Broken Democracy and Its Perils

The Gulf oil mess may be unparalleled for intractability and environmental impact, but not for public helplessness.

Regulation of deep oil drilling has been inadequate, and even supposing the public knew the risks and BP’s history of safety disdains, citizens lack control over regulatory enforcement comparable to the regulatory evasive power of private interests.

Which need is greater, more government regulatory power or more public power over government so that private interests can’t evade powers that government already has?

Government needs tending by citizens. Private interests tend to government around the clock. The question is not relying on government, as Libertarians would have it, but knowing what government should do and making government do it.  Where Libertarians misjudge security threats and where they undermine democracy, is where they want to jettison reliance on government without insisting that citizens take up the slack.

One reason people pay too little attention to government is that they concentrate on national government, the headline maker, over which they have little influence. They stare at the President for entertainment and mistake that for democracy. The level that they could influence, and transform into a power wielder over the national government that might compete with the money and media power of private interests, is city government.

City governments, working together, could make national governments honest. Collaborating across borders, city governments could pressure all national governments to attend to the security of their populations by ending war, squelching terrorists, and protecting the planet.

A current example of democratic power erosion is the bill in Congress to compensate for the Supreme Court’s holding in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission. The Republicans’ Supreme Court majority gave corporations and unions the same political advertising rights as real people. The bill before Congress would require public disclosure of the source of political advertising money.  The bill’s sponsors, though, are revising the bill to exclude organizations like the National Rifle Association from oversight.  (NYT, 6-18-10)

Security in the nuclear age needs to be a daily chore, like it was for settlers on the frontier.  To usurp Native American land entailed risks, which early Americans, the pioneers, accepted.  Today, in an analogous power grab, the United States asserts Superpower perks for its corporations to exploit natural resources globally and for its consuming public to burn fossil fuel and exploit cheap foreign labor that manufactures cars and clothes and grows food. The risks that this creates, from degrading the Gulf of Mexico to the possibility of terrorist WMD strikes, will be suffered at the household level and need to be confronted there as well.

 The level of government that could to protect the public is the local level, not because cities can field armies and missiles, but because cities united across borders could make their nations substitute globally enforced law for war and resource exploitation.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

      The Supreme Court’s decision to permit corporations to fund political campaigns is certain to narrow the possibility for fair elections based on issues and on candidate qualifications. It also furnishes a telling example of why the nations of the world, left to themselves, never will take the steps to end the nuclear arms race and prevent war.


      Weapons makers for years have allocated parts procurement, weapon by weapon, throughout the fifty states. Complex systems, like airplanes, are assembled from bits and pieces made in hundreds of separate Congressional districts. What such inefficiency adds to the cost can only be imagined, but the purpose is clear, to ensure that every Member of Congress will be vulnerable to pressure from constituents with either a job or a profit stake in each and every weapon.

     The Supreme Court now has made it harder yet to influence arms policies through election campaigns. No matter how cautious and multilateral a Congressional candidate’s proposal might be to enter into mutual, proportionate, verified arms control agreements, there never will be enough campaign money to match the infinite resources of the arms makers.

     As awful as 20th Century wars were, the nation structure, democracy, and most of civilization’s achievements pulled through. 21st Century wars, sooner or later, will be nuclear wars. Civilization, democracy, and the nations, including the United States, will not survive as we know them. If non-deterrable terrorists succeed in going nuclear, it could happen soon.

     The last political resource that threatened populations might yet command, and the last means by which populations might make common cause across national boundaries, is the cities and towns where the populations live. With effort, political influence remains available at that level. As the intended targets of wars and of terrorists, no voice in opposition to war could be more justified than the municipal voice. If Americans, through their cities, and Russians through their cities, and Chinese through their cities, all insisted at once that their nations cooperate to substitute enforced law for war, progress might follow that citizens could not make trying separately to influence their national policies.