There are several paradigm shifts we need to make in the following years in order to make this “a more perfect union”. (You might have your own list!)
First paradigm shift needed imo, is that of standing alone in our single issues. For too long we have not recognized that so many issues are interconnected. And so many times we have failed to find out who else has like interests and like issues and so have failed each other by our not connecting up. But even disparate issues often have commonalities at the core. For instance, climate change is much related to the financial crises in that we have runaway corporations intent on doing things that are just plain evil with no barriers to stop them.
Second paradigm needed to change imo, is that we replace the part time citizen with a citizen who is full time, always cognizant of the issues and one who is more than aware of who and what is on the ballot. More to the point, this citizen is not just a once a year champion, but one who stays in the loop. No longer will we be content to show up once a year and be surprised at all the stuff on the ballot.
Third paradigm shift needed for change is the lack of transparency at all levels. What do we know, for instance, about the fusion centers?
ACLU: What's Wrong With Fusion Centers
The Fourth Paradigm - the news media as it is currently constituted never hears stories about everyday men and women. This really is terrible in that it means that as far as getting the whole story out of the media we are f**ked. We only know what they want us to know.
The Fifth paradigm shift I would like to change is being always on the defensive. For once I would like for us to take the offense, to take the lead, to head the charge even. I have often thought we needed our own think tank, but now I have a new idea: (Jump the tangled twine)
Peoples Tribunal
People love them some good soap operas. And they love "reality shows". And they love trials of any kind which also afford the populace a glimpse into real life soap operas.
I propose this tribunal with the hopes that
1) It might awaken our citizenry this time, rather than get them to buy soap.
2) It might become the dawn of a new way of governance, or at least the dawn of a new way of being a citizen.
3) It will allow people's voices to be heard and to be powerful.
4) It will enable us to hit many different fronts at once, and by GOD we can turn the tables thusly, imo. We can have many many hearings going at once. So we can look into Vets and their care upon returning home, we can look into the "drug war" or conversely the shift of letting marijuana go free! We can look at Senators and Congresscritters selling their votes and to whom they sell them. We can look into the war on women and who is pushing that and why and where. We can look at the drone war and the forever wars. We can look at corporations and what being a corporation means in this country and the world and do we really want theses companies to do business in that way. After all we are giving them license to operate. How do we want that to look?
As we see there are few working sections in our government and there are a few places we have a voice and choice. And we have citizenry now that is very ignorant about our current government processes through no fault of their own because there is no transparency. So how to deal with this disparity between what we think we have and what we need and what we actually have? In my view what is needed is a mechanism to allow us as citizens to dig into our current reality compare it to visions of functional communities and educate ourselves about the disparity.
If our Congress in DC was working (and the legislators at the state and the city council and so on), we would have hearings on all kinds of things. We would have hearings on police overreach. We would have hearings on financial wrong doing. We would have hearings on torture. We would have hearings on NSA spying. We would have hearings on CIA wrong doing. There may be hearings but possibly they are posturing only an exceedingly political fashion.
Our Constitution has been discarded in practice and guardian of the Constitution in the form of the Supreme Court has been politicized and bought as well in a fashion and is ineffective therefore. We have never ratified the human rights treaty. Our whole philosophy of governing has been one of property first. We don't actually understand what our government is doing nor do we have a sense of what it COULD be doing instead.
I am positing we could create citizens tribunal that would educate our citizenry as we illuminate what the reality is and compare it to our Constitution and to the human rights treaty. We could engage our academic fellowship in this endeavor and our entertainment folks as well. And we would need a CSpan like capability to capture the hearings and archive them.
The citizens are not given time to do the job of being a citizen. So it is my hope that these hearings will become the functional underpinnings of us becoming informed and productive citizens. And they could conceivably carry on after many of the things now broken are fundamentally changed to function properly.
There are roles many roles, for people to play in these hearings.
1) Hearing Manager whose responsibility it is to set up the file systems to archive the Skype sessions and to request players for the various roles and make sure those roles are filled.
2) Judge, hopefully an impartial and fair one who doesn’t mind that the hearings are not exactly kosher but feels a responsibility to the community from which the hearing springs.
3) Prosecutor.
4) Legal defense.
