chapter six

A DEMOCRATIC AGENDA FOR A DIGITAL AGE

CHANGE IS NEVER THE ISSUE. CHANGE IS INEVITABLE. THE only real question is whether we will manage change in our own interest and in the interest of society—or whether we will simply let it happen to us. Unfortunately, this is the issue that is most often neglected as we are dazzled and dumbfounded by evolution in real time. The magnitude of the technological, economic, and social changes that are buffeting us can be so overwhelming, on so many levels, that it is difficult to grasp what they will mean for our lives and our futures. It is even more difficult for many of us to determine whether we will have any say whatsoever regarding the character and the scope of these changes—let alone when and how we might intervene on our own behalf. A great fear among environmentalists is that, decades from now, when people fully experience the consequences of decisions that are made today with limited debate, the sea levels will be rising inexorably, the damage will be racing out of control, and the range of options for action will be dramatically narrower and dramatically bleaker. Yet, because the threat is so daunting, because the requirements of a response are so great, it all becomes an abstraction. Even when people read the details of what is coming their way in ten or twenty or thirty years, even when those details are outlined by our best scientists, there is a powerful temptation to wait for a clarifying moment before leaping into action. The trouble is, environmentalists fear, that when the clarifying moment comes, it will be too late.

We fear that the same could be true when it comes to reports about how the technological revolution under the auspices of contemporary capitalism is going to create new waves of unemployment and underemployment—with more poverty, wage stagnation, and inequality, and with devastating implications for society and democracy. The changes are unfolding now, in our own lives, in our own communities. The apps are being downloaded, the robots are rolling into the hospitals. We’re not talking decades. Two years from the moment you read these words, the planet will add more computer power than it did in all previous history. By the late 2030s there will likely be a thousandfold increase in computer power from where we are today.¹ In just a few years Watson, the incredible IBM computer than won at Jeopardy in 2011, will compare to other computers like a state-of-the-art 2011 Tour de France bicycle would compare to the race cars at the 2021 Indianapolis 500. That is how fast change is coming.

If the great mass of Americans are going to have any role whatsoever in the shaping of this future, if there is to be any chance at all that the twenty-first century will belong to the whole of humanity as opposed to the monopolists of a new Gilded Age, then the defining economic issues of the age must become the defining political issues of the age. That is not the case now, and there are no guarantees that it will be the case. Americans must recognize that our contemporary political discourse stifles rather than encourages the debates about economic and social responses that might benefit the overwhelming majority of us—in large part because our political infrastructure has been organized to take essential issues off the table.

Putting issues on the table is the most radical and freeing of all political acts, as it opens to everyone the range of possibility that is always available to the elites. This is the essence of democracy. Americans must build out the democratic infrastructure, not only to repair the damage that has been done to it in recent years, but to take it to places that the boldest visionaries of the past could barely imagine. We argue that the extension of democracy to economic planning is imperative. While we mention all the main elements of such an agenda herein, we reject the notion of rank-ordering them because this is an agenda that must integrate with itself.

Our purpose is to illustrate the range of possibility and the free-wheeling—and, yes, disruptive—mindset that must be brought to democratic exploration and innovation. There is a point here that cannot be lost: it is impossible to imagine a decent or desirable society without a strong democratic infrastructure. Only when the democratic infrastructure is in place does it become possible to realize its promise fully. Only then do victories become more permanent, rather than fleeting. Only then do people stop fretting about their powerlessness and start using their power.

It’s about time for a new Port Huron Statement, and for a new National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress. But, this time, the statements and studies cannot stop with proposals to “humanize” the workplace. What’s going on now is much bigger, much broader. The discussion must recognize that the automation of the traditional workplace is already taking place. The focus must move out of the warehouse and office and toward proposals that open up the range of possibility to include new thinking on the organization of global and domestic economies, the balance of jobs and home life, education as it should be, and more. But it can’t be an excuse to dust off the tired proposals of the past—including the shopworn proposals of the Left for great sounding but not necessarily transformative initiatives, such as a guaranteed income.² Let’s start our journey there.

A PHONY SOLUTION

Imagine we were writing a book like this about an ancient civilization, or even some fairly recent society like the Soviet Union in the middle of the twentieth century, that had an economic system that was antithetical in key respects to that of the United States. Assume we provided clear evidence of how the introduction of a technology had radically transformed the society and of how, under the control of the society’s unaccountable rulers, the results were disastrous. The conclusion would be obvious: the social structure in the ancient society or in the USSR was a clunker, and for that reason alone technologies that could have advanced civilization by empowering the many instead became tools of repression and scorching societal decay. In such a case study, there would be little debate among contemporary scholars about the nature of the crisis or about what would have been best for those societies: the people should have created a superior economic system that worked for the whole of society and its future, not just the needs of the rulers who were locked into their destructive and short-sighted paradigm.

Existing US capitalism is similarly a dubious fit for the present technological revolution, and it is a bad fit for democracy. This evidence is drawn from scholars and experts who acknowledge that a tension exists between capitalism as currently practiced and what passes for democracy in America. They understand that this puts considerable strain upon the democratic values and institutions of the country. Yet, for the most part, the notion that capitalism itself must be subject to no-holds-barred political debate is unspeakable, even unthinkable. A similar intellectual paralysis among the wise men of an ancient civilization or Soviet scholars would be derided by these same observers as a sign of the society’s corruption and the bankruptcy of its intellectual class. Yet there is little self-awareness in the United States today among those who ponder the jobs crisis and the incompatibility automation has with our current political economy.

