Horizontal Governance: The Evolution of the Social Mind

So now that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement seems to have fallen off the major media radar, most of its non-participating supporters are now left to wonder, not only where did it go, but what now? It is very important for OWS to send a clearer message, about what change it wants to implement. If this message is not soon delivered, the movement will deteriorate, and be forever discounted as a senseless complaint.

The first thing that I noticed, as the OWS movement peaked, was a lot of the organizers were talking about it having a horizontal structure. For those, who don't understand what that is, or those who believe that a leaderless horizontal political system is just another phrase describing socialism, or in right-wing perspective, a communist takeover, the horizontal hierarchy finds its strengths in being leaderless. It enables every voice to rise to the top of all decision-making procedures. Unlike any of the aforementioned labels, horizontal-ism is a facilitator of efficient information, for the purpose that leaders could make more effective decisions when drawing up policies, that directly effect society, but with a focus on the needs of the individual.

So, why a horizontal, leaderless decision-making process? When asked, what was the funniest thing that he witnessed during the OWS protests in New York City, Dr. Arthur Chen of Oakland, California, responded with an action by protestors that wasn't as funny as it was purposeful. He noted that the effect of our generation's sense of inclusiveness, while watching the protestors take part in a General Assembly. This inclusiveness he witnessed is what the information age has brought us. Put simply, we have the tools that grant us the knowledge, that we don't have to "screen" each other, when it comes to having our voices heard, and that all of the information we gather from these assemblies are their to better inform us of all of our needs, rather than a pigeon-holed perspective provided to us by the measures of antiquated D.C. politics, and corporate media. The information age demands a place for those venues that would not screen all of our points of view (7).

Well, as complex as the OWS movement's demands are, so is the political process in our modern society, especially when you consider the pace at which information retrieval and gathering is accomplished in contrast to the current method  of implementation of ideas, and policies in current governmental structure on the basis of information acquisition. Basically, there is no political structure in the world today, that is capable of keeping up with the mobility of information. So, it is incompetent in providing a highly informed society with the necessary laws and leadership that will improve lives across the economic spectrum. "The style of communication, decision-making and planning taking place in Zuccotti Park, and in Occupy protests across the country, mimics much of the way we have learned to talk to one another online." (1)

As a society, we are all psychologically geared to consume and produce information at a much faster rate today than in the past, when the only avenues to the most current information were institutionally supplied media. Now the flow of information, being less authoritative, and more unrestricted, enables the general populace to shift opinion and consensus through its own mechanism of verification and truth (i.e. mic checks, tweets, Facebook statuses, etc.). Take for instance Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton's statements back in March 2011, where she stated that the U.S. is losing when it comes to information distribution (3). She was saying this even at a time of the greatest usage of the internet as an information sharing resource. With the rampant sharing of information, and the low cost to produce it, media centers have propped up elsewhere, globally, while the U.S. makes cuts to major propaganda facilities, it is apparent that the U.S. government even recognizes its failure to effectively create or even maintain an effective infrastructure to inform on a new playing field.

The pattern of rapid information sharing, and the shift away from powerful or concentrated information centers, is beginning to find its way into politics and governance. If there is any debate contrary to this concept then, that thinking is as archaic as the political system that exists today. It is a failing system, slowly collapsing under its own weight, because it is either resistant, or incapable to changing its structure, in order to meet the needs of the people it is supposed to represent, and coordinate with those who are more aware of the concordance of the highly informed public.

What we're missing today in policy making is a leadership machine that runs efficiently, and that efficiency should stem from its ability to easily discover consensus among a representative body. Horizontal-ism was born out of the political leadership's incompetence to connect, network, or even embed itself within the ranks of a more informed and people, that exists within a nexus of economical, and political awareness. If we are to successfully regain economic and civil control of not just our own nations, but to assure that in the future there exists a global mechanism by which all informed voices can be heard at the level of the representational parts of our governing structures, then horizontal governance must become a compulsory branch of government.

