the world: its
building height limit.
Reports the Washington
Post: "Christopher B. Leinberger, a land-use expert at the
Brookings Institution, last week brought up the prospect of raising
the height limit on buildings in the District. He didn't specify
a height but encouraged community leaders, planners and developers
to at least entertain the idea. 'Things have changed,' he told
a standing-room-only crowd . . . 'We have an office market that
needs to go someplace,' he said. 'Density is critical. We're
running out of land. We need to build up.'"
In some neighborhoods,
citizens are even being called NIMBYs because they don't want
high-rises shoved into their pleasant communities and the name-callers
include not just the developers but enabling liberals who think
they're saving the planet. Never mind that in their own city,
in Greenwich Village or in Europe there are plenty of examples
of density without high-rise factory farms.
Fortunately, not everyone
is taken in.
One in attendance at the
density meeting wrote online afterwards: "The biggest hole
in the program, in my humble opinion, was the fact that none
of the presenters acknowledged that DC is not Bethesda or Atlanta
or Portland. It is our nation's capital, not a strip mall out
in Fairfax waiting to be retooled."
It is this remarkable
notion of our nation's capital and other cities - that they are
just strip malls waiting to be retooled - that is driving much
of urban planning and politics these days.
In both the school consolidation
and the smart growth debates the issue of human scale - and not
some liberal-conservative conflict - is at the core. But we have
been taught - by intellectuals, by the media, by politicians,
- to revere a promise of efficiency and technological advance
over the empirical advantages of living the way humans have traditionally
lived, including valuing the small places that host, nurture
and define their lives. We have been trained not to even notice
when our very humanity is being destroyed in the name of mere
physical change.
We should notice, though,
because in the end, if we lose the fight for staying human, whether
we were liberal or conservative won't have mattered a bit.
o
ALAN CARON, president
of Maine's Grow Smart, writes about our article on smart growth
and school consolidation:
"Nice story on what's
happening in Maine. You obviously spent quite a lot of time on
it. Too bad you missed the single most important fact about the
school administrative consolidation discussion going on up here,
while you were so busy waxing poetic on Maine's town meeting
tradition and local control. Why do we need to get beyond having
a superintendent on every block? Simple. 55% of the cost of local
schools is borne by the taxpayers of the state, not the local
community. Hardly in the tradition to which you referred. And
taxpayers have every right to expect that their money isn't wasted.
The town next door to mine has a superintendent for one elementary
school. If that's what local control means we're all ready for
a little less local and a lot more efficient. Does doesn't that
mean we have to throw out local democracy, but it does mean we've
got to stop treating local control like it's some shrine of infallibility
and start asking some tough questions. Maybe in the future a
little less ideology and a few more facts would help better inform
your readers."
SAM SMITH - Of course,
this is not a matter of a couple of school districts consolidating
but a massive centralization of school districts being pushed
by a governor with no known expertise in either education or
efficiency. And neither can Grow Smart can offer guarantees of
efficiency. For example, a study done for the Pennsylvania state
legislature last September found that "Overall, the research
did not find any evidence to support the notion that bigger districts
are better districts, in terms of cost, administration or academic
achievement, in rural Pennsylvania." Another study, in November,
found that while Oklahoma law allows different administrative
costs depending on the size of the district, "most districts
were operating below that level regardless of their size."
There are other problems
with consolidation. The Institute of Local Self-Reliance has
noted, "For many small rural districts, state financing
has been a lifesaver, providing desperately needed resources.
But state control of the purse strings has also been problematic
for small schools. In many states, funding formulas have given
priority to maximizing efficiency (as measured by annual per
pupil costs). These states have devised policies that favor big
suburban districts and pressure rural schools to consolidate."
A case in point was Nebraska:
"Beginning in 1996, the state adopted a series of policies
aimed at forcing small schools to consolidate. The state increased
its share of school funding from about one-quarter to one-half.