Indeed, most writers assume capitalism as it has come to be known is the basis for democracy and freedom, and that whatever happens in the future, the necessity of preserving current capitalism (or some sped-up version of it) all but trumps other concerns. Nothing should be done to alter the power of the digital giants or the unquestioned dominance and legitimacy of the profit motive when it comes to defining the future. Even the truest believers in capitalism, if they are honest with themselves, have to recognize that this is a political gambit, a means for taking the biggest issues off the table. When we cannot have a wide-ranging debate about economics, then concentrated economic power translates into general cultural power. This is the nature of the present weltanschauung. We live in a time when it is illegitimate to say that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

This barrier to a no-holds-barred discourse about how best to organize a civil, humane, and deeply democratic future, with liberty and justice for all, warps the debate about the future. It takes not just issues, but ideas, off the table. And it leaves us with too narrow a range of options—even for scholars who have taught us much and care deeply about this country, its peoples, and its future. If changing the economy is off the table, how can the great economic problems outlined in their research, and in all of our books, be addressed? If we may generalize, the one solution that has currency, and that is promoted by scholars who have done so much to identify the concerns outlined in this book (Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and Martin Ford, among them) is the notion of a basic income or guaranteed annual income for all people in the nation.³

The idea is that everyone gets a sufficient income, usually between ten and twenty thousand dollars annually, so that no one starves to death or goes homeless in an era where jobs become far more scarce. The sales pitch to the affluent sector of the population that will pay higher taxes to bankroll the program is twofold: (1) these tens of millions of unemployed people will certainly spend all of this money on goods and services, so it will end up back in your pockets and make the economy much stronger, and (2) unless the wealthy buy off the majority of the population, there will be extraordinary social turbulence that could make the 1930s look like a day at the beach. It says quite a bit about the constricted range of debate today that Brynjolfsson and McAfee assert that basic-income proposals are radical ideas, at the outer limits of what might be acceptable.⁴ Ford goes to considerable pains to explain that this project has the free-market seal of approval from Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.⁵ God forbid anyone think of a reform that would not be embraced by capitalism’s mightiest advocates.

The idea of basic income was first posited by those on the left in the 1960s as a response to an initial automation scare, and this led to a lively debate. It was regarded skeptically by those who saw it as no solution at all, but merely a way for the wealthy to bribe the bulk of the population so they could keep their system and their privileges.⁶ At the heart of many basic-income proposals is a calculus that says that once people get their annual check sent to them by a government, that is the end of any services they get from that government. If they want healthcare or transit, or quality education, they have to go buy it in the marketplace, like they would a hamburger or a pair of shoes. In this scenario, all public services would be privatized. The grand irony of “basic income” thinking along these lines is that it leads to the precise opposite of where John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes wanted to end up. Instead of reducing commercialism and the market in a post-scarcity world, it elevates commercialism and the market so that everything is for sale. Hardly a recipe for human happiness. And economist Tyler Cowen makes the astute point that even if this looks like a terrific deal for society’s millionaires, it is almost certain they will resist paying taxes to sustain those they regard as deadbeats and free-loaders.⁷ Then there develops a massive popular struggle to win and maintain the basic income. If people are going to organize a gigantic battle, they ought to fight for more than this. They ought to fight for a world where their concerns are central, and not struggle to be extras in a world of, by, and for the rich.

In our view, a more humane approach would be to go in the opposite direction and simply remove certain functions from the market altogether as the society grows wealthier. Enhance democracy, don’t cash it out. Make broadband Internet access free and ubiquitous. Make healthcare free and ubiquitous. Make extensive public transportation within cities and between them free and ubiquitous. Make all education free and ubiquitous. The list goes on and on. At some point, down the road, inequality is eliminated and humans enter an entirely new phase of their history. The economic problem will have been solved. Which, of course, is why it will be such a difficult political fight to get there.

Education is where the major battle for the future is going on today. A coalition of right-wing, union-hating, high-tech billionaires and hedge-fund managers looking to get rich as schools get privatized is working aggressively to “reform” and effectively end public education in the United States. Most of the arguments are economic: that American kids, who are primarily educated in public schools, are falling behind children worldwide and making the nation less competitive. This is a largely utilitarian view of education that sees it as developing labor skills and high incomes for students. The one reliable measure is testing, and “reformed” school districts have children prepare for and take tests much of their time in schools. Technology is offered as a way to reduce the reliance on human teachers—and in the form of so-called distance learning to eliminate schools themselves. One can only wonder where this leads when there are far fewer jobs and people are increasingly living off basic-income vouchers. There certainly doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for schools to exist, except as holding pens for children until they get old enough to collect their own basic-income vouchers and begin shopping around for health insurance companies that will take them.

What is lost in this calculus are the two reasons the United States implemented public education in the first place: (1) to educate young people so they can be engaged and effective citizens and participate fully in the governance of society, and (2) to provide education for all as a great equalizer that gives poor and working-class children a chance to maximize their potential. School reformers often claim they want to create schools to help poor kids become rich adults, but commonly they send their own children to exclusive private schools, with hardly any testing and, ironically, very little technology. Indeed, research shows that a disproportionate percentage of tech billionaires and CEOs went to alternative Montessori schools as children. And in the Silicon Valley many of their children go to alternative Waldorf Schools that emphasize freedom, flexibility, and the arts. In short, these CEOs and their children are educated in an intimate, non-competitive environment with few tests or grades and an emphasis on personal growth, creativity, and critical thinking.⁸ Here’s our idea: why not make it the national policy that every child in America gets the same caliber of education as the children of the wealthy? That seems to be the civilized and humane target for a post-scarcity society. Why not make this the basic premise of every education debate?

ESTABLISHING THE CONTOURS OF DEMOCRACY

American history as it should be taught is that of a centuries-long struggle, often against overwhelming odds, to make real the promise Lincoln enunciated on the blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg, when he spoke of government of, by, and for the people. This history begins with the painful recognition that American “democracy” started as a backroom deal between wealthy, white landholders, many of whom brutally exploited slaves, indentured servants, subsistence farmers, indigenous people, and women. The drama of the story is revealed in the retelling of how dispossessed and oppressed human beings gained for themselves a place at the table of democracy—of how African Americans, Native Americans, Chicanos, women, immigrants, religious dissenters, freethinkers, radical editors, trade unionists, poor people, young people, and gays and lesbians achieved full and meaningful citizenship. This is the greatest American story. These struggles built our democratic infrastructure and an understanding that only through solidarity, through a commitment to one another that bridged difference and indifference, could we all be free and prosperous.

This is the story of how the promise of democracy became the reality of democracy. And it is vital to understanding the work of building a democratic infrastructure that is sufficient to the challenges that are coming our way.

