I AM a Visual Artist, as well as an Archetypal Research & Synthesis Metaphysician and in my early years as a pen & ink illustrator/souvenir cartographer I registered my published works with the United States Copyright Office (28 year terms, renewable one time prior to release into the public domain). I AM now beginning to look into the Creative Commons alternative to ownership of copyright, because... we never really own anything! ~ JDHWB-R
You Never Really Own Anything
Ownership. Property. This is mine. This is yours. Do you think you own anything? You don’t. Ownership is an illusion. So is property. Why? Because all the things you use are only used by you temporarily before they are passed on or thrown away. Be it food, clothing, cars, property, furniture, cell phones, air, water. You never say to anyone ‘Don’t breath here! This air is mine!’. Of course not. Air is still free, and no one claims to own it. Water is also in a large degree free, but is becoming more and more privatized. Food, clothing, cars and land has become utterly privatized. Still. You don’t, and never will own anything of it.
You use it.
You don’t own it.
At best, all you can say about ownership is that ‘this is in my possession now and as long as I am using it’. That is the most ‘ownership’ there is. Everything that you ‘own’ is only ‘yours’ temporarily. It is only borrowed or rented. Your food goes into you and comes out again. So does the water. Even your body is on loan. When you die it goes back into the circulation. Ownership is an illusion. Still, it’s an illusion bought by humanity. But it is no more than an agreement that say’s that ‘ok, we will have a system here that gives some the right to claim vast resources of the planet for themselves, while others get nothing’.
There’s no ownership in nature. There’s only coexistence, with every part fulfilling their task, and every part being fulfilled in doing so. In a moneyless society and resource based economy this is how we will look at ownership, since this is the only ‘ownership’ there is and ever will be. Having a paper that say’s you own something doesn’t make it more ‘yours’ in the big scheme of things. Whatever you ‘own’ can be lost in the blink of an eye.
Today ownership is almost equal to accessibility. The more you own, the more access you have to things in life. The more land you own, the more cars you own, the more houses you own, etc. The problem is that you are only one person and cannot possibly make 100% use of all the things you own. Even if you only own one car and a guitar. You will never be able to use whatever you own all the time.
If, however, you didn’t own anything, but had access to virtually everything this planet and humanity can offer, you would ‘own’ more than the richest people on this planet will ever own. I’ll say this again, because this is the most important thing there is to grasp when it comes to concept of non-ownership:
If you didn’t own anything, but had access to virtually everything this planet, and humanity, can offer, you would own more than the richest people on this planet will ever own. The whole planet would be yours to use. Of course, this means that all borders and visas would have to go too.
In a resource based economy everyone will have access to virtually everything on this planet. Today we think that if this was the case, everyone would rush to the same places and go for the same things, because that is what is seemingly happening today. ‘Everyone’ seem to run after the same things. And sometimes, yes, some things are more popular than others. But we must remember that a lot of this is due to advertising and promotion seeking a certain behavior among the population fulfilling the profit motive of the capitalistic system.
One example of a moneyless system in today’s society is the library. Sometimes you have to wait for books to come back, yes, but more than often the books you want to borrow are there for you. If the whole world was like the library, you might have to wait a while going to a certain beach or holiday resort if it was full for the time being. But, there would be lot’s and lot’s of other places to visit in the mean time, just like there would be lot’s of other interesting books to read while you were waiting for the one you wanted. Maybe you’d find other, even more interesting books to read, and places to visit, in the mean time.
The idea of ownership builds on the notion of scarcity. The thought that there is not enough of places and books for every one of us. Therefore, it is best to hoard as much as we can while we can. If we don’t, we risk being without, not having access and having to live a poor life.
Not owning anything could be the best experience humanity has ever had. It would result in the most abundant lifestyle anyone on this planet could ever dream of. Not owning anything is a notion built on the opposite of scarcity. It is a thought that when we share, everyone will have many times more than what we would ever have if we were to own everything we wanted. This includes the richest of the richest people on this planet. No one, I repeat, n o o n e, can own the whole planet. Even though someone certainly tries to do just that, it will never happen. In any case no one would ever be able to use the whole planet for themselves only. You can’t swim on all the seas, climb all the mountains or eat all the food.
Some people try to own as much as possible, thinking this will bring the best lifestyle for them, not realizing that sharing will bring more to everyone, even them. Of course, we can not all have our own private jet or private beach. But we would have access to more jet’s and beaches than we could ever use in a world with no ownership.
So, since we don’t own anything anyway, since ownership is nothing more than an illusion bringing lack to the world, why not simply abandon it. Of course, this is not something that is done over night. Many people are ready for it, even rich people. But just as many people are afraid of it and far from ready. For it to happen this thought has to manifest itself throughout the population and take root. Humanity have to break free from the thought of money, property and ownership and open it’s eyes to the new virtually unlimited possibilities a moneyless society and a resource based economy can offer.
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons licenses free of charge to the public. These licenses allow creators to communicate which rights they reserve, and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Creative Commons licenses do not replace copyright, but are based upon it. They replace individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, which are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management, with a "some rights reserved" management employing standardized licenses for re-use cases where no commercial compensation is sought by the copyright owner. The result is an agile, low-overhead and low-cost copyright-management regime, profiting both copyright owners and licensees. Wikipedia uses one of these licenses.