But unlike the old funding formula, which had doled out funds
based on each school district's costs, the new formula provides
a flat rate per pupil. This rewards the state's largest school
districts, which have low per pupil, per year costs, and penalizes
the state's smallest school districts. Ninety small rural districts
lost more than 10 percent of their state aid. Meanwhile, the
largest school districts saw their funding increase by $78 million.
. . According to the Nebraska Alliance for Rural Education, the
state is losing some of its best schools. Those who attend high
schools with fewer than 100 students are significantly more likely
to graduate and go on to college."
Caron's argument that
money should decide who has the power - sort of like our political
campaigns, no? - suggests that the federal government is entitled
to choose who is on the board of Halliburton or the Bath Iron
Works or that the lives of all senior citizens should be directed
by Washington in return for their Social Security. Caron's view,
however, reflect corporate rather than democratic values.
What is happening in Maine
and elsewhere is that the corporate ideology of bigger is better
is being applied in a roughshod manner as parents, media and
politicians are conned into believing that this will produce
more efficiency. In fact what will happen is that the children
and their schools will be treated as a disposable product line
rather than as the raison d'etre for the school system.
Local control does not
provide infallibility, but it does provide malleability, which
means that when you have a problem you only have to go to town
hall and not have to convince Governor Baldacci, the state legislature,
the media, the Brookings institution and all the money behind
them. It worked pretty well for two centuries until people began
falling for the corporate myth that making the trains run on
time was a more important goal than democracy. Or education.
The problem with this myth is that not only do you lose democracy
but you often find the trains still come late. And the kids still
struggle.
ALAN CARON - This is precisely
the debate that Grow Smart Maine was trying to spark with the
Brookings report. We certainly don't want anyone to be silent
in this discussion.
To us this isn't about
the particulars of the Governor's proposal, which surely will
undergo adjustment. Nor is it about consolidating schools. Grow
Smart is in strong supporter of local and neighborhood schools,
which are often the heart and soul of communities. But we're
not going to be able to keep those schools open, pay teachers
decent salaries and prepare kids for tomorrow's jobs if we spend
too much money on administration. Something is going to give.
Is it schools, superintendents or kids?
We can argue that the
status quo works fine, but it's worth remembering that Maine
just barely survived a recent TABOR vote, that would have had
disastrous effects on local schools, despite over a million dollars
spent by national education interests. Can we continue to ignore
taxpayer resentment? We don't think so. We will pay a fearsome
price if we do.
Let's remember, also,
that our two hundred year tradition of local control, which effectively
established the size of towns and school administrative districts,
reflected how far people could ride a horse to town and return
safely by dark. Today we're riding the internet and living in
commuter-sheds rather than towns. Does Maine still need a superintendent
within riding distance of every parent? We don't think so. Can
we find a way to adapt to today's realities while maintaining
the best of local control? That's the challenge.
SAM SMITH - As we have
pointed out, when you add quality of education, and not just
financial figures - to your judgment of efficiency, the massive
centralization of school districts since the Conant report don't
seem efficient at all. A major cause of America's trouble with
public education has been its conversion from an academic enterprise
to a bureaucracy modeled on the corporation. Beyond that is the
problem that while small schools may not be an initial target
they certainly become one in a big administrative unit obsessed
with fiscal efficiency. Further, there is no guarantee that large
units provide even fiscal efficiency. For example, in a period
during when the DC public school system population declined by
a half, the size of its central administration almost doubled.]
CHARTS SHOWING TREND IN SCHOOL DISTRICT
AND SCHOOL SIZE
THE
CATHOLIC CHURCH & SUBSIDIARITY
WIKIPEDIA - The principle
of subsidiarity holds that government should undertake only those
initiatives which exceed the capacity of individuals or private
groups acting independently. The principle is based upon the
autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds that
all other forms of society, from the family to the state and
the international order, should be in the service of the human
person. Subsidiarity assumes that these human persons are by
their nature social beings, and emphasizes the importance of
small and intermediate-sized communities or institutions, like
the family, the church, and voluntary associations, as mediating
structures which empower individual action and link the individual
to society as a whole. "Positive subsidiarity," which
is the ethical imperative for communal, institutional or governmental
action to create the social conditions necessary to the full
development of the individual, such as the right to work, decent
housing, health care, etc., is another important aspect of the
subsidiarity principle.