From the beginning of the American experiment, there has been an understanding of the basic requirements of democracy:

       •  elections for positions of public trust by popular vote of constituents

       •  the rule of law and the control of corruption

       •  constraints on militarism and “continual warfare”

       •  the guarantee of an independent, substantial, and uncensored free press

       •  a government strong enough to address and eliminate excessive economic inequality

Over time, the drafters of state constitutions, as essential frameworks of democracy and governance, have outlined three additional requirements:

       •  the right to a free education for all citizens, through grade twelve, which is in all state constitutions

       •  the right to form free trade unions and to engage in collective bargaining, as it is identified in some state constitutions

       •  the right to a clean and sustainable environment, as it is identified in some state constitutions

The Populist and Progressive Eras recognized that the character of America was changing as a once predominantly rural and agrarian country was becoming increasingly urban and industrial. New democratic practices and arrangements were developed to counter corruption and inequality. The backroom deal was finally ended as a directly elected US Senate was established. Citizens were given the power to write and veto laws via initiatives and referendums and to remove officials via the recall power. Government was given strength and meaning in relation to economic power, via the establishment of the progressive income tax, the authority to tax corporations, and the banning of corporate contributions to campaigns.

But even this progress was insufficient, as the Great Depression and the rise of fascism confirmed with scorching force and immediacy. In response, Franklin Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights, also known as an Economic Bill of Rights. To realize the full promise of democracy, the United States would need to guarantee the rights to

       •  meaningful work and a living wage

       •  healthcare

       •  an education

       •  housing

       •  adequate food, clothing, and recreation

       •  old-age pensions and social security

       •  freedom from the abuses of private monopolies in business

This remains an extraordinary agenda. Realizing just what is written above would constitute nothing less than a political revolution, and an economic revolution. Our economy would need to be radically transformed—to get off the drug of militarism, to end crony-capitalism policymaking, to get real about planning and social investment—in order to provide all the elements of the economic bill of rights.

And the transformation would need to be ongoing.

Today’s circumstance requires that a few new protections be added to FDR’s list. For instance, the ancient sanction against corruption must be updated to guard against the privatization and outsourcing of public education and public responsibilities. It is imperative to remove profiteering from the provision of public goods: education, municipal services, public safety, and the defense of the land from foreign threats. If recent decades have taught us anything, it is that Dwight Eisenhower was right to warn against the threat posed by a military-industrial complex. And it is becoming increasingly clear that, as taxpayers and citizens, we cannot afford a prison-industrial complex or an education-industrial complex. Democracy cannot be maintained when profiteers obtain lucrative contracts and then use the money to hire lobbyists and fund campaigns so that they can obtain yet more lucrative contracts.⁹

Likewise, having an ecology that can sustain human life is not some premium channel a society can select in addition to the democratic basic package. It is not like having satellite radio added to your new car purchase. It is the very foundation for human existence for all societies and must be regarded as such. Environmental movements have come to understand and advance the idea that their success rises and falls with movements for democracy and social justice worldwide. Today’s environmental activists recognize that a new more accountable and community-oriented economy is mandatory for human survival, and that the only way to achieve such an economy is through the dramatic extension of democratic infrastructure. As author and environmental activist Bill McKibben argues, it is imperative to “break the intellectual spell under which we live.” This is what we have termed weltanschauung, and it is joined to the hip of democratic infrastructure. McKibben explains that “the last few decades have been dominated by the premise that privatizing all economic resources will produce endless riches. Which was kind of true, except that the riches went to only a few people. And in the process they melted the Arctic, as well as dramatically increasing inequality around the world.”¹⁰

As the rough outlines of the damage done on a host of environmental, economic, and social issues come into stark relief, a sense of urgency is increasing exponentially. Also increasing is the sense that we are all in this together, and we have common interest in a democratic infrastructure. Elite solutions for the environment, just like the economy, will tend to serve elite interests. As the saying goes, if you are not at the table when decisions are being made, you are the dish that is being served.

A full democratic infrastructure provides more than the right to vote. Full democratic infrastructure provides economic and social security, a free flow of information, and absolute protection against discrimination and corruption so that every citizen—not just those who are wealthy—has the freedom to engage fully in the politics and governance of the nation. None of this presupposes a particular type of economy, yet all of it presupposes that every American will have the right to participate fully and meaningfully in determining what type of economy best serves her—and best frames the future. When a crisis causes a jolt, as will surely be the case with the technological and social transformations that are now unfolding, citizens must retain the power to put economic options on the table—and to embrace the best of those options. If we want to make it through the changes that are headed our way, and to come out on the other side as a nation that enjoys what the New Economy Coalition describes as a “new economy . . . where capital (wealth and the means of creating it) is a tool of the people, not the other way around,” then there must be a democratic infrastructure that is sufficient to foster economic democracy.¹¹

DEMOCRATIZE THE CONSTITUTION

A certain portion of the work in the coming decades must address the nation’s constitutions. Constitutions underpin and frame our democratic infrastructure. Yet, they do not always make it functional. Nothing thwarts political and economic democracy like a constitution so imprecise that it allows right-wing judicial activists to make buying elections easy and voting hard. Instead of democracy, the Constitution of 1787 gave us an unelected Senate and an Electoral College and other structures intended to control rather than empower the unruly masses. Americans who had fought to end the abuses of old elites objected to the prospect of being abused by new ones. They demanded and by 1791 had won the ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights. Seventeen more amendments have come since then. Seven of those amendments overturned Supreme Court rulings, and almost all of them sought to extend democracy, end corruption, and make the federal government more responsive to new times and new challenges.¹²

These amendments made the United States a different and better nation. But we are not different and better enough. Foreseeing our contemporary circumstance, Thomas Jefferson counseled against viewing the Constitution as “too sacred to be touched,” warning that “we might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” Jefferson also argued that “the real friends of the Constitution in its federal form, if they wish it to be immortal, should be attentive, by amendments, to make it keep pace with the advance of the age in science and experience.”¹³

The real friends of the Constitution today champion a “move to amend” that would declare that corporations are not people, that money is not speech, and that votes must matter more than billionaires’ dollars. Sixteen states and some six hundred communities have since 2010 demanded that Congress initiate a constitutional response to the judicial activism that has allowed elites to commodify our politics and corporatize our governance.¹⁴ At the same time, activists are taking up a proposal by Congressmen Mark Pocan and Keith Ellison to end the crude assault on voting rights with an amendment that establishes, finally and unequivocally, a right to vote and to have every vote counted.¹⁵ These are good starting points, but they are not sufficient.