The organization was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson, and Eric Eldred with the support of Center for the Public Domain. The first article in a general interest publication about Creative Commons, written by Hal Plotkin, was published in February 2002. The first set of copyright licenses was released in December 2002. The founding management team that developed the licenses and built the Creative Commons infrastructure as we know it today included Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, Glenn Otis Brown, Neeru Paharia, and Ben Adida.
In 2003 the Open Content Project, a 1998 precursor project by David A. Wiley, announced the Creative Commons as successor project and Wiley joined as CC director. Matthew Haughey and Aaron Swartz also played a role in the early stages of the project.
As of January 2016 there were an estimated 1.1 billion works licensed under the various Creative Commons licenses. As of March 2015, Flickr alone hosts over 306 million Creative Commons licensed photos. Creative Commons is governed by a board of directors. Their licenses have been embraced by many as a way for creators to take control of how they choose to share their copyrighted works.
Progress is impossible without change. In a previous blog titled “The Rat Cage”, I explained that every time you had to sit in a classroom and learn about things you had no interest in, any time you had to pay taxes, any time you had to go to work when you didn’t want to, any time you watched the corruption in the world and couldn’t do anything about it, every time authority made you feel powerless over your own life, every time you wanted to be authentic but couldn’t for fear of consequences… you desired to be free. You desired radical change. Like so many generations before you, you felt like your life was a rat cage and you wanted out of the rat cage. But because of the strength of the rat cage... The bills to pay, mouths to feed, reputation to uphold, people to not let down, you stayed stuck while desiring freedom.
An average man is invested in and only believes in the world of physical action. To this man, desire is nothing more than an abstraction. He does not understand that desire is the fuel for universal expansion. It is desire that pre-paves our physical reality. Desire is the momentum of the river that is carrying us in the direction of whatever it is that we want. All evolution owes itself to this precursor. Every thought we think, word we speak and action we take is nothing more than compliance or resistance to the direction of that momentum. And that vibrational momentum gets to a point where it cannot be stopped. The momentum of the collective desire for radical change cannot be stopped. We are all subject to the current of that river.
2016 was the year of purification. Imagine that you are about to make a serious change in your life relative to where you live. First, you would have to let go of your attachment to where you live currently. There would be a process of cleansing in which you would have to decide what you wanted to keep and what no longer served your progression. In 2016, this purification process took place on a mental, emotional and physical level. Many of us had to come face to face with our deepest long-term wounds as a result, our primary theme of resistance. Many of us became freer and many of us suffered as our attachments were stripped from us in this purification process.
I have spent the entire night last night out of body, specifically looking through the life path potentials of humanity and of the earth for the upcoming year. And I will tell you now that the theme for 2017 is: RADICAL CHANGE.
When a person really desires a radical restructuring, they want a fresh new start. Not an alteration of what currently exists. The same is true of a collective desire for radical restructuring. We have actually been in the active process of this radical restructuring as a universal time space reality, world and human collective since 2011. It will continue with various stages of intensity for many years to come. To tell you the honest truth, the apex of this process of change for the entire collective is currently a vibrational match to the year 2020. And like any process, this process has multiple phases. 2017 is heavy with transition. There is great movement in this year. This year is not about subtle changes. It is charged with the momentum of action.
Last night, I asked to be shown an image that would represent the human collective in 2017. I was shown the image of a man in his late 20’s. He was standing in his nicely furnished apartment. It was full of his things. He stared at the things as if to say goodbye. Then, as if led by some un-fathomable instinct, with only the clothes he was currently wearing, he walked out the door, locked it, went down the stairs, and threw the keys to his apartment into a trash bin on the street. In a state of complete non-attachment, as if he was never coming back, he started walking down the street to who knows where, towards the horizon line. He did not have the elated energy of freedom as he walked away from me. He had the energy of someone who had nothing left to lose by walking into the unknown. Like the consequence of staying outweighed any risk he may face and so, he took the action. This man represents our human lives in 2017.
Change, especially drastic change, is something that people fear no matter what country or culture or race or religion or creed they belong to. We have learned there is safety in the predictable. But to be completely honest with you, there is nothing more unsafe during a collective drastic change (like this year) than ‘staying’. Staying in the familiar, continuing to do the same things and resisting the change beckoning you forward is futile. This year will be unpredictable, any resistance to the momentum of this change will guarantee that the ride will be turbulent. And like it or not, 2017 will bring guaranteed surprises to everyone’s life. Economic troubles and violent social unrest will be a major part of this drastic change. I will warn you in advance that drastic change often looks and feels like chaos. A division is occurring between those who will hold on to the old consciousness and the structures that go along with that consciousness and those who will step into new consciousness in order to build the new structure for society. This year, you will see polarization and opposition across the globe. Many of the alliances formed between governments and conversely oppositions declared in 2017 will set up the fate of humanity in the coming years. Also, humanity has been materially focused for so many thousands of years. This coming year, that will change for many people on this earth.