Political leaders remain indifferent, well, at least those who support it. Those that don't support a new amendment to the governing structure, simply understand that they exist in a system that isolates them from common needs, while symbolically upholding that they are representing the people, when in fact they have latched onto a more concentrated, financially apt body of constituents: corporations. Since the decision of the Supreme court to classify corporations as persons, our representatives have shut the true people out of government, and even governing themselves. Through well financed lobbying, it is extremely easy to market popular opinion that is biased in favor of business' agenda, and marketing is not necessarily fact or even truth. The rate of information is faster, because it is smaller, concise, concentrated, and easily facilitated. Instead of having to wait for the true popular message, from veritable people, senators, congressman, and statesman, refuse to recognize the time, the patience or the capabilities to hear an ever-growing population's demands. So through corporate person-hood, the ears of representative governing have only been listening to the minority of the population. Even if it isn't a minority below the surface, it is a highly concentrated, single body, that portrays skewed data, information, and opinion to our leaders, and has basically hijacked the democratic process. If our leaders were competent enough to embrace new technologies as tools to reconnecting the bridge of representation to their people, the need to consolidate information through the pipe of false person-hood, the corporations, then OWS would have never had the need to exist.

I bring all this up not to belabor the issue of corporate person-hood, but to emphasize one aspect why our politicians turn to corporate lobbying first, instead of the mass of people they are really supposed to represent, if they are even doing so at all. It is really a matter of "voice" as information, and a conflict between that and the speed at which it flows into government from the people, and the amount with which they are inundated. Ask, any successful businessman, if a business grows beyond its capacity to produce, the business' production infrastructure needs to change, in order for it to satisfy that growth. The same thinking should be applied to governing. What OWS is attempting to offer up to its leaders is governing system by which the people can regain their voices in government, and "produce" policies that directly stem from that voice, and not from the concentrated minority of voices that are isolated from the people by financial means and sheer totalitarian information marketing committed by the corporations and wealthy elite.

The most important thing to recognize about the corporate person-hood and its new found tight relationship with political leaders is that it is authoritarian in nature. This convenient relationship is severely evident in the doctrines of right-wing politicians, who have plenty of private interests lobbying them, and also support an extreme version of capitalism that caters to the corporate person-hood status. Instead of gathering consensus from veritable persons, the information pipe is diverted, and the flow of information into government has become unchallenged, simply by changing the definition of a person.

In education, the lack of leadership's capacity to adapt to the information age is strongly evident in its complete ignorance of improving the learning environment in general education. In the U.S. classrooms still contain the educational tools of 50 years ago. How would our leaders expect students to compete on the global playing field, if the real world expects learning and skill gains through an information highway, while the primary learning environment is only stocked with only #2 pencils and dry erase boards? If the leaders in the U.S. need an answer to why students are not ranking higher in the global education standings, they should ask themselves, "why hasn't there been a massive R&D effort to understand how to use computers to develop customized reading-learning strategies for kids with different learning styles." (4) If our leaders realize the technology is more about a new way of thinking, and decision making, and less about entertainment (i.e. video games, and Tweeting), then they would discover that educating our kids along these lines would enable them to govern themselves better, teach each other more efficiently, and basically share ideas in order to effectively innovate.

There is a concerted yet unspoken effort to suppress this new mode of information sharing by only the most powerful elements of our society, and their political cohorts, that realize the benefits of not just guiding media output, but excessively controlling it. If schools are not funded adequately enough to utilize the technological tools of now, if legislation is written in order to selectively expose our privacy, take away our right to free speech, and prevent us from seeking out the right information, then it is absolutely evident that controlling the masses comes in the form of authoritarian restraint. If gaining information is a race, those capable of buying policies, and those making them, are slowing the greater majority of people down with uncertainty and unprincipled policies. If ordinary people are adapting successfully to information exchange, and that progression is being even slightly restricted or presided over, then it would suffice to say that not just media, but also the flow of free information is controlled.

In order to paint a picture of the entities that control the flow of information, it must be emphasized that the avenues by which we receive information are highly restrictive because of two factors: 1) the private industry's inability to embrace change;  and 2) the failure of policy makers to stimulate change (5). It's all about speed really. Not about the ability of businesses and politicians to keep up, really, but more about their reluctance to change, even increase, speed at all. If the flow of information is sped up, then change in any system is inevitable, and to ignore it for the sake of security, or preservation of pre-existing systems, is simply put, a failure. Here's a scenario that makes no sense, in this matter, when Google Health (a resource for users to store and analyze their health information) decides to discontinue it's service. Within the same month, Qualcomm Life plans to sell a health device hub, that connects up to servers, in order to continuously share a patient's real-time health information with medical professionals via the "cloud" (6).