The Constitution should be clarified so that it sustains rather than throttles democracy. Do away with the Electoral College. Ban the practice of gerrymandering. Close the loophole that allows governors to appoint cronies to vacant Senate seats. Ask why America maintains a House of Lords–like Senate where, today, the vote of a member elected by 121,000 Wyomingites can cancel out the vote of a member elected by 7.8 million Californians.¹⁶ Consider electing members of the House to four-year terms that parallel those of the president, so that the popular will of 131 million voters in a presidential election can’t be stymied by 90 million voters in the next mid-term election.¹⁷ Object to any calculus that prevents a majority–African American District of Columbia and a majority–Hispanic Puerto Rico from becoming states.¹⁸ Reexamine every barrier to popular participation, including those of poverty, ignorance, and incapacity. “When it shall be said in any country in the world, my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am the friend of its happiness: when these things can be said, then may that country boast of its constitution and its government,” wrote Thomas Paine.¹⁹ He was right, as was FDR when he proposed an economic bill of rights. No constitution can repair every breach in society, but a renewed US Constitution can clear the way for the people—the whole people, as opposed to a handful of elites—to forge a more perfect union.²⁰

The point, after all, is not the perfection of a document, it is the power of the people to shape their future. Something remarkable happens when transformative power is on offer: apathy ends. The advocates of a democratic agenda for a digital age should offer America a vision of a next politics where, as Robert M. La Follette proposed, “the will of the people shall be the law of the land.”²¹ Going to the root of the matter on behalf of political and economic democracy can be daunting. Constitutional change always faces the open opposition of those who are satisfied with the status quo and the quiet opposition of those who simply do not believe big changes are possible. Progress has never come easily. But progress has come. And here is the good news: progress often comes rapidly.

At the start of the 1910s children who should have been in school were changing bobbins in mills. Workers who dared to organize unions were mowed down by paramilitary forces. Women who could not vote were dying in sweatshop fires. The government lacked the ability to collect revenues necessary to address the basic needs of a nation experiencing rapid yet shockingly unequal growth. Progress in Washington was stymied by millionaires who bribed legislators to secure US Senate seats. Progressive reformers recognized that the “money power” made a mockery of the promise of popular governance. So they established their “covenant with the American people.” They explained the changes that were necessary. And they got them. Not with ease, and not through the generosity of the elites. They got them through organizing, marching, rallying, practicing civil disobedience, taking risks, and voting against the failed men of the past who blocked the way to the future. Above all, they got them when the great mass of Americans grew so frustrated, so angry, so determined, so hopeful, that they would no longer accept a fate dictated by distant and disengaged elites. They got them when Americans decided that the people could do a better job of shaping the future than the millionaires and the monopolists.²²

In a ten-year period, the Constitution was amended so that women were permitted to vote, the Senate was directly elected by the people, and Congress had the power to implement progressive taxation.²³ At the same time, child labor, workplace safety, and pure-food-and-drug laws were implemented; labor unions were on the march; and the rough outlines of what would become the New Deal were taking shape in states that came to be known as “laboratories of democracy.” The great leap forward was made possible by recognition that the United States needed fundamental change and that some of that change required amending the Constitution. It was the same in the 1960s and early 1970s, another age of reform that saw constitutional amendments to extend voting rights to the District of Columbia, abolish poll taxes, clarify presidential succession, and allow eighteen-year-olds to vote.²⁴

The champions and builders of a democratic infrastructure for the twenty-first century should, when it comes to constitutional reform, seek and expect nothing less from the next ten years.

DEMOCRATIZE JOURNALISM

While constitutional reform is as necessary now as Jefferson suggested it would be, many of the changes that are required to create a full democratic infrastructure do not require any constitutional amendments. Let’s start with the information that people need to be their own governors. To get to democracy, there has to be a democratization of communications that ensures that all Americans are sufficiently informed to fully engage as citizens. The great majority of Americans are not getting this now. Old media has been dying slowly for decades, and there is no evidence to imagine that the media that democracy requires will be delivered by app newsrooms or robot reporters. There are no market solutions, no technical fixes, no new economic models. There is only one way out of this mess, and it is to put the people in charge of demanding the solutions that media conglomerates and “click-chasing” reporters will not demand. People—citizens—will need to be in charge of the funding of the next media system.²⁵ Once we remove the shackles of our stilted political discourse, problems that seem impervious to reform become areas for experimentation and great hope.

American history, and the contemporary experience of the most democratic countries on the planet, tells us this is possible. And the rough outlines of the movement that will be needed to make the change are already in place. Citizens who recognize the essential connection between information and democracy can build on the strength of a media-reform movement that has, under both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, prevented bad things from happening. With roots that go back for decades, the media-reform movement came together in its modern form to thwart Bush-era attempts to effectively eliminate limits on the amount of media that one corporation could own in one community—and, by extension, nationally. More recently, it has blocked efforts to undermine net neutrality, the essential tool for defending free speech and the free flow of communications on the Internet. In an age of rapidly changing media, then, the media-reform movement has already engaged millions of Americans in the fight to prevent some very bad things from happening.²⁶ Now, it must make some good things happen. Media-reform activism must be part of a broad democratic agenda for a digital age.²⁷

The goal—every bit as ambitious as those of the most ardent advocates for economic democracy—should be information democracy. Citizens who possess little or no wealth must have the same information that citizens with great wealth now enjoy. Hedge-fund managers and CEOs do not seek information as entertainment. They are not spectators. They get the best information that can be found and they act on it. Citizens who would be their own governors must adopt the same sensibility. For obvious reasons, journalism that democratizes access to information will not be funded by the elites. Bernie Sanders is precisely right when he says that “it’s not in the interest of the corporations who own the networks to actually be educating the American people so that we’re debating the real issues.”²⁸ But it is in the interest of the people to support journalism that sustains democracy. So the United States should give the people the tools to subsidize independent, not-for-profit journalism.²⁹

How? Begin with supercharged funding of public broadcasting and robust support for community media—along the lines already outlined by the most energetic campaigners on behalf of maximized funding for what should be “an American BBC.”³⁰ Those are givens. But we dare not stop there. A democratic agenda must demand substantial public investments in journalism as a “public good.” This is nothing new for America. The United States developed a press system that was the envy of the world in the early nineteenth century through massive postal and printing subsidies for newspapers.³¹ These subsidies made the cost of production so low that the United States eventually had more newspapers per capita than any other country in the world. The founders of the American experiment were not familiar with the term public good, but they treated the press as just that. And they did so in the only way that made democratic sense, by providing generous postal and printing subsidies to all publications—even those that dissented, even those that, like the abolitionist press, proposed radical change—so that none were puppets of the government.³²

What’s the modern model for establishing a nonprofit, noncommercial, competitive, uncensored, and independent press system that embraces digital technology, that recognizes the potential of new-media platforms, and that, above all, provides a journalism that is sufficient to sustain genuine democracy? How about this: every American adult gets a two-hundred-dollar voucher she can use to donate government money to any nonprofit news media of her choice. She can split her two hundred dollars among different qualifying nonprofit media, indicating her choice on her tax return or a simple form. This program would be purely voluntary, like the tax-form check-offs for funding elections or protecting wildlife. Simple universal standards can be developed for media that qualifies for voucher funding, erring always on the side of expanding rather than constraining the number of qualifying newsrooms. A small existing agency, such as the Postal Regulatory Commission (which has some history in this area), could provide necessary oversight and administration.

