[Vision2020] US Chamber’s Lobbyists Solicited Hackers To Sabotage Unions , Smear Chamber’s Political Opponents

[Kenneth Marcy]

On Sunday 13 February 2011 20:29:00 Dave wrote:
> You want to tell that to an Egyptian right now?

NO!! Certainly not. The Egyptians, however, are in the different situation of 
nearly starting over in their national organization. Instead of using nukes, 
they used tweets to remove the face and the skullcap of their body politic. 
Now they have to invent some set of neurosurgical processes, some set of 
constitutional convention, political reorganization, and legal restructuring 
to rearchitect, to replumb, and to rewire the constitutional, statutory, and 
political structures of their society. Then having done that, they have to 
reface and to recap their national headship with a new set of people to embody 
and effect the new structures and responsibilities of power.

Egyptians are in the exciting, but dangerous, position of having done the 
easier part of revolution -- the creative destruction part. A large number of 
140-character tweeters was sufficient for that part. Now they need more 
organization of a smaller number of full-bore text processors operated by 
their own new founding fathers and mothers in constitutional convention to 
accomplish the heavy-duty writing for a new national legal structure.

Americans' situation differs from the Egyptians' situation in that we don't 
need to scrap our entire government, but we do need to re-envision our system 
of business and commerce vis-a-vis the our systems of national and state 
governments, and the structures of economic democracy that should form the 
interfaces between economic activities and civic affairs. 

Is the phrase business ethics an oxymoron? On one hand we have Milton 
Friedman, F. A. Hayek, and their ideological offspring who essentially say yes. 
Let business do business, and the rest can take care of itself as it can, and 
if it can't so be it. On the other hand we have F. D. Roosevelt, J. M. Keynes, 
and five generations of people, most of whom appreciate that some degrees of 
guidance, regulation, and control of otherwise laissez-faire activities could 
achieve the dual goals of commercial profitability and social stabilization 
that are beneficial both to business people and the remainder of civil society.

The last decade at least, and the last four decades for certain, have 
demonstrated that our collective understanding and control of our economic 
systems leaves a lot to be desired. Ever since Lyndon Johnson refused to raise 
taxes to pay for the Viet Nam War, American economic activities have been 
tempered by self-serving forces controlling the central levers of monetary and 
fiscal power. This financial-governmental complex, every bit as powerful as 
Eisenhower's military-industrial complex, has, like the latter, also been 
outside of the reach of democratically-selected representatives of the 
sovereign power of the American electorate. 

Americans now need to accomplish the dual goals of re-envisioning a better and 
more democratically responsive system of economic governance, and find a set of 
political routes and activities to implement the results of this new economic 
architecture without disrupting either the economic activities that power the 
system or the economic benefits that motivate the operation of the system. This 
is an especially challenging task because both parts of the foundation and 
parts of the superstructure need to be remodeled simultaneously. But it can be 
done. Whether we have the collective will to get the job done amid incessant 
on-going discussions of the efficacy of any set of decisions upon which to 
proceed is a matter yet to be observed.


Ken