No matter what true ‘seer’ you talk to about 2017, you are going to hear the same thing… That 2017 is ripe with conflict. I cannot lie to you and tell you that if you watch the world at large, you are going to feel good this year. But you are also going to hear us say that the heating up of the collective conflict is exactly what will cause so many to ‘move’ forward and progress. In a larger sense this ‘move’ is into a new state of consciousness. On a mental level, this means drastic changes in perception, which in turn changes your emotional experience completely. And on a physical level, this year spells change, change, change as well. Do not be surprised if these changes come to you as if out of the blue. Do not be surprised if you find yourself physically relocating.
Given that this year is all about drastic change, I have some very aimed and serious advice for you. I want you to think of the momentum of this great process of shift that we are in as an out of control train that is piloted by the collective desire of human kind for drastic change. I am telling you that where this train is headed, is exactly what you have been asking for. And am telling you that this train is taking those aboard it, away from the inevitable collapse of what is. But this train has no mercy for those who stand on the train station platforms gathering their things. It has no mercy for those who procrastinate and show up late. It has no mercy for those who are not ready. When it rolls into the station, it will not be stopping. And so, my suggestion is to start running now. Start running in the direction that it is heading, so that when you hear its engines, you can jump on board. And when you jump on board, be willing to let go of anything that is slowing you down.
From this day forward, for as long as this transition of consciousness is occurring within our race, whenever you feel drastic change approaching, hear my voice calling to you over the steam of the engines. Hear me calling “Jump On Board”. Do not hesitate… Let the momentum take you. Carry your fear, like a crying baby in your arms and get on the train with it. Make the change. Do not resist it.
The Meeting of the Electors is scheduled for Monday, December 19, 2016
What is The Electoral College?
The Electoral College is a process, not a place. The founding fathers established it in the Constitution as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.
The Electoral College process consists of the selection of the electors, the meeting of the electors where they vote for President and Vice President, and the counting of the electoral votes by Congress.
The Electoral College consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the President. Your state’s entitled allotment of electors equals the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for your Senators. Read more about the allocation of electoral votes.
Under the 23rd Amendment of the Constitution, the District of Columbia is allocated 3 electors and treated like a state for purposes of the Electoral College. For this reason, in the following discussion, the word “state” also refers to the District of Columbia.
The presidential election is held every four years on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. You help choose your state’s electors when you vote for President because when you vote for your candidate you are actually voting for your candidate’s electors.
Most states have a “winner-take-all” system that awards all electors to the winning presidential candidate. However, Maine and Nebraska each have a variation of “proportional representation.” Read more about the allocation of Electors among the states and try to predict the outcome of the Electoral College vote.
After the presidential election, your governor prepares a “Certificate of Ascertainment” listing all of the candidates who ran for President in your state along with the names of their respective electors. The Certificate of Ascertainment also declares the winning presidential candidate in your state and shows which electors will represent your state at the meeting of the electors in December of the election year. Your state’s Certificates of Ascertainments are sent to the Congress and the National Archives as part of the official records of the presidential election. See the key dates for the 2016 election and information about the roles and responsibilities of state officials, the Office of the Federal Register and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and the Congress in the Electoral College process.
The meeting of the electors takes place on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December after the presidential election. The electors meet in their respective states, where they cast their votes for President and Vice President on separate ballots. Your state’s electors’ votes are recorded on a “Certificate of Vote,” which is prepared at the meeting by the electors. Your state’s Certificates of Votes are sent to the Congress and the National Archives as part of the official records of the presidential election. See the key dates for the 2016 election and information about the roles and responsibilities of state officials and the Congress in the Electoral College process.
Each state’s electoral votes are counted in a joint session of Congress on the 6th of January in the year following the meeting of the electors. Members of the House and Senate meet in the House chamber to conduct the official tally of electoral votes. See the key dates for the 2016 election and information about the role and responsibilities of Congress in the Electoral College process.
The Vice President, as President of the Senate, presides over the count and announces the results of the vote. The President of the Senate then declares which persons, if any, have been elected President and Vice President of the United States.
The President-Elect takes the oath of office and is sworn in as President of the United States on January 20th in the year following the Presidential election.
Roles and Responsibilities in the Electoral College Process The Office of the Federal Register coordinates the functions of the Electoral College on behalf of the Archivist of the United States, the States, the Congress, and the American People. The Office of the Federal Register operates as an intermediary between the governors and secretaries of state of the States and the Congress. It also acts as a trusted agent of the Congress in the sense that it is responsible for reviewing the legal sufficiency of the certificates before the House and Senate accept them as evidence of official State See the key dates for the 2016 election and information about the roles and responsibilities of state officials, the Office of the Federal Register and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and the Congress in the Electoral College process.
I voted my conscience on November 8th, which was for Jill Stein of the Green Party but it is interesting to note that she never reached the threshold to receive a single Electoral vote, according to tally of pledged Electors. See predict the outcome link in the text. Dr. Jill Stein is not listed. However, among those candidates who received pledged Electors, Hillary Clinton has the most qualification, based on her political experience, and should be chosen by the Electoral College to be the 45th President.It is now time to vote your conscience. ~ JDHWB-R
Interlocking Directorates: The Foundation of American Corporatocracy Interlocking Directorates in the Corporate Community
by G. William Domhoff
Interlocking directorates -- defined as the linkages among corporations created by individuals who sit on two or more corporate boards -- have been a source of research attention since the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, when they were used by famous muckraking journalists, and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, to claim that a few large commercial and investment banks controlled most major corporations.
