American democracy is broken. Let's fix it.

81% of Americans believe America is "on the wrong track." 60% of Americans think the political debate in Washington does not represent the concerns raised in their own community. Only 13% of Americans say they have confidence in Congress (Time Magazine, Harris Interactive). This is what a broken democracy looks like.

Here are 3 major issues I think we need to address:

Campaign finance
In the 2008 congressional elections, 93% of the winning candidates spent more money on their campaign than their opponents. Meanwhile, only 0.08% of the US population is responsible for over 66% of all campaign donations (Center for Responsive Politics).

Our politicians -- Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike -- are profoundly aware their political survival depends on securing the most campaign funding. What we have is an electoral system in place that gives our politicians huge incentive to represent the interests of a tiny pool of wealthy donors above 99.92% of America.

Let's fix it: End or dramatically limit private campaign contributions. Currently, a person can donate about $43,000 a year to support their preferred candidate and party. We should demand our politicians set this limit to a level all Americans can be expected to afford, say, no more than $100 a year. Otherwise, we need to do away with private funding altogether and convert to a publicly funded system, which would give all eligible candidates the same amount of campaign funding.

The 'Revolving Door' When a politician or government regulator leaves office to take a position as a lobbyist, or for a company they were previously in charge of regulating, they move through what is called the revolving door. This process presents our officials with incentive to bootlick for companies and special interest groups while in office,  with the understanding that they will receive an extremely lucrative position with one of these companies or groups after they leave office. According to Legistorm, nearly 5,400 congressional staffers have gone through the revolving door in the past decade.

Let's fix it: Support a bill like Colorado Senator Michael Bennett's, which would institute a 6 year ban on lobbying by congressional staff after leaving our government, and a lifetime ban on lobbying by former members of Congress.

American voting format
Al Gore would have defeated George W. Bush in the 2000 election had Ralph Nader not run for president. A majority of Americans wanted a liberal president in 2000, but Bush won because Nader -- a candidate with no conceivable chance of winning -- absorbed many of Gore’s would-be votes.

We've all heard the expression "don't vote independent, you'll just throw your vote away." But the truth is far more troublesome than that. As evidenced by the Gore/Bush presidential election, voting independent is actually a vote for your least preferred candidate.

Let's fix it: Instead of our current "one person, one vote" system, which promotes the Democrat/Republican bipartisan stranglehold on our democracy, demand our government start using an approval-based voting system, which allows you to vote for multiple candidates.

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Come 1%, Come 99%! Occupy DeKalb is meeting at First and Lincoln every Friday @ 5pm. Like us on Facebook for ODK updates!

Researching the Medicinal Applications of Prohibited Substances

Some compelling studies have emerged over the past decade that have linked prohibited substances -- including MDMA (Ecstasy), and psilocybin ("magic mushrooms") -- with significant, and sometimes profound, medical applications.

Unfortunately for researchers, studies on these substances are few and far between. As banned substances under most international law, they are extremely difficult for experimenters to obtain, and researchers assume heightened liability risks to study illegal drugs.

Regardless of these impediments, illegal substances may have superior medical benefits to legal prescriptions, and in many cases prescription medications are posing much more danger to people than illegal drugs. According to the FDA, between January 1997 and June 2005, marijuana was cited as the primary cause of 0 deaths, while medications that are often prescribed instead of marijuana caused 10,008 deaths. Meanwhile, a 2007 study by the Florida Medical Examiner's Commission found prescription drugs -- especially drugs like Oxycotin, Vicodin, Valium, and Xanax -- were directly responsible for 300% more deaths in Florida than all illegal drugs combined that year.

So why should it be so much more difficult for researchers to study prohibited substances for medicinal purposes? The astonishing results of recent experiments involving MDMA and psilocybin only make this question even more urgent. Take the following examples...

-Psychiatrist Michael Mithoefer administered 2 MDMA therapy sessions to individuals who had suffered from serious post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for an average of 19 years. An astonishing 83% of the MDMA recipients showed significant improvement after 2 months from the last therapy session, compared to 25% for the placebo group. None of the subjects experienced serious side-effects or long-term problems from the experiment.

-MDMA is also showing promise as a treatment for leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma. Scientists have known for a few years that MDMA has cancer treating properties, but the dose necessary for it to be effective was so large it would kill the patient. As of this year, scientists have developed a modified version of MDMA that has none of the psycho-activity of ecstasy, but is 100x more effective at killing white blood cell cancers.