It is hoped that there are willing attorneys and academicians who can step up to these roles and be willing to do that without compensation. Perhaps the ACLU could adapt some of their practices or at least try and see if we couldn't reach a broad consensus of how to do these hearings.
5) Task Force will act as researchers into the issue and support the prosecutor as well as the defendant.
6) Media Maven will create a daily summary. This role will allow casual onlookers to scan quickly and get a sense of progress during the day.
7) (and possibly more) is that of people who will not testify on their own behalf. This will entail taking all the available public speech of the person and indexing all the words so that another person taking on the role can take public statements and answer questions. Targeted people are free to make further public statements but the public will be cautioned about those statements that are not corroborated by an oath or third party back up. (And conversely, the task force could point out where third party corroboration has been affected.)
8) The every day citizen will be free to submit questions, theories, commentaries, critiques and tweet and socialize those things that interest them.
I would love for the ACLU or for law school academicians to get involved. Academicians of all stripes would be needed for various in depth views.
Here is how I think it might work:
Let us take one scenario: the Oakland Police Department. This is how it might work:
An Activist who has been long engaged with the struggle in Oakland might come forward to start the hearing. S/he becomes the Hearing Manager. S/he sets up a task force initially.
A task force could be created of folks with expertise in Police Departments and we have a number of retired police folks that have the right attitude and temperament to do just what we need. There might more Oakland Activists and some local attorneys (if possible the ones that had the successful suit that caused Oakland Police Department to have Fed oversight. Or those lawyers might agree to be the prosecutors.) And there might be a local ACLU coordinator as well.
For the Prosecution and Defense and Judge: We need a lot of fledgling lawyers and their teachers. I am under no illusions that the fledgling lawyers will necessarily have the right attitude in all cases but there will need to be attorneys for the defense as well as prosecution so that will work out okay. Perhaps retired judges would be willing to jump in and help out, or perhaps judge wannabes might come forward.
We will need people to stand in for the defendants as a lot of them will not want (initially) to give us legitimacy. In that case, all of the defendants public statements will have to be archived and indexed so that statements can be pulled out relative to questions and statements by the “defense” as we go along. A lot of this will be in the “virtual” realm so our CSpan look alike will have to deal with skype like connections and document storage in some manner that will allow archiving but not editing.
Occupy Report on Oakland Police
Now the Oakland PD has been SO problematic that it has been "monitored" by the feds for many years (in quotes cause I don't see that it has helped much). So within the essay are some of the problems that OPD has caused for it citizens and mayor.
Among their findings:
OPD is the penultimate bureaucracy in Oakland—there is no other city service that consumes the resources that it does by multiple measures. OPD takes up 40 percent of the city’s General Fund while another nine percent goes to servicing debt, no small part of which is attributable to the generous Police and Fire Retirement System. The current and retired staff of OPD live overwhelmingly outside of Oakland, meaning that a substantial sum of money contributed to city coffers by the largely working-class and non-white tax-payers is exported to the largely white, upper-middle class suburbs. Additionally, over ten years the City of Oakland has paid out $58 million in settlements to victims of police brutality while regularly exonerating officers for their abuse, payments which ultimately help individual officers avoid accountability for their actions.[5]
and
Oakland police are among the highest paid employees in the city. In 2011, 178 members of OPD in a department of fewer than 700 received a higher total compensation than Mayor Jean Quan. In fact, nine of the top ten earners among City of Oakland staff were police, including the Chief, two Deputy Chiefs, one Lieutenant, three Sergeants and even two Officers, all of them receiving a total compensation of over $300,000.
The essay is very thorough and takes into account what is asked of the OPD:
Nobody’s going to invest in a city when you have a high crime rate so you have to drop that.
This is a high priority from businesses in the area especially those that depend on tourism.
The report takes into account the problematic actions of the city:
To give one example, the Oakland City Council voted to pay $40,000 in punitive damages assessed on an individual officer who strip-searched men in public. The city had no obligation to pay these damages, which were assessed as a punishment on the officer who committed this outrageous offense. This move by the City Council both protected and gave a green light to abusive officers, exposing precisely why the department has been incapable—or rather uninterested—in reforming itself.