Based on a proposal from economist Dean Baker, the Citizen News Voucher program we outline here represents a literal and practical response to the transformation of media in the digital age. Baker says it is “designed to maximize the extent of individual choice while taking full advantage of new technologies.”³³ The idea borrows from the libertarian movement, in its recognition that vouchers can be used to give greater control over the expenditure of public tax dollars. It combines a healthy hostility to government control over news content with a faith in the power of individuals to make their own choices, and it recognizes the public-good nature of journalism.

A news voucher program would allow public-media organizations to dramatically increase their funding. Imagine if a public television station in a metropolitan area of one million people that was ill-served by existing media—which is to say any and every metropolitan area—managed to get fifty thousand viewers to donate half of their Citizen News Voucher to help with the development of a newsroom to cover state and local elections and government. With a $5 million budget, that station would have the resources to hire top journalists and to provide a quality alternative to dwindling commercial coverage that is invariably surrounded by a slurry of negative campaign commercials.

Now, imagine if most of those fifty thousand viewers donated the other half of their Citizen News Vouchers, in combination with similar numbers of viewers from twenty more metropolitan areas, to develop an evening radio and cable news program along the lines of Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now.” That program would have close to $100 million to hire journalists to cover national and international issues. But let’s also imagine that two thousand residents and allies of an impoverished and neglected neighborhood in the core city of that metropolitan area were to direct half of the vouchers to fund a community radio station newsroom covering policing issues.

Let’s put it all online, with podcasts and apps and alerts so that every one of these initiatives is available to everyone—as news happens and all the time. A condition for getting the vouchers is that everything produced by the nonprofit medium getting the funds must be put online immediately for free; it enters the public domain where anyone can use it as needed. Suddenly old media and new media are working together to produce journalism that matters, and that does not have to rely on advertising or subscriptions or the vagaries of the market. And the people who need information are paying journalists to go out and gather that information and to deliver it to them.

Too good to be true? No. Democratic necessities are never too good to be true. They are simply hard to get. Net neutrality was supposed to be too good to be true. Plenty of pundits said it would be impossible to beat the world’s most powerful telecommunications lobbies in a fight to preserve a free and open Internet. Yet, in an era when corporations so frequently get so very much of what they ask for, media reform, civil rights, and community activists made the fight for net neutrality an issue. They put it on the table. They were out-spent and out-lobbied. But in February 2015 they won a victory that Free Press president Craig Aaron identified as “the biggest win for the public interest in the FCC’s history.” Aaron explained that “it’s the culmination of a decade of dedicated grassroots organizing and advocacy. Millions of people came to the defense of the open Internet to tell Washington, in no uncertain terms, that the Internet belongs to all of us and not just a few greedy phone and cable companies.”³⁴

Absolute protections for a free and open Internet were impossible to get. Then we got them. The information we need to utilize and maintain a democratic infrastructure will be ours if we make the struggle for that information part of an agenda that recognizes the necessity of political and economic democracy. And if we hoop ourselves together to advance that agenda, we can get it. Indeed, if we hoop ourselves together at a moment when people will be demanding transformative change, we can get a whole lot more.

DEMOCRACY, NOT MONOPOLY

What is striking today is that there is an emerging genre of superb books outlining the stunning increase in economic inequality in the United States over the past four decades and the disastrous implications for our economy, our democracy, and the social structure. It seems like everyone gets it. When the Occupy movement exploded onto the scene in 2011, even Republicans talked about inequality as a problem, albeit for a split-second.³⁵ For those old enough to remember the 1960s or early 1970s, today’s America feels increasingly like a feudal or Third World country, the kind few thought possible fifty years ago. Dramatically lessening economic inequality is required to have a functional democracy; there is no two ways about it. That is one theme that has been central in every period of democratic surge in the nation’s history, and it must be so today, because indications are that unless we the people act rapidly and boldly, the current circumstance is only going to get worse, possibly much worse.

One of the essential explanations for mounting economic inequality in the United States is the increasing monopoly power over the economy. This was well understood in the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and even in the 1960s. Monopolies themselves were recognized as singularly anti-democratic constructs that needed to be weakened. Economic concentration is far more prevalent today than in any of those earlier times. The digital economy is nothing if not a hothouse for monopoly. Yet the issue gets barely any serious discussion; massive monopolistic corporations are treated as if they are part of the unchangeable scenery, like the Rocky Mountain range. It shows just how powerful these firms are that they can buy their way out of critical analysis. But the populists, the Progressives, the New Dealers, Ralph Nader, and the 1960s activists all had it right (as did Jefferson and Lincoln): concentrated economic power is not only a threat to smaller businesses, workers, and community enterprise, it is a direct threat to democratic governance. It must be addressed squarely or any hard-earned popular reforms will be fleeting.

Fortunately, the current crisis is sparking a renaissance in thinking with regard to corporate power and monopoly.³⁶ What’s even more encouraging now is that the talk is turning from identification of the crisis toward consideration of what to do about it. When the telecommunications giant Comcast proposed in 2014 to take over Time Warner Cable, in a $45 billion deal that would further monopolize cable and digital communications, there was a general sense that it was a done deal. After all, Comcast was on good terms with leading Democrats as well as Republicans; it was the poster child for crony capitalism, as its core industries were all based on having government monopoly licenses. Even critics of the takeover “assumed that the merger with Time Warner Cable would happen—we just needed to demand concessions on other fronts,” recalls Fordham Law School professor Zephyr Teachout. But the done deal was undone. Media reform, civil rights, and consumer groups stirred an outcry and federal regulators started to raise questions. When word leaked that the US Department of Justice might oppose the deal, Comcast backed off in what former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps hailed as “spectacularly good news for consumers concerned about the spiraling cost of cable and broadband and for millions of citizens who want nothing more to do with gatekeeping and consolidation in the communications ecosystem on which our democracy depends.”³⁷ No doubt about that. But it was something else as well. It was a signal that people power may have more capacity to upend corporate power than even the most optimistic activists had imagined.