Now, you read that last paragraph, and say, "so what, it's the nature of the market, and it's competition for these companies to make changes". But, if looked at from a non-business perspective, and more so from the information architect, it would make sense to have multiple arenas of data, that could be used in conjunction, in order to create a larger data pool, which in turn would enable medical doctors and patients as well as healthcare insurers a more efficient tool to analyze medical risks and factors. Basically, business, because of profit loss, has taken away one source of health data aggregation, and isolate it via a paid for service, that limits the flow of information. The argument here is, why not have it in multiple ways? Why not just have a horizontal information structure, like the format that the OWS's movement has instituted for the purpose of sharing information among working groups?

It is second nature for us to produce information. In fact we produce information as fast as we interact with one another, yet most of it goes undocumented, or is placed in a data-accessible format. Discovering the point at which human interaction on the social level transitions into information provision to those who need to analyze it, or use it as a way to make sound policy decisions, is most likely the intention of the horizontal political structure, that OWS intends to implement. Most people may think, that polls or surveys may be the tool by which all of this is done, but often surveys can be too specific to a certain research need, and cannot be easily digested by the average person, and polls are either too biased or skewed to provide a non-partisan assessment of any policy stance. This, in no way, is a justification for the gathering of information of individuals, but rather, having our political structure take a more determined approach to gathering a sense of what the public needs are.

1. Occupy Wall Street’s ‘horizontal hierarchy’ seen through prism of the Internet
2. The Authoritarian Personality
3. Hillary Clinton: US Losing Information War to Alternative Media
4. Miller, Matthew. The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity. New York: Times, 2009. Print.
5. Arndt, Rachel Z. "Google Health to the Guillotine." Fast Company Dec. 2011: 32. Print.
6. Box Sends Health Data Right to the Cloud
7. Why I Protest: Dr. Arthur Chen of Oakland, California

Capitalist Chattel Slavery

How freeing is free market capitalism? It is in most cases offers sovereignty for those directly involved with the markets, and mostly for those who have the most to gain from it. At times, the current economy, and its ideals of capitalism seem too overwhelming to the individual, in that its close relationship with democratic government, seems to take more freedoms away from the individual than it provides, unless, of course, those individuals retain a sum of money to release themselves from a lack of favorable laws to benefit themselves.

There are many elements that lie beneath the surface, and those that can afford to manipulate the systems that attempt to make capitalism fair for all, offering a proper market of competition, instead of a system of biased steering of laws, in order to sustain a faulty or corrupt culture of business. In a nation that recognizes businesses as individuals, on the same level as individual persons, the economic imbalance is evidence that in a democracy that favors free markets and capitalist ideals, the dollar grants more advantage to big business, and places the true individual at a significant disadvantage. (Access To Justice In U.S. At Third-World Levels, Says Survey)

The credit system under the guise of free markets is also faulty, in failing to provide self-reliant financial gain for the individual. Based on my previous statement, legally empowered business grants credit, as well as maintains or enforces the credit values of individuals. The government has no role in this type of economy. There is no element of enforcement available to the consumer, that would provide a financial security if the consumer should be locked out of the current economic system, by not having a monetary provision. This, in essence, heavily enables private interests to selectively control and monitor who receives monetary resources, and how much of it they deserve. The Federal monetary system is practically becoming non-existent, and therefore corporations replace the Fed as a means to managing monetary aspects of the economy.

As manufacturing corporations, and corporations in general are granted more free will under limited regulation, they continue to impress upon the workforce a lower and lower wage, as financial corporations instill the use of credit, in order to keep the low wage earners psychologically at bay, from discovering that they cannot simply afford sustainability on a lower rate of income. In a capitalist democracy, as we have in the United States, money empowers any institution that has enough of it to supply, the corporation legally provided the rights of the individual inherits an unfair advantage over the literal individual. What the U.S. government has done is, instead of creating a separate set of laws to preserve the rights of corporations in a manner parallel to the rights of the individual, the government has purposefully created an artificial class of society that has tremendous amount of economic advantage over the individual, synonymous to the relationship between land owners of early America, and their imported slaves, who held absolutely no economic rights, whatsoever, and lacked the legal rights to sufficiently gain a secure and sustainable way of life.

