Censored 2012 (23 page)

Concentrated social power can easily be abused and only tends to be benign when it is transparent and balanced by other forms of social power (such as unions balancing management, or the three branches of government balancing each other).
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Unless held in check and balanced, power tends to corrupt—concentrating and seeking secrecy and freedom from oversight to maintain and expand itself. Today we can see fear of terrorism, antigovernment “freedom” narratives (including “free market” ideology),
the equation of profits with jobs, and the fiction of “corporate personhood” being promoted as primary PR memes to garner public support for the concentration of corporate and elite power which can then be held free of public supervision and accountability. Media ownership, the dynamics of advertising, and the coevolution of corporate and journalistic cultures into closely woven elite mindsets and networks make it increasingly unlikely that elite-supported “mainstream” media will adequately cover any public challenges to elite power or emerging alternatives to the status quo.
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Ways that collaborative culture can work to balance concentrated power include 1) funding public, community, and crowd-sourced media; 2) supporting journalistic efforts to report about the positive work of NGOs and grassroots activities; 3) supporting public conversations about issues that matter; 4) funding websites that enable people to think and work together to realize shared visions and preferred public policies; and 5) supporting strategic actions and public attention to counter efforts by elite interests to undermine or suppress collaborative actions. Note the following example.

Fourteen states have now introduced bills to form state-owned banks or to study their feasibility. All of these bills were inspired by the Bank of North Dakota (BND), currently the nation’s only state-owned bank. While other states are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the state of North Dakota continues to report surpluses. On April 20, the BND reported profits for 2010 of $62 million, setting a record for the seventh straight year. The BND’s profits belong to the citizens and are produced without taxation. The BND partners with local banks in providing much-needed credit for local businesses and homeowners. It also helps with state and local government funding. Now, other states are on track to follow North Dakota’s example, moving their state reserves from Wall Street banks to banks owned by their own residents.

Readily available credit made America “the land of opportunity” ever since the days of the American colonists. What transformed this credit system into a Ponzi scheme that must be propped up with
bailout money was a shift to private, conglomerate bankers who always require more money back than they create because they charge high interest rates for maximum profits.

Policymakers in Washington have fundamentally altered the landscape of banking and the new landscape is clearly designed for the multinational Wall Street bank. Yet even after the excesses of our biggest banks produced the near collapse of our financial system, federal officials doubled down on the “bigger, riskier” strategy. They guided the largest banks through mega-mergers—Wells Fargo’s absorption of Wachovia, JPMorgan Chase’s purchase of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, Bank of America’s deals for Merrill Lynch and Countrywide—then nurtured these fragile conglomerates with billions in taxpayer dollars. The result? The top five banks in the United States in 2010—Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and PNC—now control more deposits than the next largest forty-five banks combined. Their share of total deposits in the US has more than doubled since 2000, to 40 percent. Their share of assets is even greater—48 percent—up from 26 percent. Today, just one percent of the country’s banks have more branches than all of the rest combined. For every big bank executive who has gained from this policy, hundreds of local banks—and the communities that depend on them—have lost out.

Overall, state banks differ from private banks by being mandated to serve the public interest, not shareholders or bank executives seeking personal gain. Both state and private banks receive money from the Federal Reserve Bank at low interest and loan this money plus interest. However, interest rates are typically lower from public banks, saving borrowers and making local investments more likely and more profitable. State banks partner with community banks and credit unions giving them greater liquidity, thus supporting them to make loans to small businesses (vs. the current tightening of credit by most banks).

When the state borrows money from the state bank for public projects, it does not have to pay the higher commercial interest rate charged by private banks—saving on state project costs an average of 30 to 50 percent. These savings are returned to the state, and eventually to the public at large, in terms of lower taxes, more services, etc. State banks are a win-win for virtually everyone—the whole community
benefits. Objections are usually based on misconceptions or a lack of information. Get involved and help this “game changer” happen in your state and community.

In our current century, technology and global economics are weaving us increasingly into each other’s lives, connecting each one of us to more people (most of whom we won’t ever know), drawing us into new and expanding streams of information, and rapidly increasing complexity. We find ourselves wrestling with a surreal sense of expanding personal choices combined with collective powerlessness, and all within a context of life being too much, too fast, too confusing.
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Our reactions to this are quite understandable; we look for simple things to hold onto and simple things we can deal with, turning away from complexity into at least an illusion of clarity and control.
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We tune out, let go into distractions, and require entertainment in order to pay attention to anything for very long. So we find a large percentage of the vastly expanding field of human creativity being channeled not into addressing the complex realities that are actually shaping our lives and our future, but into producing oversimplifications, entertainment, and evermore innovative ways to manipulate—rather than inform—the population.

Our world has become so complex and the time allowed for reporting so limited, that there is little room for stories about the interactive, systemic nature of problems, only news about the many discrete symptoms. The public becomes numbed and bewildered by the problems in the news, and increasingly disenchanted with public life.

In such an environment, individuals and families often seek out private solutions, or they narrow their associations to a particular subculture. Meanwhile, the neglected commons become even riper for manipulation by special interests.