Today corporate interlocks are analyzed with bigger databases and sophisticated network programs, thanks to desktop computers. The databases are large matrices that contain information on the linkages between persons and groups. Either a corporate/organizational network, based on common directors, or an interpersonal/social network, based on shared board memberships, can be derived from these matrices. That is, the matrices contain a "duality of persons and groups" (Breiger, 1974). This is worth mentioning because this essay will discuss both "corporate networks," that is, the linkages among corporations created by interlocking directorates, and "social networks," that is, the linkages among people by virtue of the fact that they sit on the same corporate board.
The conclusions from the more recent studies are very different from those drawn 100 years ago, probably because the interlocks now mean something different than they did back then. Interlocks used to have the strategic purpose of tying corporations together for economic advantage for the owners. Today they are more the incidental by-product of recruiting a diverse and experienced group of individuals who have a variety of skills and connections to bring to the table.
It's also important to note that most corporate directors are not interlocking directors. Even when a large number of companies are included in the database, making the possibilities for interlocks much greater, only about 15-20% of corporate directors sit on two or more corporate boards. And even fewer, of course, sit on three, four, five, or six boards, although they are the people who tie the network together. They are "linchpins," as one research team puts it (Davis, Yoo, & Baker, 2002).
January 20, 2017 at 7am Freedom Plaza 1355 Pennsylvania Ave NW (14th St and Pennsylvania Ave) Washington, DC 20004 United States
Progressive people from all over the country will be descending on Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2017 to stage a massive demonstration along Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day.
It is critically important that we keep building a larger grassroots movement against war, militarism, racism, anti-immigrant scapegoating and neoliberal capitalism’s assault against workers’ living standards and the environment.
Real social change comes from the bottom, the mobilized grassroots, and not from the centers of institutional power, the professional politicians or the capitalist elites.
This country needs a real political revolution. Millions of people feel entirely disenfranchised by a political system that delivered the least favorable and trusted candidates in U.S. history. Many hoped that the Bernie Sanders campaign would represent a new direction and opportunity to take on entrenched power and extreme inequality, for a higher minimum wage, to defend Social Security, rebuild the labor movement, provide universal health care and free tuition.
That campaign was largely suppressed, but its end does not change the desires and aspirations of tens of millions of people, workers and youth in particular, who are demanding real change. On Inauguration Day, thousands will be in the streets to give voice to the millions of people in this country who are demanding systemic change.
Donald Trump is a racist, sexist bigot. We believe that tens of thousands of progressive people will be in the streets on Inauguration Day and in the weeks and months afterward.
How one voted on election day is one thing, but even more important is whether we succeed in building a mass movement that can truly change the country, and the world.
Waiting for the same politicians who led to the rise of Trump to now stop him is a lost cause.
Authoritarian democracy is on the march on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite alarming parallels, the U.S. remains better positioned to preserve and rebuild true democracy.
By John Shattuck
The election of Donald Trump shows what happens when democracy misfires. It echoes recent developments in Europe, most notably in Hungary and Poland, where elected leaders are attacking democratic pluralism, minority rights, and civil liberties, keeping the forms of democracy without the substance. The same trends are proceeding in France, the Netherlands, the U.K., and other European democracies where far-right parties under the banner of populist nationalism are pursuing racist and xenophobic objectives.
Having returned to the United States this fall after seven years in Hungary, I am struck by the shocking parallel between what is happening in Europe and here at home. The Trump election signals a sharp turn toward the populist far right. The presidential campaign was marked by the denigration of women and minorities and the rhetoric of racial extremism. The president-elect’s early appointments include people with these views. Civil liberties are threatened. Foreign alliances are in jeopardy. The risk of war is heightened.
There are similarities and differences between the environment that has produced Trump and the circumstances fueling the rise of European nationalism. What can we learn from what’s happening in Europe? What are the firewalls against authoritarianism in the United States?
Democracy is in trouble for many of the same reasons on both sides of the Atlantic. Discontent is widespread. In 2014, a European Commission poll revealed that 68 percent of Europeans distrusted their national governments, and 78 percent distrusted the political parties that had produced them. In the United States, a Gallup poll showed that 65 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with their system of government and how it works—a striking increase from only 23 percent in 2002.
A reason for the discontent is a sense that the world is out of control, and elected governments are making matters worse. A deeper reason is that people are confused about democracy—demanding greater participation in their own governance and greater efficiency in the way government operates. Democracy is at war with itself—citizens look to democratic governments to solve their problems, but are unwilling to recognize their own responsibility for keeping democracy healthy.
The roots of discontent can be found in recent Western social and economic revolutions that have simultaneously strengthened and weakened democracy in Europe and the United States.
The cultural revolution of the 1960s created a world of individual rights and freedoms, transforming democratic society by strengthening pluralism and minority rights. But a counterrevolution that has turned the struggle for human rights and civil liberties into an endlessly divisive political battleground, in which the resurgent racism, sexism, and xenophobia of the Trump campaign is the latest example.
The market revolution of the 1980s enshrined the market as an engine of economic growth. It also drastically reduced the role of government in regulating the economy, cutting back the social benefits of a mixed economy and a welfare state. It paved the way for the rise of new economic elites, globalization, and inequality, while breeding political resentment among those left behind.