Teachout took it as such. “Stopping a merger like this is real political power,” she explained in the spring of 2015.³⁸ “The Comcast defeat reminds us that we haven’t always accepted big banks, big chicken, big beef, big Monsanto, big patents, big oil, a market defined by bigness instead of competition.” To Teachout’s view, “the crash of 2008 was the first sign for many people that this concentration of power was bad for people’s lives. Although calls to break up the banks failed, the mainstream demand lives on. Banks are bigger and more concentrated than ever, but the consensus ideology was burst. However, the anti-monopoly sentiment stayed largely caged in its own arena, an idea reserved for banks, not for a way of seeing the economy more broadly.”

Teachout explained that

a new populist fighting force representing the broad grassroots demand that we break up big companies. When the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed, Senator Sherman spoke about it in democratic terms, ‘A Charter of Liberty,’ he said—and until the 1980s we understood that. Comcast, even without the merger, threatens our liberties. One-hundred-and-ten years ago, a group calling itself the Antitrust League held events around the country, demanding the government break up big companies. A few years later, Teddy Roosevelt used the Sherman Act to break up Standard Oil. And while it took until FDR to put in place a persistent, rational antitrust policy, Roosevelt’s choice to battle Standard Oil was a critical turning point in American history—it showed we did not have to bow before big monopolists. The modern antitrust leagues are just now forming.

Teachout’s not the only one proposing to break up digital giants like Amazon and even Google.³⁹ Nor is she alone in speaking of the need for new movements and “a new charter of liberty.”⁴⁰ That’s the ticket. But why stop there?

Breaking up monopolies makes sense in some cases, but in others, indeed in the most oppressive of monopoly circumstances, it is virtually impossible to break up a giant company into five or ten competitive parts. These are the “natural monopolies,” the kind that dominate the digital economy with its “network effects.” What to do? There is an old argument that could be made new again. Worried in the 1930s about the way in which “the corporation is simply running away with our economic (and political) system,” University of Chicago economics professor Henry Calvert Simons suggested that “the state should face the necessity of actually taking over, owning, and managing directly . . . industries in which it is impossible to maintain effectively competitive conditions.”⁴¹ Simons was no radical. Economist Milton Friedman referred to Simons as “my teacher and my friend—and, above all, a shaper of my ideas.”⁴² So why did Simons favor nationalization? His reason was both economic and political. “Few of our gigantic corporations can be defended on the grounds that their present size is necessary to reasonably full exploitation of production economies,” he argued. Yet, Simons explained, the most powerful corporations could easily thwart attempts at regulation, even blocking moves to apply antitrust laws. The practical solution was “direct government ownership and operation in the case of all industries where competition cannot be made to function effectively as an agency of control.”⁴³

Contemporary political economist Gar Alperovitz recalled this analysis after the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, noting that despite the mess they had made of things, the “too-big-to-fail” banks were bailed out and back to their old bad behaviors in no time. Invoking Simons’s work, Alperovitz wrote in 2012 that the logic of his argument remains. “With high-paid lobbyists contesting every proposed regulation, it is increasingly clear that big banks can never be effectively controlled as private businesses. If an enterprise (or five of them) is so large and so concentrated that competition and regulation are impossible, the most market-friendly step is to nationalize its functions.”⁴⁴ That opens up a host of questions that need to be solved. Most important: How can there be accountable and effective management of public enterprises? The track record in the United States and worldwide reminds us that FDR was right: the more democratic a society is, the broader its democratic infrastructure, the more likely public institutions will be honest, effective, and hugely popular.

DEMOCRATIZE PLANNING

In view of the nature of the economic challenges that Americans are experiencing today, and the economic calamity they will experience in coming years, putting economic issues on the table is about more than gently guiding and assisting the private-sector economy, under the assumption that “what is good for Apple is good for America.” To this end, we would link the elements of the democratic infrastructure that have already been described to the development of what the United States has never really had: a national industrial policy that

       •  focuses on creating and retaining meaningful and well-compensated work in all sectors of the economy

       •  guards against the development of monopolies that reduce competition and innovation, and that threaten small business

       •  supports research and development—especially in areas where investment is necessary but not necessarily profitable in the short term

       •  works with private and public employers and communities to establish a proper balance between work and leisure, providing a regulatory framework that defines full-time work and guarantees that compensation is adequate so that employees can support their families without being expected to work excessive hours

       •  maintains the planning, funding, and support networks needed to guarantee healthcare, disability, and retirement security for all, as well as the education, training, and transportation services that are required by twenty-first-century workers

       •  encourages economic development in industrial sectors and geographical areas that may not be immediately profitable, but have great social value; by doing so it can make areas eventually cost efficient

       •  ensures that workers have a voice in their workplaces and, through their unions, in broader economic planning by corporations and governments

       •  recognizes the value of public utilities and public services to the whole of the economy and to the whole of society, and encourages public ownership and cooperative development

       •  guarantees that the benefits of technological advances are shared by all, and that changes in the workplace are made to ease economic and social burdens rather than merely to boost profits

       •  requires that trade policies benefit workers and the environment in the United States and the countries with which it trades

       •  maintains a steady commitment to environmental protection and climate justice with an eye toward ensuring that economic decisions are made to promote sustainability rather than exploit the planet

       •  addresses the unique challenges faced by rural and urban Americans, and by people of color and immigrants who have suffered from historical discrimination and contemporary inequity

       •  establishes a national land-use policy that supports sustainable agriculture and the development of livable communities rather than sprawl and factory farming

       •  is constantly evolved in a transparent and inclusive manner, with democratic oversight and governance.