The principle of subsidiarity
was developed in the encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 by Pope
Leo XIII, as an attempt to articulate a middle course between
the perceived excesses of laissez-faire capitalism on the one
hand and the various forms of totalitarianism, which subordinate
the individual to the state, on the other. The principle was
further developed in Pope Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno
of 1931, and Economic Justice for All by the National Conference
of Catholic Bishops.
DEVOLUTION
IN BRITAIN
AYESHA ZUHAIR, DAILY MAIL,
2007 - Although the current devolved institutions in Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland have only been in place or legislated
for about nine years, the United Kingdom has over 120 years of
experience with devolution and the complex political and institutional
issues it presents. This long accumulated experience started
when William Gladstone tried to deal with the political problems
in Ireland by introducing a devolution measure referred to by
Gladstone as a Home Rule Bill in 1886. . .
The United Kingdom's first
experience of the working of a devolved legislature was in Northern
Ireland over a fifty-year period. The Government of Ireland Act
1920 gave Ireland Home Rule, but partitioned Ireland. There were
to be two parliaments one for the 26 counties of the Catholic
south and another for the six Protestant counties in the north.
The Ulster Protestants did not want home rule, but were forced
to accept it as the price for being excluded from the Catholic
nationalist south. . .
Devolution in Northern
Ireland illustrated how difficult it is to make devolved institutions
with full taxing and spending powers financially independent
and accountable, when they have a limited tax base. In principle,
the Northern Ireland parliament had tax raising powers and was
expected to finance its own public services and make an 'Imperial
Contribution' to the cost of things such as the armed services.
. .
Legislation for a devolved
assembly with an executive and legislative power was agreed as
part of the Good Friday Peace Agreement in 1998. While the Protestant
Unionists in 1921 had not wanted a parliament during the fifty
years of the Stormont regime, they became accustomed to a high
degree of autonomy, which they came to appreciate and enjoy.
The people of Northern Ireland had no practical means of influencing
the government at Westminster, because the political parties
in mainland Britain had taken no effective part in Northern Irish
affairs since 1921.
The condition for devolution
that the United Kingdom Government insists on is a framework
of power sharing that enables both community in Northern Ireland
to participate in the devolved administration and that the aspiration
of the nationalist communities, for an Irish dimension, is also
taken into account. For large parts of the Unionist majority
such arrangements are unacceptable. Reaching agreement on stable
power sharing arrangements is therefore difficult.
Scotland has a full parliament.
It has all powers devolved to it that were once exercised by
the Westminster Parliament, apart from a list of specific powers
scheduled as reserve powers. The principal reserved items relate
to the Crown and constitution, foreign affairs and defense, immigration
and economic, monetary and financial matters. Oddly enough, abortion
is specifically identified as a reserved United Kingdom matter.
. .
Wales has an elected assembly,
not a parliament that appoints an executive headed by a First
Minister. . .
The United Kingdom's experience
of devolution has had two dimensions to it so far. The first
has been the consequences of the processes that have led to devolved
institutions; and the second is the working of the devolved arrangements
themselves. The process of devolution has had a powerful impact
on the United Kingdom party system breaking and rearranging party
majorities. Both the process of making decisions about devolution
and the institutions created by it have resulted in novel constitutional
practices: referendums, special majorities, changes in parliamentary
procedure, a new relationship between the Crown and a legislature
and the creation of a Presiding Officer whose function is more
politically engaged than that of the traditional role of the
Speaker.