Constitutional law since its establishment has emphasized an indifference to the financial freedoms of the individual. It is apparent in its wording of the 14th amendment, in that no state entity may "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This wording lends the federal government to too much passivity when it comes to regarding the freedoms of the individual. In a capitalist society, such as the one that exists in the United States, finances are the single most important aspect of gaining the essence of a stable and sustaining life; license to act within the law so as to maintain a sustainable life; and preserve one's own property. Granted the fundamental legislation laid forth in the founding documents and the following amendments were implemented to foster equality, but the reinterpretation of its meanings creates a paradox for the individual. If we are to uphold equality as some right granted to all individuals by supernal granting, then the people must ask themselves, how fortified is this equality when stood up against equality measured in monetary value. When you bring together the intrinsic strengths of individual freedom versus financial capability to purchase the essence of freedom, the two are not one in the same, Therefore, those elements of the governed that have the larger capacity to superficially obtain freedoms, should not obtain the same guarantees of freedom meant for the individual person.

A person is defined as "a human being regarded as an individual." In no way can this be misinterpreted or misconstrued as some other form or being, yet the law interprets it as including a network of individuals, even corporations. As Noam Chomsky has noted, the "powerful and privileged" felt that "any person" was too acute and obtuse under the same definition. "The Courts decided long ago to extend the concept "person" to include collective legal fictions created and supported by state power: corporations, which now dominate the economy and the society, and increasingly the political system." If the political system is dominated financially by corporations, then it is correct to conclude that the individual under these legal bounds has involuntarily relinquished crucial aspects of the freedoms granted by the 14th amendment. "Last January the Bush Supreme Court appointees overturned a century of precedents and sharply extended the right of corporations to buy elections." If those with the financial capacity to purchase votes have the driving force to guide the results of election in their favor, then it is true that the individual has lost their ability to effectively participate in a free democracy as a free person. The means by which laws are created to preserve individual freedoms are now steered by those who gain freedom through financial mechanisms, and not by right alone. "The grounds for the verdict are that money is speech, and corporations are persons, so to deprive them of the right to buy elections would deprive these fictional persons of their constitutional rights of freedom of speech. These expanded rights of unaccountable state-backed private tyrannies are being quite effectively exercised in the congressional campaigns that are underway right now, in a concerted effort to ensure that Congress is taken over by an extreme wing of business representatives." It is wrong to consider that men of business maintain a firmer right to freedom by way of state laws, than what is intrinsic in the right of free men. Whether we are associated with business or not, our freedoms are single in the perception of justice. (Final Remarks, Istanbul Conference on Freedom of Speech)

There are more mechanisms in place that tend to disable consumers from participating in the economy, by utilizing their financial assets. Without any government involvement most private institutions share information about consumers, basically known as credit reporting. An individual's movement through an economy is monitored at all times by, not a governing element, but instead by private interests: corporations. Since these corporations are granted the same status of liberty as you and me as individuals, it is as if one person has the ability to oversee your financial habits, and on the same token, enable or disable your ability to effectively spend or acquire money. If capitalism is a sponsor of free market practices, how is it possible that one individual can judge the financial capabilities of another? How does one individual justify your economic status within a market? What is that concept called? Controlling, manipulating, and monitoring one's ability to participate in an economic environment can somewhat be defined as an aspect of slavery. If participants have a minimal amount of money to spend on sustaining their inalienable lives, then they must turn to some other form of financial capacity, which is defined in capitalist structures as credit. Either the government's economic mechanisms supply the means by which its society can maintain sustainable living, or the private elements will follow suit in providing loans or credit dispensation. If the individual who lends to the individual who lacks the assets to participate in the market, at what point does the borrower gain non-debt status, if the economy is not providing enough means to participate in the economy, then how would the borrower ever exit debt status? The individual who has loaned or granted credit to the other is aware of this situation, and will seek to extend the debt status utilizing the information provided via credit reports, in order to manipulate debt elimination steps, and indeterminately keep the borrowing individual economically disadvantaged. Therefore, the economically disadvantaged individual fails to ever enter a prosperous stage, and due to the constant lack of having on-hand financial resource, obtains the economic status of an indentured slave.