-A recent study out of Johns Hopkins University showed long-lasting personality change for the better in nearly 60 percent of subjects who were administered a single dose of the psychoactive component of "magic mushrooms," psilocybin. Researchers discovered significant increases in the personality trait "openness," which is related to qualities like compassion and patience. Both participants and their family and friends reported improvements in a participant's relationships, mood, and general well-being more than a year after the final psilocybin session.

So, can we conclude that some illegal drugs have significant medical uses? Generally, no, because there has not been enough research done to draw sound conclusions. But one conclusion is safe: decades of scientific research on these substances have already been lost, thanks to the US led War on Drugs.
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Come see Dr. Roberts, NIU professor emeritus of psychedelic studies, at the next Students for a Sensible Drug Policy meeting! Tuesday, 10/18 at 8:00pm in the HSC, Room 405.

'We the People' Petitioning and Occupy Wall Street

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions
 
'We the People’ appeared online September 22, 2011. It allows anyone to submit a petition online for any proposal they would like. The petition must privately earn 150 online signatures before it is publicly viewable on the website. When ‘We the People’ debuted, if a petition received 5,000 signatures within 30 days of that petition appearing, the White House said they would publicly respond to that petition. As of October 3, 2011, the White House has increased the petition threshold to 25,000 signatures within 30 days.

I think it's some kind of cosmic serendipity that Occupy Wall Street and We the People happened to spring up within days of each other. I think everyone who aligns themselves with the Occupy Wall Street movement could further the cause by joining We the People and voting for petitions they support, and encourage as many people as possible to participate. Occupy Wall St on Facebook already has about 90,000 members, many of them extremely active users. It should be easy for us to get approval for petitions month after month, forcing the White House to acknowledge our voices each time. Sure, they could dismiss our petitions, but every time petition signers see their proposal ignored, those signers will feel slighted and even more energized to raise awareness to their cause.

I'd like to see OWS members, when interviewed, make mention of the We the People platform. When interviewers challenge us with the, “what does this movement represent?” question, we can still preface our explanation with “well, I can’t speak for everyone involved…” but then go into “but I personally encourage everyone to sign up with We the People at whitehouse.gov/petitions, and to tell the White House directly what proposals they want passed...the petitions I personally support right now include…” This way, everyone who is interviewed can keep true to the integrity of OWS as a decentralized, leaderless movement, while allowing some members to comfortably articulate to interviewers and the rest of the world what specific proposals we as individuals want to see addressed.

I'd like to bury this ‘Occupy Wall Street protesters don't know what they want’ criticism as best we can, and move on to whatever the next challenge will be. I think the We the People platform is a handy resource for applying pressure to the government, while allowing articulated proposals to organically emerge from OWS. It is so easy to use and accessible to anyone with computer access, so I can't think of a good reason not to try to use this to tap on the windows of the White House.

If you like this idea of spreading a 'We the People' meme through Occupy Wall Street, please pass it on!

Peace!

More scattered details on a civic engagement social network...

Ok, here's some more developed ideas for the functionality of such a system...

Users should have to register an account with an email address, to avoid people spamming with votes. Having their email addresses in the system could also help with optional email updates of what is happening in the thread. You could probably make these updates desirable with user-customized charts that display the trend of that proposition in the previous week or so. Having a user account also means that users could be reached by other members, allowing people to share ideas and potentially vote differently after debate.

Without question, spamming, and attempts to hack or rig the system would take place, but the moderators (or whoever is at the end of the day paying the bandwidth bills) would have to do their best to keep the system running smoothly. I would be interested in knowing what strategies reddit, Wikipedia , etc. use to minimize hacks, system rigging, trolls, etc.

A fascinating system of organization and metric analysis tools could be integrated, and extremely easy to use. You could see just what propositions the most people voted yes on, or just the ones that the most people voted no on, or a combination of the two, or where people are who voted against it, or what religion or self-described race or age or height or weight etc etc etc. These metrics could be integrated into appealing maps, charts and graphics.

Also, I have to point out that while Facebook only lets you Like stuff, a democratic legislation proposal system would have to let you vote Yes or No (For or Against) or No Vote, just as you would if you were a member of Congress. This means that we might OWS supporters/sympathizers have to open up our ideas to a public consensus gathering system, and possibly find that we are actually in the minority on certain propositions. That doesn't mean we shouldn't participate just as enthusiastically on the behalf of the 99% (technically, the 100%, anyone can vote in the system). I just think we shouldn't encourage popularizing a forum for civic engagement: where people of all ages and languages can engage in meaningful discussions and feel their voice is being heard more democratically than they are used to.