INTRODUCTION
TO DEVOLUTION
ALTHOUGH CRITICISM
abounds concerning
the rapid concentration of governmental power, world trade, domestic
commerce and police authority - just to name a few - there is
a stunning lack of alternatives proposed or even mentioned by
media, politicians or intellectuals. Even among those who despise
these trends there seems an almost tacit acceptance of their
inevitability. A few examples:
- One of the greatest
assaults on the Tenth Amendment's protection of state powers
- No Child Left Behind - is broadly supported by both Republicans
and Democrats. The Tenth Amendment, in fact, has almost become
the Forgotten Law.
- America's right to determine
the values and politics of the rest of the world, even to the
point of invasion, has wide acceptance among Democrats and Republicans,
limited only by the caveat that it may not be as big a disaster
as is Iraq.
- The gross conglomeration
of the American media - the broadcast media in particular - has
raised few objections saved from those hardy groups that still
believe in a free press.
- Many corporations use
America mainly as a mailing address as they seek to do to the
world what Starbucks has done to many urban neighborhoods.
- The cultural values
of Americans is increasingly based on the idea that bigger is
better. We have been taught to worship grandiosity and ridicule
the modest.
Obviously, these are not
universally held values although one might easily think so. In
fact, underneath the surface of mainstream megalomania are numerous
examples of groups and people still acting in, or striving for,
human scale. They are, in fact, about some of the most important
business of a human: reversing the gigantism that has not only
hurt our lives but is threatening the whole planet.
Collectively these alternatives
can be called examples of devolution or subsidiarity, the dispersal
of authority to the lowest practical level, an increasing proximity
of people to power, the return of commerce, politics and policing
to human scale.
Nothing could be more
important and no idea is more in need of a movement.
You didn't have to explain
this in the 1960s and 70s when community power and control were
well up on the left's agenda only to be wiped from memory by
a generation of accumulators, self-aggrandizers and monopolizers
preaching the human heresies of Thatcher, Friedman and Reagan
like so many hustling evangelicals.
This journal has joined
innumerable fights on this matter over the years. It argued for
urban neighborhood government, it published a series of articles
on devolution in other countries (including a prediction of the
break-up of the Soviet Union) by Thomas Martin, and we have raised
the flag for more urban states.
The best way to think
about devolution is to remember that it refers to what Martin
has called "the ideology of scale." This ideology functions
in a three-dimensional fashion with traditional ideologies. For
example, one can be a progressive decentralist or a conservative
who believes in centralized authority. Thus conservatives and
progressives may agree that much power needs to be returned to
a local level, but might disagree violently on how it should
be handled once it gets there.
What works so well in
the manufacture of a Ford Taurus -- efficiency of scale and mass
production -- fails to work in social policy because, unlike
a Taurus, humans think, cry, love, get distracted, criticize,
worry or don't give a shit. Yet we keep acting as though such
traits don't exist or don't matter. We have come to accept the
notion that the enormous institutions of government, media, industry
and academia are natural to the human condition and then wonder
why they don't work better than they do. In fact, as ecological
planner Ernest Callenbach pointed out, "we are medium-sized
animals who naturally live in small groups -- perhaps 20 or so
-- as opposed to bees or antelopes who live in very large groups.
When managers or generals or architects force us into large groups,
we speedily try to break them down into sub-units of comfortable
size."
Today, if you want to
tell it to the boss, you may have to travel a couple of thousand
miles just to get to the receptionist. All of our systems appear
to be on steroids. And like the drugged athlete, nature eventually
pulls the plug. The institutions that have imposed a tyranny
of size upon us not only fail to accomplish what they set out
to do but are themselves disintegrating. The troubles of such
huge institutions is a primary characteristic of our times. Consider
the Soviet Union, Sears, General Motors and, yes, the United
States itself.
We see it and yet we don't.
Our loyalty to our assumptions and ideologies as well as our
natural difficulty in accepting mortality even in non-human systems
lead us to underrate such changes, to keep trying to do things
the old way one more time. |