Of course, to mention economic planning in the United States in the past few decades is seen as utterly absurd and extremely dangerous. We are told by people who plan all the time to improve their own lives that planning by society will lead to some totalitarian hack—usually a brain-dead bureaucrat who fantasizes about Khrushchev’s Soviet Union—interfering with the untouchable market. Everyone who listens to a politician or a corporate spokesperson knows the words by heart. But the truth is we do have serious economic planning in the United States and it has been effective. Trade deals, intellectual property protections, tax policies, farm subsidies, all sorts of monopoly licenses for broadcasting, cable TV, and cellphone spectrum are forms of economic planning. So are choices made with regard to privatization and outsourcing. And let’s not forget bailouts of Wall Street and multinational corporations. The market produces its own inefficiencies, its own failures, and—in an age of crony capitalism—its own pathologies that cost taxpayers and the US economy trillions of dollars.⁴⁵ Yet, when the market crashes, there are plans to protect those who did the crashing. That’s a form of planning, although not a very good one. And nowhere is economic planning more evident in today’s United States than in the Pentagon budget, which has been guiding much of the US economy since the 1940s. A significant piece of the US competitive advantage in computing and electronics extends from research bankrolled by the Pentagon. The Internet, itself, was the result of such funding. Large corporations and most of big business are so interlocked with the government that the distinction between them is almost moot.

So we have plenty of economic planning. The problem is that it is done by and for elites with almost no public awareness or participation. And it has become increasingly corrupt. Those purportedly brain-dead bureaucrats of yesteryear are today more likely to be cynical hustlers looking to pass through “the revolving door” between government and the corporate sector. If they do it just “right,” as many former congressmen and regulators have, they can make millions in big-ticket private-sector jobs in the industries they oversaw during their period of “public service.”

The minimal baseline level of credible planning that once gave the United States the most advanced physical infrastructure in the world has become so corrupt that decisions about how and when to repair that very infrastructure are made not with an eye toward keeping everyone safe and mobile but with an eye toward perfecting the curb cuts around corporate campuses and developing paying-customer lanes on soon-to-be-privatized highways. Oh, yes, there is a lot of planning on behalf of the very wealthy and the very powerful. What’s needed is planning for the rest of us. Economic planning needs to be democratized and popularized and made accountable. And this democratic planning must be done locally, regionally, and nationally. It could be that such planning will keep things just as they are, and regard its function as assisting the largest corporations to get even larger. But if that is the case, it should be the result of the informed consent of the people. There is no indication, however, that corporate America believes it can win a fair fight on those terms.

So is economic planning un-American or necessarily radical? Hardly. Most of what is discussed here builds on the industrial policies and approaches to economic planning long embraced by the governors of the strongest economic powerhouses of Europe, especially Germany. We do not hold up the Germans or the Danes or the Norwegians or the Swedes as perfect planners. And we do not suggest that the United States must borrow precise policies—although they are instructive, and we particularly appreciate the groundbreaking work of Britain’s Trades Union Congress to show how easily the German model might be adapted to other countries.⁴⁶

What we do suggest is that Jeremy Wiesen, a professor of entrepreneurship (emeritus) at New York University’s Stern School of Business, was absolutely right to argue several years ago in the Wall Street Journal: “We shouldn’t need to implore the government to have at least as many officials focused on new business creation as are measuring GNP and GDP. The term ‘industrial policy’ should not be seen as a pejorative. It certainly isn’t in China. Nor should it be anathema for the U.S. government to provide capital and other incentives to keep scientific and entrepreneurial talent at home, give aggressive trade assistance, and incubate new businesses—all of which is done in China.”⁴⁷ We believe with economists and Robert Pollin and Dean Baker that “an effective combination of public investments and industrial policies” is necessary “to meet the fundamental challenges at hand.”⁴⁸ And we emphatically agree with Pollin and Baker that “a public investment/industrial policy agenda is quite viable in principle and has demonstrated its effectiveness in widely varying circumstances, in the U.S. and elsewhere.”⁴⁹

Nothing about public investment and industrial policy—nor any of the broader changes that are necessary to democratize economic decision making—will halt, or even slow, the arrival of the future. Rather, these changes will shape the future along humane and equitable lines, rather than along some billionaire’s bottom line. There is moral and practical value in establishing an economy that responds to human values and human needs, and that recognizes, as have Green Parties around the world, that

conventional economic policy uses economic growth, inflation, balance of payments and unemployment as “economic indicators,” the normal criteria against which progress is measured. Although it is the most usually quoted indicator, gross national product (GNP) is a poor indicator of true progress and does not adequately measure people’s sense of well-being. It measures only the activity in the formal sector, regardless of what that activity is. In consequence, current economic theory fails adequately to reflect the real effects of human activity within a finite ecosystem, and is used to “validate” economic activities which are ecologically unsustainable and/or socially unjust.⁵⁰

If it is fair that all citizens should have a say with regard to the policies that shape their future, then it is practical for society to take steps to strengthen that contribution. The quality of the contribution that those citizens will make to the debate increases as they enjoy a measure of economic and social security—and the stability that both provide. One of the top excuses for Americans who do not vote is that they simply do not have the time to gather information, get to the polls, and cast a ballot. “When pollsters have attempted to ask non-voters why they haven’t voted, two of the common answers have been ‘too busy’ or ‘schedule conflicts’,” notes long-time political writer Eric Black. “A lame excuse by some, perhaps, but not for all.”⁵¹ The day-to-day burdens placed on low-wage workers who put in long hours, often at some distance from their homes and the neighborhoods where they would vote, make it hard to meet even the most basic requirements of democratic engagement, argues Congressman Steve Israel, who explains that millions of Americans simply cannot “find time to vote.”⁵² It is true that making voting easier, as Israel and others propose, could increase turnout. But it is even more true, to our view, that giving people more job security, steady hours, more workplace flexibility and, above all, more time away from work, will dramatically increase their freedom to participate in democracy. That fuller participation ensures that elections produce governments and policies that are more reflective of the popular will and more responsive to popular needs. Economic security begets greater economic security, as it allows working Americans to shape responses to questions about public investment, planning, and trade that are in the public interest—as opposed to the often misguided and invariably self-serving whims of CEOs who can hire lobbyists and fund politicians to do their bidding.

