Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, January 01, 2010

Welcome to Thunderdome!

Robert Cruickshank provides an enormously useful if a bit terrifying survey of all the ballot initiatives that have qualified or look likely (ish) to qualify for the upcoming June and November elections in 2010.

If you are a California citizen you absolutely must become educated about the politics of these initiatives. Cruickshank is clearly right to say that these initiatives might well shape the State pretty decisively for a generation.

Too many fighting liberal Californians know much more about National politics than they do about State politics.

And yet State politics directly impact millions of lives in ways we have a real say and stake in as Californians. Also, the sheer scale of California's cultural influence, economic impact, and regulatory ripple-effects actually impacts National politics across the board in ways we are uniquely in a position to shape as Californians.

California Democrats frankly might have more influence democratizing the whole country if they focused exclusively on defeating the anti-tax anti-government Republican minority and its monolithic obstructionism via the arcane 2/3rds provision in the California Constitution (as in so many things, when it comes to Republican zealots deploying irresponsible minority obstructionism to yield shock doctrine politics, as went California so goes the Nation -- let's make their defeat here a comparable precedent), and then through the imposition of environmental, safety, labor, civil rights, universal healthcare standards create a secure base in California from which the rest of the nation can learn positive lessons and a progressive momentum with which the Democratic Party might drag the whole country kicking and screaming into a more sustainable, more equitable and pluralistic, healthier, better educated, more energy and resource secure tomorrow.

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