When journalism is employed primarily to attract us to advertisements or, worse, to channel our baser desires for enemies and well-targeted certainties, it undermines our ability to muster sufficient collective intelligence to serve our individual and communal benefit.
In fact, journalism becomes part of the system through which we are destroying ourselves and our world.

To serve our ability to function as a democracy by delivering some modicum of wisdom on behalf of a good society, journalism needs to give us insight into the dynamics of the systems that generate the conditions we live in. It needs to help us shift our attention from the presenting problems to their systemic causes, and give us the knowledge to take action where it really makes a difference, rather than flailing at symptoms that return to haunt us over and over.
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The rising demand to address these issues is part of the evolution of societies and systems into a global civilization that can survive and thrive at more sophisticated levels of complexity and create a healthier “fit” between humanity, technology, and nature.
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Shoppers worldwide are using five hundred billion to one trillion single-use plastic bags per year and the average use time of these bags is twelve minutes. Plastic bags pollute our waters, smother wetlands, and entangle and kill animals. Plastic is nonbiodegradable and is made from a nonrenewable resource: oil. An estimated three million barrels of oil are required to produce the nineteen billion plastic bags used annually in California. Californians also use 165,000 tons of Styrofoam for take-out food containers. Plastic and Styrofoam pollution not only litters our coast and harms marine life, it also costs California $25 million to cleanup each year.

Most plastic also contains harmful chemicals like Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates, which can be unsafe for human consumption or use. These can be avoided by using alternative materials like reusable cloth bags, stainless steel water bottles, and other paper, wooden, glass, and metal substitutes.

In California, people have responded to this problem: thirty-five counties have recently banned the use of plastic bags, nine counties have passed levies and fees on use, twelve counties are considering bans or fees, and twenty-six states in the US have introduced forms of legislation curtailing or banning plastic bag use. Californians are
increasingly aware of the dangers associated with plastic. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that plastic bag use in the state has dropped by as much as 33 percent in the last three years.

In response to this public concern and efforts by local governments, the multibillion dollar plastic bag industry has tried consistently to block public proposals that reduce plastic bag use. Now they are suing cities that have voted to ban single-use plastic bags. It’s time to support local activists and politicians that stand up to such power tactics and add your efforts to help preserve our environment and reduce plastic use.

A startling realization: Our “democratic” society is not institutionalized in ways to get people together who represent different sides of an issue and put them to work collaboratively toward a win-win solution. The only institutionalized procedure that encourages full collaboration or consensus is the jury system. But juries are asked to reach unanimous agreement on yes/no decisions—guilty or not guilty. Juries do not develop win-win solutions; they only pass judgment on prestructured, win-lose outcomes.

We need social processes and methodologies to involve people in effective, collaborative information gathering, problem solving, and decision-making. In all collaborative efforts, community members can also realize the gifts of diversity by reaching beyond traditional left/right factions to include more citizens, bringing new people and cultures together for connection and mutual benefit.

One of the most crippling aspects of our current version of democracy is its intrinsic adversarial nature. Serious dysfunctions arise from the oppositional politics of parties, and the polarization of potentially synergistic views and values into two “sides” that view each other as monolithic enemies, who are blind to nuances, and who cannot imagine alliances with “them” or engaging in cocreative policy development. These dynamics waste immense resources in electoral and lobbying battles, create governmental deadlock when different partisans control different branches of government, feed corruption that arises in such environments, and produce compromises and “deals”
that satisfy neither the legitimate interests of the partisans involved nor the real needs of the community being “served.”
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In short, we are divided and conquered. A cross-party pioneer, Joseph McCormick remarked: “Those in power are keeping us marching to their drummer—left, right, left, right, left, right—right off a cliff.”
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The word “collaborator” takes on a dark meaning in the wartime atmosphere of polarized politics.

Alternative maps and models of the political landscape have been developed to show more complex political realities than left and right, since those polarized formulations simply do not adequately describe the nuanced values and preferences of the population. One simple model divides voters into Republicans, Democrats, and Independents—the latter category rapidly becoming larger than either of the major parties. One simple quadrant model from the transpartisan movement suggests a left-right axis as well as a vertical order-freedom axis, with traditional Democrats in the upper left, traditional Republicans in the upper right, Greens in the lower left and Libertarians in the lower right.
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Twenty years ago,
Utne Reader
issued a map that had two more axes: centralized-decentralized and liberty-equality. More recently,
Utne
described the existence of a massive “radical middle.”
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Journalism and activism could both productively step out of the oversimplified and mythic left-right framework, and start enabling and reporting on more efforts by citizens to collaboratively work out the best approaches to our collective challenges among their fully diverse selves.

In
chapter 4
, Signs of Health & Emerging Culture, we will discuss recent news stories about collaborative success and about emerging social inventions that empower people to get involved and make a real difference in their communities. Here is an example from one of this year’s censored stories, about opening up municipal budgets to community stakeholders—getting resources to communities that are often significantly underserved and whose voices often go unheard.

“Participatory Budgeting” (PB) is a process that allows citizens to decide directly how to allocate all or part of a public budget, typically
through a series of meetings, work by community “delegates” or representatives, and ultimately a final vote. It was first implemented in 1990 in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, and has since spread.