Democracy Spring

"We need to get out money of politics so we can get people back in."

This Is A Working System!

"There’s this misguided myth that unions and management don’t get along. It’s a business bottom-line issue. Right-to-work is going to compromise my quality, my competitiveness. The unions are my partner. They’re almost like a screening agency. This is a working system. I have never understood this right-to-work agenda." -Bill Kennedy, Rock Road Companies

From Fate Of The Union (NY Times, June 2015)

Democracy's High Stakes

Pay 2 Play follows filmmaker John Ennis' quest to find a way out from under the "Pay 2 Play System," where politicians reward their donors with even larger sums from the public treasury — through contracts, tax cuts, and deregulation.  Along the way, he journeys through high drama on the Ohio campaign trail, uncovers the secret history of the game Monopoly, and explores the underworld of Los Angeles street-art on a humorous odyssey that reveals how much of a difference one person can make. Pay 2 Play is the layman’s guidebook to taking back our democracy.

This Game Is Rigged

There's Just Us

"The current criminal justice system is shaped by economic bias — crimes unique to the wealthy are either ignored or treated lightly, while the so-called common crimes of the poor lead to arrest, charges, conviction, and imprisonment. The three propositions that support this statement are that (1) society fails to protect people from crimes they fear (homicide, burglary, assault) by refusing to alleviate the poverty that breeds them; (2) the criminal justice system fails to protect people from the most serious dangers by failing to define as crimes the dangerous acts of those who are well off (white collar crime, pollution, occupational hazards) and to prosecute accordingly; and (3) by virtue of these and other failures, the criminal justice system succeeds in creating the image that crime is almost exclusively the work of the poor, an image that serves the interests of the powerful. By focusing on individual criminals who are poor, the system diverts attention from the injustices of social and economic institutions. The failure to reduce crime reinforces this situation by concentrating fear and hostility on the poor. At the base of unequal justice is the unequal distribution of wealth and income. A criminal justice system cannot hold individuals guilty of the injustice of breaking the law if the law itself supports and defends an unjust social order. To counteract this failure, steps must be taken toward domestic disarmament; criminalization of white-collar crimes; creation of a correctional system that promotes human dignity and gives ex-offenders a real opportunity to go straight; a more reasonable exercise of power by police officers, prosecutors, and judges; and equal access to high-quality legal expertise for all individuals accused of crime."

From The Rich Get Richer And The Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class And Criminal Justice, 1979

Plutodemocracy

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."

"What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of "populistic" democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it."

"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts... We believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."

Excerpts from Testing Theories Of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, And Average Citizens, April 2014