The political revolution of 1989 marked the end of the Cold War, the opening of borders, and the beginning of a transition to democracy and free markets in Eastern Europe. But it also marked the end of the social contract between economic elites and the people. In Europe, the government began to restrict social support programs, and in the United States, employers reduced employee health plans, pensions, and job security.
The most recent democratic upheaval, the internet revolution, opened the floodgates of information, creating unlimited opportunities for peer-to-peer communication and bottom-up pressure for change. But it amplified amateur voices and spawned echo chambers and ghettos of communication, reducing discourse across political divides and increasing the polarization of democratic societies. Fake news mixed easily with verified facts, and was often more powerful than the facts because it confirmed prejudices. Meanwhile, the same digital revolution gave governments new powers to invade privacy, in democracies as well as dictatorships.
DEMOCRATIC DISCONTENT IS ESPECIALLY ACUTE in Eastern Europe, where the roots of democracy are shallow. Here, self-styled “illiberal” leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban are paving the way for right-wing nationalists like France’s Marine Le Pen, and providing a potential model for Donald Trump in the United States.
Autocratic nationalism in Eastern Europe—like the Trump revolution in the United States—is a product of populist anger at outside oppressors, disaffection from elites, and disappointment with the market economy. Eastern Europeans were ruled for centuries by successive empires of Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg, fascist, and communist authoritarian regimes. A hunger for national identity and honor among the peoples of the region grew out of oppression by their rulers—the Habsburgs, who executed the first elected Hungarian prime minister in 1849; the Russians, who dominated Poland throughout the 19th century; and the Turks, who defeated the Serbs in the Battle of Kosovo Polje at the end of the 14th century. The collective Serb memory of Turkish conquest was so powerful that Slobodan Milosevic invoked it 600 years later when he launched his genocidal ethnic cleansing campaigns against Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, massive crimes that revealed the dark side of populist nationalism in post–Cold War Europe.
Totalitarianism after World War II shattered civil society in Eastern Europe. It also destroyed the sense of citizen responsibility essential for the growth of democracy. In Prague in the 1990s, “volunteering” had a negative connotation because it was seen as “collaborating” with oppressive rulers. In Budapest, residents wary of “communal” premises did not take care of common spaces in apartment buildings. Communism’s alternative to civil society was state employment and social security, but of course these were dismantled when the communist regimes fell.
After 1989, hopes in Eastern Europe that democracy would bring immediate economic benefits went unfulfilled. Standards of living failed to keep pace with popular expectations, especially after the financial crisis hit the region in 2009. In this neuralgic environment, Eastern Europeans were attracted to political leaders who claimed they could defend them against outsiders like the foreign banks that had called in their mortgages when the financial markets collapsed.
These festering resentments were the building blocks of an autocratic populist nationalism that is relevant to what is happening today in the United States. In our country, identity politics is cultural and racial. In Europe, it tends to be national. Ignored by the liberal proponents of post–Cold War European integration, identity politics were taken up with a vengeance by right-wing leaders who developed divisive “us versus them” nationalist narratives to appeal to a resentful and confused populace.
In Hungary, on the losing side of both world wars as an ally of Germany, the nationalist narrative depicts Hungarians as victims. The treaty ending World War I dismantled the Habsburg Empire and stripped Hungary of two-thirds of its lands, separating Hungarians from their compatriots. This narrative claims that Hungarians (who were allies of Hitler) were victims of German occupation in 1944 who were forced to participate in the Holocaust, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The nationalist identity narrative proclaims, “Brussels is the new Moscow.” Casting the European Union as a hostile foreign power serves the interests of nationalist politicians whose popularity is boosted whenever EU authorities question their commitment to democracy.
Eastern European autocratic nationalism is also built on the politics of fear. Leaders have linked the threat of terrorism in their countries to the refugees fleeing violence in the Middle East. In Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland, the governing parties have branded Muslim refugees as “a threat to Christian civilization.” The Hungarian government claims that Muslim refugees in Europe are all potential terrorists, and has enacted an anti-terror law giving the government emergency powers to declare “a state of terror threat” and suspend the constitution.
In July 2014, Viktor Orban proclaimed in a speech following his April re-election as prime minister that Hungary was “an illiberal democracy.” The prime minister stated that Hungary and its Eastern European neighbors were explicitly rejecting the liberal values of individual rights. To emphasize his point, he asserted that “the Hungarian nation is not a pile of individuals” like the West. Orban claimed that liberal democracy was a failure, pointing to political division and economic inequality in the United States, and dysfunction in the EU on financial policy and migration.
The elements of an “illiberal democracy” are similar in Orban’s Hungary and Trump’s America. The entry point is an election victory achieved by denigrating the opposition, through distortion and innuendo, as criminal and elitist, and appealing to ethnic identity and national revival. The critical feature of the new governance model is a legislative supermajority that guarantees total control by the ruling party. In Hungary, this opened the door following the 2010 elections to constitutional changes abolishing checks and balances and other key distinguishing features of pluralist democracy.
The central claims of the new illiberal system are its promises of efficiency, collective purpose, and national pride. The tradeoffs to achieve these goals are the centralization of power and curtailment of individual rights. A central question is whether this model is sustainable, especially when it is inside a larger transnational system like the European Union. In his 2014 speech, Orban challenged the EU, claiming, “I don’t think our EU membership precludes building an illiberal new state based on a national foundation.” If Hungary’s rejection of EU values is replicated by other countries across Europe, the transnational system will collapse.
