Toward a More Participatory Form of Democracy

On July 20 I wrote the following in my last blog post:

"Neither teachers nor state workers nor unions are to blame for the budgetary crises. Years of tax cuts for the richest individuals and tax avoidance by the big corporations are the real culprits."

Coincidentally, on the same day Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone wrote this about corporate tax avoidance:

"There is a possibility that a second 'one-time' tax holiday will be approved for corporations as part of whatever deal emerges from the debt-ceiling negotiations.

"For those who don't know about it, tax repatriation is one of the cons of the Washington lobbying community. Here's how it works: the tax laws say that companies can avoid paying taxes as long as they keep their profits overseas. Think of it as a gigantic global IRA. Companies that put their profits in an offshore IRA can leave them there indefinitely with no tax consequence. Then, when they cash out, they're supposed to pay the tax. Only there's a catch. In 2004, the corporate lobby got together and begged congress to give them a tax holiday. A 'one-time' tax holiday was declared [and] companies paid about 5 percent in taxes, instead of the usual 35-40 percent.

"Companies started to systematically 'offshore' their profits right after that with the expectation that somewhere down the road they  would get another holiday. [And sure enough] leading members of the Senate are seriously considering giving the most profitable companies in the world another 'holiday' as a reward for their last seven years of systematic tax avoidance."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/holiday-in-scambodia-20110720

Taibbi goes on to ask why there is no visible outrage about this kind of corporate/congressional behavior, which will result in hundreds of billions of potential tax dollars being withheld from the Treasury at a time of critical revenue shortfall. I think part of the answer lies in the simple fact that governmental and corporate centers are so remote and opaque vis-a-vis the daily lives of most of us.

One of the Ten Key Values of the Green Party addresses this problem as follows:

DECENTRALIZATION
Power and responsibility must be restored to local communities, within an overall framework of ecologically sound, socially just values and lifestyles. To counter the alienation of mass industrial society, we work toward the restoration of humanly-scaled communities, institutions, and technologies. We view political decentralization as a prerequisite for substantive participatory democracy.

I want to focus here on that last sentence: "We view political decentralization as a prerequisite for substantive participatory democracy."

Democracy would be enhanced if people could participate more often and more directly in the process. But this is hardly possible when decisions are made in distant, hugely complex institutions of power (where Big Money tends to dominate the discourse). The Green politics movement would like to see a gradual shift back to more-local decisionmaking within a context of "humanly-scaled communities, institutions, and technologies."

As things stand now most of us have come to view governmental activity as "what they do": "they" fix the roads, "they" run the schools, "they" collect the taxes, "they" formulate the budgets . . . "they" set policies of all kinds. There would be much more interest in (and ultimate buy-in for) policies that "we" participate in formulating. This is why the Green Party talks about the rejuvenation of local community life.

To the extent that the centers of power usurp so much of our decisionmaking authority and command so much of our resources and attention, people feel alienated and resentful. The Tea Party phenomenon taps into these feelings, but the Tea Party critique is mostly negative: anti-tax, anti-state, anti-regulation, etc. The Green Party presents a positive, pro-community alternative.

Our society has come so far in the problematic directions of globalization, centralization, and domination of the economy by multinationals, that it will take time to "turn the ship" toward more localism. Meanwhile, naturally, we should be raising our voices to address injustices like extreme wealth disparities and corporate tax avoidance. We must not allow bureaucratic and corporate elites to get away with self-interested, duplicitous behaviors that are so economically, socially, and ecologically irresponsible. We should elect representatives who will operate within the current federal and state legislatures to address these issues and shake up the status quo.

But at the same time we should also work to bring about a deeper kind of social change based on the idea of decentralization. A gradual devolution of power away from the statist and corporate centers would help rejuvenate our local communities and foster a healthy, responsive, participatory form of democracy.