DEMOCRATIZE THE ECONOMY

Economic democracy is not a threat. Economic democracy is a promise. Economic democracy does not need to be bureaucratic or slow. It can be fast, and vibrant and brilliant. Think of democratic decision-making about how to invest the largesse of a great and prosperous nation as the ultimate crowd sourcing. Economic and social justice and sustainability in the coming digital age are not impossible dreams. The United States can be a prosperous and equitable, innovative, and inspiring country once more. It might even be “the city upon a hill” that John Winthrop imagined in the seventeenth century, and that John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan preached about in the twentieth—a model for other nations to emulate and embrace.⁵³ But if the experience of the past four decades, and especially of the most recent period of booms and busts, bubbles and bursts, meltdowns and bailouts, wage stagnation and widening inequality teaches us anything it is that there is no market-driven route to justice and sustainability. No billionaire will deliver prosperity and equity. The only way up is democracy. The people have to shape this change.

When the jarring reality of a jobless economy finally and fully hits, as it will, there is going to be an immediate demand for bold and meaningful economic change to ease immediate pain and long-term uncertainty. At this point, every economic and political charlatan in the land, every spin doctor and every paid-off pundit, will have a proposal. So, too, will many honorable yet misguided politicians who want to help but who have no clues. There will be horrible and dangerous plans. There will be those, as there always are, who promise that all will be well if we cede a little more authority to the elites who have been so in charge for so very long. There will be threats to democracy and these will be particularly horrifying—because moments of great turbulence will demand more democracy, not less. And the best way to prepare is to lock in as much democracy as we can.

Alperovitz, a professor at the University of Maryland, has worked for a number of years to get Americans to “contemplate how to rebuild a more equitable economy.” Proposals for public banking and real regulation of corporations that are “simply running away with our economic (and political) system” are simply pieces of a greater program he proposes as part of a “new economy” movement that recognizes that “deepening economic and social pain are producing the kinds of conditions from which various new forms of democratization—of ownership, wealth and institutions—are beginning to emerge. The challenge is to develop a broad strategy that not only ends the downward spiral but also gives rise to something different: steadily changing who actually owns the system, beginning at the bottom and working up.”⁵⁴

In recent years, Alperovitz has been a happy warrior on behalf of burgeoning movements for worker ownership nationwide. But, as he explains, “The current goal is not simply worker ownership, but worker ownership linked to a community-building strategy.” Alperovitz argues that

the strategy must take up the challenge of rebuilding the basic institutional substructure of the local economy in ways that are efficient, effective, stable, redistributive and ongoing. This will include:

                •  Expanded use of city, school, hospital, university and other purchasing power to help stabilize jobs in a manner that democratizes ownership and benefits for both low-income communities and small- and midsize businesses;

                •  Expanded use of public and quasi-public land trusts (both for housing and commercial use) to capture development profits for the community and to prevent gentrification;

                •  An all-out attack on the absurdly wasteful giveaways corporations extract from local governments;

                •  Coordination with labor unions and community activists to build and sustain momentum.

This is not some utopian fantasy. The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives, a decade-old national grassroots coalition, now includes more than one hundred member workplaces across the country as part of “a thriving cooperative movement” that provides consulting and technical assistance to cooperatives. Its slogan is “Farther-Faster-Together” and its express mission is to link worker cooperatives to one another and to broader social justice movements. The movement is growing. And they are focusing on communities that have been hit hard by deindustrialization and dislocation. The potential for these models is real, as is the interest in them. “When people start thinking about how they would organize their own workplaces if they had the opportunity and the tools to do it, they get so excited,” says Rebecca Kemble, the president of the federation’s board. “It frees them up from so much that beats people down, that depresses them. Suddenly, there are possibilities.”⁵⁵

There are a lot of possibilities: in new movements by teachers and parents who seek to end the overemphasis on high-stakes testing and rote learning in favor of programs for educating children to think and to act as citizens, in movements to rethink backward models of training and retraining displaced workers for jobs that will soon disappear, in smart thinking about sharing jobs and dialing back the length of the work week, in fresh proposals for full employment and serious infrastructure investment (which recognizes that the infrastructure of the future will require both concrete and fiber optics), and in a renewed understanding of the power and value of public ownership and utilities that meet human needs.

That’s a very good start—precisely the sort of thinking that the United States is going to need to address technological change, automation, and the threat of a jobless economy. At the local level, where Kemble says it is still possible to make change, activists are on the move.⁵⁶ She was elected in April 2015 to the Madison, Wisconsin, city council and is already working with Mayor Paul Soglin to invest $5 million over five years in “planning, research, grants, loans, and even forgivable loans” to get worker-owned cooperatives up and running. Based on a similar project in New York City, but significantly larger in scale and ambition, the Madison project will focus on both economic and racial justice. “Building a great local economy is not reserved for white males,” says Soglin. “We’re hoping this will be part of our economic development strategy in areas where there’s food insecurity, where there isn’t a concentration of jobs, and where significant numbers of households are below the poverty line.” Kemble and the mayor hope to shape a new understanding of twenty-first-century economics. “One of the benefits of a program like this is it gives us another opportunity to show that the economics of aggrandizing wealth in the top one percent is stupid,” says Soglin.⁵⁷

To bring projects like the one in Madison to scale, to take them national so to speak, remains the challenge. And it is a challenge where the threat of a jobless economy comes into direct conflict with the politics of citizenless democracy. This is where, no matter how beautiful it may be, the dream gets deferred. “[What] we call traditional politics no longer has much capacity to alter most of the negative trends,” explains Alperovitz. “To be clear: I think projects, organizing, demonstrations and related efforts are important. But deep down, most people sense—rightly, in my view—that unless we develop a more powerful long-term strategy, those efforts aren’t going to make much of a dent.”⁵⁸

IMAGINE DEMOCRACY

Imagine if that changed. Imagine if a justifiably frightened and angered American people were to look up from their gadgets and their unemployment forms. Imagine if they realized that the present is unsatisfactory and that the future looks terrifying. Imagine if these Americans recognized that what is terrifying is not the technology, nor even the fact that everything is going to change. What is terrifying is that they have no say about the scope and character and direction of that change. What is terrifying is that they cannot put proposals for a new economy on the table and make them the law of the land and the frameworks for our future. What is terrifying is that the essential economic issues of the time are not the essential political issues of the time. Imagine if the people recognized that they must have a say or they will have nothing at all. And imagine if they were hooped together, finally and fully, across what were once considered lines of division. Imagine if the people were ready to demand a new Constitution, a new politics, a new economy. Imagine if the people were ready, finally, to demand democracy—and all of the freedom, fairness, and human potential that extends from the moment when the profiteers and the pretenders are pushed aside and we, the people, forge our future.