There's other interesting possibilities too. Maybe you could have some metric system that rates users online credibility as voted on by other members, so those users would have a more heavily weighted vote on a different chart of data. Like, what do the most civic-ly engaged people say should be done about this proposition? This could cause problems though so I mention it only as a possibility.

You could read a user's profile and see (if they choose to share it) how they voted on different issues, and you could try to reach out to them and see if they could be persuaded otherwise. This system could also make it easy to see how the way you vote matches up with famous users or persons in power that choose to participate. (I bet Bernie Sanders and Ron Paul would participate.) Imagine that, you could have your profile show you immediately how many points of agreement and disagreement you have with some real political leader. Or Snooki.

Let's take it further, the actual propositions that are trying to be pushed through Washington should be on there for the global community to vote for or against or not at all. Every politician should be urged to participate. It'd make it real easy to see who has been voting with you and who has been voting against you.

I think a functionality that shows how politicians vote on different issues would be the most exciting feature of this system. You should be able to have your profile collect all your different votes, for or against or indifferent, and then click on a politician, and see how they voted on that particular legislation. For example, you might find that Barrack Obama voted just like you 56% of the time and Rick Perry 37% of the time, and then see exactly what propositions they agreed and disagreed with you on.

Doesn't it suck when you go to the voting booth, and you see a zillion names and you have no idea what they really stand for? All of us want to vote for the person who would most vote like ourselves if we were in office. Wouldn't it be cool to have an app we trusted on our phones that would quickly and easily show us which politicians in this election have voted the most like you in the past, and claim they will vote the most like you in the future? Cut through the rhetoric. Cut through the commercials. Just get the facts: does this politician's votes represent mine or not?

At the end of the day, the system needs to be intuitively easy to use, minimally embellished, but have room for vast sophistication. When you click on a proposition, it should open a thread of dialogue and/or a forum on that proposition. To keep people interested and to the point, these discussions should probably be aggregated in a reddit style as well, so people can find what viewpoints have garnered the most interest or debate recently and historically, so they can get the most pith out of their debate participation. There's no reason why this program can't have a fun Facebook side of it.

There could of course be no advertising, and everything would have to come through donations. There would be a donate now button, but nothing else. No-one keeping the platform running can ever be paid for doing so. All money given to the organization would be spent on keeping the servers running. Any civic engagement site whose operators directly make money from the site should be shame shame shamed out of existence.

I think Occupy Wall Street should align with the development of one (or many, like a Facebook, I think one would just rise to the top) of these systems, to boost civic engagement by the disenfranchised 99% of the world, who can't walk in to Congress and cast a vote, who can't impeach their political leader, who in their busy lives can't remember the details of all the times they've been helped or screwed over by those voting on their behalf.

If something like I'm describing already exists, then great! I think members of the OWS movement should try to attract attention to these platforms for civic engagement. There are people all over the world who would like to be with OWS on the street in NYC or any other major protest, but they just physically can't be there. We have electricity and internet, they don't need to be there! Sure there are people who can't participate because they don't have E & I, but all the more reason to design this online civic engagement system, and vote for the proposition to declare E & I a basic human necessity in the 21st century ; )

Thanks for reading, I'd like to hear what anyone thinks for or against, or take suggestions.

Peace!

Occupy Wall Street Reddit-style Legislation Proposal System

I think we should have a kind of reddit/wikipedia-style polling system for the legislation the Occupy Wall Street movement wants passed. We have to invent a system that will allow fully formed proposed legislation to emerge organically from the movement, and for some ideas to rise above others. I had this idea while reading the first official statement from OWS located at http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/first_official_statement_from_the_occupy_wall_street_movement/. I'm imagining a minimally embellished, reddit-style webpage that only displays the proposed legislation, in descending order of popularity, and have each of the proposals hyperlink to their respective open discussion/debate thread. People from all over the world could contribute votes and discussion to what legislation the undisputed imperial leader of the world passes, and OWS could represent their voice on the ground.

I've heard a LOT of people say they don't understand what exactly the OWS movement is asking for. I think if an online, reddit/wikipedia modeled legislation proposing system emerged, we could bury that criticism forever. OWS spokespersons could then feel comfortable articulating to the media precisely the legislation we as a movement are proposing. They could continue to preface statements with the usual "Well, I don't speak for all members involved..." but then explain the most popular proposals from the 'official' and completely democratic OWS legislation proposing organism.  This would maximize pithiness, and I think empower a lot of people who aren't used to being political spokespersons to speak comfortably about what the movement represents.