There are two types of people in economic culture: those that practice the art of deception as a means to producing more prosperity for themselves, without providing an ample product, and therefore lacking production; and there are those that produce as a means of provision to the rest of society. Those who facilitate provisions into a society, and are compensated for it, are those that improve, and enable better growth for the economy. In contrast to this, there are those who seek compensation from society, without offering a provision, and it is these participants of a society that impress disadvantage upon other members of society, and therefore are degrading the efficiency and growth of any economy.

The process of creating an alternative international military force, "is nothing short of a subversion of the very existence of the nation-state and of principles of sovereignty and self-determination. 'The increasing use of contractors, private forces or as some would say "mercenaries" makes wars easier to begin and fight -- it just takes money and not the citizenry.'" This is the crux of this argument, in that there is no containment or element of private industry regulation to ensure the citizens that a paid force would not maneuver against the rights of a state and it's people. Only does money create mechanisms by which a force can generate a system which the intrinsic rights of the individual come with a price in monetary terms, and not on terms of liberty. (Scahill, Jeremy. Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. 2007. Nation Books. New York.)

Let's think about IBM's move to relocate, or expatriate its domestic workforce in the United States (Project Match). IBM simply wants its workers in the U.S. to leave the U.S, and move to India, because the cost of living is cheaper there, and the workforce demands a significant less amount for wages (The Business Elites ... Are Instinctive Marxists). Basically, outsourcing jobs to foreign workers for its company is not enough, and now that that workforce is saturated, and the U.S. workforce is desperate for jobs, due to economic hardships, IBM gains from removing a trained workforce from one nation to another, in order to decrease pay, without regard for international laws, or the domestic rights of the individual who chooses to relocate for work. The worker has two choices: relocate outside of the country that guarantees your freedoms and quality of life, to preserve your job, and work for less money, or resign, and seek work elsewhere at a time when the availability of jobs is scarce. Either way the individual is forced to sacrifice their livelihood and the stability of domestic laws that preserve individual rights over state or plutocratic authority. This is a basic manifestation of involuntary labor enslavement. The lack of international laws protecting foreign workers who have relocated, plays into the hands of corporations who take advantage of global free trade, in order to manipulate labor in a way that would place global workers within an insecure, and lacking global arena of nonspecific human rights laws, which provide these corporations with the ability to have complete dominance over a workforce's ability to sustain a free and stable life based on its provided labor. Is it not in the practice of financially advantaged corrupt third world entities, to gather up the strong, and those fully capable of providing intense labor for minimal compensation, in order to gain full profits? There is an unspoken advantage supplied to the corporate elites, that consumes the liberties of the common man, and that disguised upper-hand that the elites have gained, fails to address the laws that guarantee a dislocated workforce's economic freedom, and prevent capitalist-driven indentured servitude.

If we are to continue to convince ourselves as a society, that the current form of free-market capitalism is the only means of providing the individuals of society with freedom, then we are leading ourselves down a path of foolishness, ignorance of the law and misguided philosophy. Those of us, that are not financially capable of purchasing the attention of representatives at the state and national levels, are the individuals that are blindly led to have faith in our freedoms, but that faith is weakened by the mere fact that freedom within a capitalist society is so closely tied to monetary value and status. This is especially true, when the availability of money is decreased, and replaced by a system of credit, that has the intent of deteriorating our value as free members of society, and therefore debt becomes the chains by which we are prevented from gaining individual prosperity. If the individual cannot prosper, then the individual cannot be free.