You could use quotes that are in the public domain to augment a case for the "defense" such as:
I believe police departments are economic drivers. If you have bad stories coming out about crime or bad policing, investors are not going to come to a city. So in an industrial age city that is built much like Oakland has been an industrial age power house, it has to redo itself, it has to re-engineer itself with a different economy, and in order for that to happen you have to have a lot of investment, whether its federal funds or from private investors to come. Nobody’s going to invest in a city when you have a high crime rate so you have to drop that.[7]
(The relationship between business and law enforcement was described by Anthony Batts, the Chief of OPD when Mayor Jean Quan was inaugurated in 2011 who resigned days after the establishment of the first Occupy Oakland camp. )
Now in the Oakland case the liaison from the Mayor’s office to the police might also come under scrutiny and a lawyer might be needed for her as well as one for the Mayor. All of these might call for more FOIAs as well.
It is possible that the Mayor or the Liaison might be willing to come forward with information but not be willing to swear to what they say. I think they should be allowed to do so, but they need to answer or refuse to answer all the questions put forth to them acknowledging that the “5th” is not really going to work in this scenario.
The end result is going to be, I hope, a more thorough report than even the Oakland Occupy Report with some details about what is wrong and what suggested remedies might be. And there will be a template of sorts for other communities including the FOIA requests.
Since City Hall is involved there would have to be a point at which we determine whether to have hearings on that body as well or keep this hearing only with sidelines into city hall involvement.
Citizens should be allowed to add questions to the mix via the web site and although I have left off the jury role, I think the citizens will play a crucial part in the outcomes.
The questions that might come out could be as follows:
Now if you were an Oakland taxpayer what would you think if presented with this evidence?
What avenues would there be for changing OPD to the point that it wasn't abusive and it didn't siphon off so much of the scarce resources?
There might also be the question of what are the police departments duties and what SHOULD they be.
The NYPD work stoppage By Matt Taibbi | December 31, 2014
Irony alert:
If you're wondering exactly what that means, the Post is reporting that the protesting police have decided to make arrests "only when they have to." (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously, take 10 or 15 seconds).
And related articles:
The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate
How Low Income New Yorkers Are Benefiting From The NYPD’s Work Stoppage
Possible Benefits:
1) My hope is that there will be simultaneous hearings on PDs all across the nation. Each giving the others some new avenue to explore.
2) Along with the PD hearings, perhaps some activists could also be doing the same for other community problems like prisons, drugs, infrastructure, taxes and the like.
3) And state hearings on voter rights, pay to play legislators (could expand this to the federal level).
4) Activists could use the findings to more specifically target actions to get better results.
5) Because we could use individuals stories, this will get the people’s engagement in a more positive way than the news stories that ignore people’s stories.
6) Because we can summarize each day’s efforts and link to the material backing what is going on people throughout the country could get caught up in the relentless drip drip drip of information and ideas and connections come out and become better educated and better voters for that matter.
7) And we could actually see candidates addressing the issues as they come out, thereby pushing a more progressive (hopefully) agenda throughout the nation.
8) Because news outlets have become so constricted in personnel, it is possible that they will pick up on all of the efforts on going and actually put them IN the news (along with our web site).
9) One of the biggest items needed is a true open partnership with like minded folks. ACLU, Move-On, 350.org, etc. could find great benefit in joining this effort to augment their own.
Possible hearing topics: Capitalism, Finance, Insurance, Pay to play in legislation and executive actions including national and state and local and wage theft and other labor issues. (Now imagine THAT effort multiplied over the 50 states and national AND local and see how we might start the Kochs and the Waltons and the banksters and CEOs sweating!
Maybe we could include a hearing (or hearings) on our abuses in the past. Trail of Tears, slavery, FHA discrimination etc. These have echoes that linger to this day and have never been accounted for or people made whole after the events.
This is the last Bill Moyers PBS broadcast and I believe it answers some questions. There is such a thing as "Public Trust". If we build a case powerful enough to catch some judges attention then we can change the paradigms we are now faced with.
Finally from Upworthy: Empathy Revolution is what I am envisioning as a partial bennie here. As people's stories are told and archived, other people can learn what it is like to have to deal with cops sucking money out of poor neighborhoods just so rich folks won't be taxed. Or they might understand how much in common they have with others whom they previously thought were beneath them.
Another benefit, in my minds eye, is that this will snowball and become and avalanche sweeping out corruption and mildewed ways of thinking and move us into more exciting ways of doing things.