The Hungarian government is undermining structures that maximize accountability and liberty within a framework of democratic governance—checks and balances, independence of the judiciary and the media, the protection of minorities, a pluralist civil society, and the rule of law. The government used its supermajority in 2011 to push through a media law broadening official media channels and reducing independent media. It amended the constitution to reduce the power and independence of the country’s principal safeguard against arbitrary rule, the Hungarian Constitutional Court. It instituted a regulatory crackdown on NGOs and civic groups that receive international funding, causing President Barack Obama to include Hungary in a list of countries using “endless regulations and overt intimidation” against civil society. The government has honored anti-Semitic leaders of the interwar regime that allied with Hitler’s Germany and paved the way for the Hungarian Holocaust by passing four separate anti-Jewish laws. And, for more than a year, the government has led a campaign to block refugees fleeing violence in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq from entering Europe.
In September 2015, the Hungarian government galvanized nationalists across Europe when it constructed razor-wire fences on Hungary’s borders and stationed its army and police to keep out refugees. The result was a huge boost to the governing party’s popularity at home, and the prime minister’s emergence on the European stage as a challenger to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose humanitarian response to the crisis reflected the values of the EU. The refugee crisis provided a golden opportunity for Hungarian, Polish, and other Eastern European leaders to burnish their illiberal credentials. To paraphrase the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, illiberal leaders use chaos to create the opportunity for imposing order.
The Polish government is now emulating the Hungarian model. It made the refugee issue a central feature of its election campaign last year, promising that religious and ethnic nationalism would protect Poles from an invasion of Muslims into Poland’s homogeneous Catholic society. The government took a page out of the Hungarian playbook by attacking the Polish Constitutional Court and the independence of the Polish judiciary. An internal battle is shaping up in Europe and the United States between liberal and illiberal democracy.
An internal battle is shaping up in Europe and the United States between liberal and illiberal democracy. At stake are the values that safeguard against a repeat of the world’s catastrophic experience with fascism and communist totalitarianism. Disturbing signs are everywhere about the declining health of Western democracies—the steady fall in participation, broad distrust of political leaders, alienation from distant decision-makers, the corrupting influence of money in politics, and increasing polarization and gridlock. Out of this discontent, populist nationalists and demagogues on both sides of the Atlantic, like Orban and Trump, have come to power through democratic elections.
BUT ILLIBERAL GOVERNANCE has weaknesses. The legacy of state control over the economy in Eastern Europe and its eventual collapse under communism has shown that it is difficult for centralized authoritarian regimes to deliver economically to their citizens. This is particularly true for countries like Hungary and Poland that have been incorporated into a much larger interconnected market economy like the European Union. Russia and China, cited by Orban as models of illiberal governance, are both faltering economically because of the way they are governed politically.
A related weakness is that illiberal governance breeds systemic corruption, which is a drag on economic growth and a source of political instability, as the situation in Russia demonstrates. The governments of Eastern European countries have high unfavorability ratings compared with other EU member states on Transparency International’s European Corruption Index. They are rife with crony oligarchs whose conflicts of interest and amassing of wealth drain public resources and sap competition.
A further weakness is that, even in autocracies, civil society seeps in. Illiberal governance is vulnerable to the digital revolution, which allows increased peer-to-peer flows of information and amplifies grassroots pressure for change. Traditional media have fallen under the control of illiberal regimes, but digital media have not. In Hungary in 2014, more than 100,000 people took to the streets when the government threatened to tax internet use, and it had to back down.
As the Hungarian internet tax controversy shows, illiberal regimes have few institutional safety valves for citizen discontent. When popular pressures build, the regime must either back down or resort to coercion. The government crackdown on the Maidan democracy movement in Ukraine showed how the use of violence by an authoritarian regime can lead to greater public discontent and pressure for more radical change. The result in Ukraine was the replacement of an illiberal regime with a more open government. In short, illiberal governance stimulates and feeds on popular fears and anxieties. But without a safety valve for discontent, it may not be sustainable in the long run.
In Eastern Europe, it’s not yet clear whether these vulnerabilities will lead to a political reversal and a liberal democratic opposition coming to power through elections—or to deeper repression and entrenchment of the regime, as in Putin’s Russia.
THE UNITED STATES, WITH ITS democratic and civic traditions, is better prepared to resist permanent autocratic rule. If Trump, like Orban, moves toward authoritarianism, unique characteristics of the American political system that are different from those in Eastern Europe will be available to opponents to organize effective resistance.
The United States is better equipped than Hungary to resist a leader who uses an election to centralize power and undermine the country’s pluralist institutions. While the United States has had more than two centuries of constitutional democracy, Hungary and many other European countries, especially in the east, have limited democratic traditions and long experience under authoritarian rule. And in contrast to the United States’ immigrant history and vast ethnic diversity, Hungary, Poland, and other countries tending toward authoritarianism are far smaller, relatively homogeneous societies that are readily susceptible to xenophobia.