I Can't Get No, Stimulation

The U.S. government is an absolute disgrace. We've got Republicans calling us to action to help the economy, then they decide they don't want to move forward with it. We've got presidential debates postponed, now it's going to happen. We're getting promises of lower taxes for the middle class, yet we're being expected to bail out big companies with our tax dollars. Democrats didn't trust Paulson on the bail out plan, yet they will move forward on implementing an unpopular plan, yet it is the "responsible" thing to do (Demolition accomplished).
I was watching on C-Span over the weekend, representative after representative, approach the podium with out-right anger at how this economic bail out plan is being managed by a select group of Congress, and then being brought to the floor for approval, without any discussion over it 110 page subject matter, and the laws it outlines. It's an absolute disgrace to America's ideals, and the way government should be run based on our Constitution. It's sad to witness a hand-picked group of Senators, Bush administration figures, and Representatives, go over a resolution, and walk out and tell the American public that this deal is ready to go. It's not a deal if there's no one else to make a deal with.
Here's a solution for you! Why don't you bail me out? Why don't you bail out all those people who are swamped in debt, because of these outrageously high markets. Why don't you bail us out by giving us jobs that give us reasonable pay, that would allow us to keep us afloat? Why don't you give us some reasonable health care, so that we don't have to shovel out thousands of dollars a month, which could be money used to put back into our debt, or put into investing? You don't do this, because it wouldn't make sense to you. Because you don't know what it's like to have empty pockets, and a pain in your body, you can't take care of, because there's no money to go to the doctor. You don't have a clue what it's like. All you know is how to keep those poor suffering CEO's afloat, so that they'll have enough money to pay for their country club dues, get medical coverage for their pet dogs, and mold their aging ugly wives with out-patient surgeries.
I received a letter from my Senator this weekend, after having spent a good 3 hours writing her a well thought out letter, and she had the nerve to send me back a form letter, which was probably sent out to the rest of her constituency, pacifying me, and telling me that everything will be okay, once we pass this bill, and take care of our poor Wall Street. Senator Feinstein said that she "received from Californians more than 50,000 calls and letters, the great bulk of them in opposition to any form of meeting this crisis with financial help from the Federal Government." That's a lot of people, not even considering those who are opposed who didn't write her. She also stated that "this isn't just about Wall Street." I could not agree with her more. It's a crisis at the individual level, where people are swamped with debt from all angles, and the only solution the government has is to bail out those who inflated the American financial system in the first place. Bailing out Wall Street, therefore won't work, because the Fed has decided to place yet another band-aid on a system that is financially, and internally bleeding. There solution is offer more credit to the existing credit, on top of debt. Money has become a ghost.
President Bush keeps hanging this fear over us, that the economy will destroy itself if this plan does not get approved by Congress, yet the fear has been there for a long time. We knew about our problems long before you did, Mr. President. I fear the only threat that exists now, is your administration's dangerous mismanagement of our economy.

Change Must Happen

On a little side note, today, I've been reading through a very good book by Thomas L. Friedman, titled, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twentieth-first Century, and I will take from a quote that was an answer to the author's question of what this Indian CEO's message was to the American people, in a world where the playing field has been flattened, and now India, China, Russia, and the like, are all beginning to thrive in a global technological economy. His response, that everybody [in America] needs "to wake up to the fact that there is a fundamental shift...in the way people are going to do business...everyone is going to have to improve themselves and be able to compete."
That's a pretty hard statement to swallow, but in my opinion it's true. I think I can completely and utterly relate to what he has said. America is very steeped in this conservative mindset, that what has worked in the past - basically becoming prosperous to due to innovation and setting the economic pace - will work now. But it won't! Don't you see? There is a new playing field, and Americans are still playing baseball, while the rest of the world is embracing a new and completely different game.
Unemployment is rising in America because there is way too much consequence to "doing your job", and not enough focus on making your job better, and more adaptable to the new way things work. In part people have been forced out of the workforce simply because they cannot compete on the new playing field. You have a lot of people who simply resist or are reluctant to learn new technological ways to do their job. Maybe, the greater part of the workforce is technologically inadequate or incompetent (I don't know you pick one), and because it is a majority force, it resists change in the workforce, because it feels threatened, and so they turn against those who want to change the game. Either play the right game or don't play it at all!
I look at it this way, if Americans do not begin to compete, instead of settling back into the comfort of a thriving past, then we will fail to sustain ourselves as an economic power in the global scene. We would also need to open our minds to new and better practices, those of which are very different than what we're used to, but in the end, we'd benefit from connecting ourselves to the global market, which is hardily driven by other nations at this point. We will soon be falling behind in the race, to the end of the pack.