Strong civil society organizations can provide a platform for resisting authoritarianism, but in Eastern Europe the legacy of communism has stunted the growth of civil society, limiting its effectiveness as a counterweight to government. Press freedom and independence are guaranteed by law and tradition in the United States, but the media in Eastern Europe are identified by their political party connections and rarely able to push back against government dominance or manipulation. An independent judiciary is essential for effective resistance to authoritarian rule, but the courts in Hungary have been reshaped by constitutional changes pushed through by the government’s parliamentary supermajority. Finally, congressional procedures in the United States are more complex than parliamentary rules in Eastern Europe, where it is easier for a government majority to push through its agenda and even change the constitution if it has supermajority status.
Americans may be in a better position than Europeans to resist autocracy, but the challenge nevertheless will be great if Donald Trump tries to govern as an autocrat. The new president comes into office with vast powers: control of both houses of Congress, national-security authority that has been broadened and extended by both of his immediate predecessors, an open Supreme Court seat and perhaps more, the power to overturn executive decisions made by President Obama in key areas such as the environment and immigration, the ability to populate the government with extremists, and the power of the bully pulpit to rally his constituency and set the tone of government, including, crucially, the tone of its relations with ethnic, racial, and political minorities and noncitizens.
There are precedents for reining in presidents who threaten human rights. Richard Nixon used the power of the presidency to attack the Constitution and his political enemies. In response, the courts, the media, and civil society resisted and the House of Representative voted to impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors. Ronald Reagan and his congressional allies attempted to overturn judicial and legislative safeguards of the rights of minorities and women. A bipartisan coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats, professional organizations, and civil-rights groups succeeded in defending against this attack. The administration of George W. Bush, in violation of the Constitution and international law, instituted the use of torture in the “war on terror” after September 11, but resistance inside the federal bureaucracy, and by the federal courts and members of Congress succeeded in eventually reinstating the torture ban.
I was involved in all three of these successful campaigns to defend the rights of Americans against authoritarian assertions of presidential power. A similar campaign will have to be launched if Donald Trump abuses his power at the expense of the people.
There are six major democratic assets in the United States that can be used to resist autocracy. None of them is a guarantee, but together they represent a firewall for American democracy that can be deployed by citizens collectively determined to protect their freedom.
First is the great diversity of American society. In contrast to the largely homogeneous populations of Eastern Europe, the United States is a nation of immigrants and minorities, woven together in a vast patchwork of racial, ethnic, and religious groups, connected by a common interest in freedom and opportunity for themselves, their families, and their communities. Trump appealed to the “forgotten (white) man” who feels threatened by this diversity. But as the Bernie Sanders campaign demonstrated, there are ways of reaching this constituency from the left. Cross-cutting economic interests in creating jobs, protecting social welfare, and reducing inequality connect Trump and non-Trump voters, making it possible to imagine a broad political base for promoting economic justice and resisting extremism, particularly since Hillary Clinton received about two million more popular votes than Trump, and 54 percent of the total votes cast were against Trump. Organizing a broad-based demand for economic inclusion would undercut Trump’s brand of racially exclusive autocracy, symbolized by his appointment of Breitbart media executive Stephen Bannon as his chief White House strategist. The Bannon appointment has appalled almost as many Republicans as Democrats.
Second are the federal courts. Unlike European national courts, the federal judiciary has the authority to review challenges to executive or legislative actions that violate citizen rights, and as noted, the courts have done so repeatedly during previous presidencies. I was the lawyer in a case successfully challenging President Nixon’s warrantless wiretapping of government officials and journalists, which was cited in the Nixon impeachment proceedings. Obama has appointed several hundred federal judges who can be counted on to uphold the Constitution against presidential abuses of power. Judges appointed by previous presidents have not hesitated to do so. The incoming president will have the power to nominate one Supreme Court justice to fill an open seat, but this will not change the current five-justice majority in very recent decisions involving abortion rights, press freedom, and civil rights.
The federal courts are not a panacea for the diseases afflicting democracy. They are procedurally ponderous and institutionally cautious, and federal judges are trained to stay within the confines of precedent. But there is ample proof that the federal judiciary has played a role in the past in restraining presidents from exceeding their constitutional authority and protecting and advancing the constitutional rights of citizens. There is good reason to believe that they can do so under the Trump presidency.
Third is the federal system itself. Unlike European countries where government power is centralized, the United States is made up of state and local governments, as well as the federal government, and power on most domestic issues is constitutionally diffused throughout the system. On the day Trump was elected president, scores of state and local-level referenda were passed on such issues as education reform, de-incarceration, and marijuana use. It has long been a Republican mantra to devolve domestic policymaking to the states, and this is likely to continue in the Trump era, though some Republicans are happy to undermine federalism when it suits their ideological goals. There is also a danger in this approach: Civil-rights and civil-liberties standards (like abortion and gay rights) could be lowered by some states, and it will be up to the federal courts to guard against that.
Fourth is the strong and multi-layered civil society of the United States, in contrast to the anemic civil society of Eastern Europe. This is the greatest potential engine of resistance to autocratic nationalism. Amplified by social media, American civil society organizations have the capacity to build coalitions and create pressures on Congress and the executive branch. A broad coalition to save the federal courts led by the American Bar Association and the American Civil Liberties Union prevented the Reagan administration from passing legislation to take away the jurisdiction of the federal courts in cases involving abortion rights and school desegregation. From coalition-building to political lobbying to mass demonstrations, civil society will be the backbone of any movement to resist authoritarianism. This will require people to come out of their silos and reach across partisan divides to seek common ground on political goals such as defending immigration, protecting the environment, resisting discrimination against minorities and women, and preventing torture from being reintroduced in terrorism investigations. In each of these areas, several Republicans in Congress have already signaled that they will resist extremist Trump policies. Civil society organizations across the political spectrum should work with them to build bipartisan coalitions.
Fifth is the news media. Unlike Europe, the media in the United States are constitutionally protected and beyond the reach of most forms of regulation. Donald Trump has threatened to control the media by strengthening state libel laws, but these threats ring hollow against the unanimous opposition of Republican and Democratic judges. Bigger challenges for the media are its fragmentation in an increasingly digital landscape, and its susceptibility to manipulation by propagandists and political liars, as well as regulatory threats. But the very diversity of our media is an important tool of democracy against authoritarianism.
Finally, Congress is a potential source of resistance to assertions of presidential power. In European parliamentary systems, a prime minister who controls a supermajority, as Orban did from 2010 to 2015 in Hungary, can force legislation through parliamentary opposition. In the United States, Congress and the president are separate branches of government. Congressional procedures such as the filibuster in the Senate and the rules process in the House can slow or stop the progress of legislation, especially if the president’s party is divided over policy, as is the case with the Republican Party after the Trump election.
At this writing, too many Republicans have been willing to do Trump’s bidding, seeing him as the agent of their policy agenda. But it takes only three defections in a Senate divided 52-48. If Trump resorts to blatant extra-constitutional extremism, there are likely to be enough Republican senators committed to civil liberties and the rule of law to prevent him from succeeding.
These features of American democracy can be safeguards against the abuse of presidential power. But citizens must mobilize to resist illiberal governance. Now is the time for mobilization, before it is too late and the United States begins to resemble an Eastern European autocracy.
Activists celebrate at Oceti Sakowin Camp near Cannon Ball, North Dakota
The victory at Standing Rock could mark a turning point
Bill McKibben
The defeat of an energy company by indigenous activists shows what nonviolent unity can accomplish. There are lessons here as we enter a challenging new age
The news that the US federal government has refused to issue the permit needed to run a pipeline under the Missouri river means many things – including that indigenous activists have won a smashing victory, one that shows what nonviolent unity can accomplish.
From the start, this has been an against-the-odds battle. Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the pipeline, is as wired as they come: its line of credit links it to virtually every bank you’ve ever heard of. And operating under a “fast-track” permit process, it had managed to win most of its approvals and lay most of its pipe before opponents managed to mount an effective resistance.
But that opposition finally did arise, and it centered on the last place the pipeline would have to cross: the confluence of the Missouri and the Cannonball rivers. It wasn’t standard-issue environmental lobbying, nor standard-issue protest, though there was certainly some of both (lawyers took the company to court, activists shut down bank branches). At its heart, however, in the great camp that grew up along the rivers, this was a largely spiritual resistance. David Archambault, the head of the Standing Rock Sioux who demonstrated great character and dexterity for months, kept insisting that the camp was a place of prayer, and you couldn’t wander its paths without running into drum circles and sacred fires.
As a result, overlapping epochs of sad American history were on display. When native American protesters sat down in front of bulldozers to try and protect ancestral graves, they were met with attack dogs – the pictures looked like Birmingham, Alabama, circa 1963. But it went back further than that: the encampment, with its teepees and woodsmoke hovering in the valley, looked like something out of an 1840s painting. With the exception that this was not just one tribe: this was pretty much all of native North America. The flags of more than 200 Indian nations lined the rough dirt entrance road. Other Americans, drawn in part by a sense of shame at this part of our heritage, flooded in to help – when the announcement came today, there were thousands of military veterans on hand.
Indigenous organizers are some of the finest organizers around the globe – they’ve been key to everything from the Keystone fight to battling plans for the world’s largest coal mine in Australia. If we manage to slow down the fossil fuel juggernaut before it boils the planet, groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network and Honor the Earth will deserve a great share of the credit. Right now, for instance, Canada’s First Nations are preparing for “Standing Rock North” along the route of two contested pipelines out of Canada’s tarsands. But in the Dakotas it’s been particularly special: they’ve managed to build not just resistance to a project, but a remarkable new and unified force that will, I think, persist. Persist, perhaps, even in the face of the new Trump administration.
Trump, of course, can try and figure out a way to approve the pipeline right away, though the Obama administration has done its best to make that difficult. (That’s why, instead of an outright denial, they simply refused to grant the permit, thus allowing for the start of the environmental impact statement process). But if Trump decides to do that, he’s up against people who have captured the imagination of the country. Simply spitting on them to aid his friends in the oil industry would clarify a lot about him from the start, which is one reason he may hesitate.
In any event, though, time is measured somewhat differently in the dispute between this continent’s original inhabitants and the late-coming rest of us. For five hundred years, half a millennia, the same grim story has repeated itself over and over again. Today’s news is a break in that long-running story, a new chapter. It won’t set this relationship on an entirely new course – change never comes that easily. But it won’t ever be forgotten, and it will influence events for centuries to come. Standing Rock, like Little Big Horn or Wounded Knee, or for that matter Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, now belongs to our history.
