Reforms Needed to save our Federal Republic

In an article titled: Post-Roger Stone: Ten ideas for repairing Trump’s justice system By Jennifer Rubin, She writes:

“President Trump granting clemency to his crony Roger Stone, who served as the go-between for the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, on practically the eve of Stone’s incarceration for multiple crimes attendant to his coverup on behalf of the president, is grotesquely corrupt but unsurprising.”

She recounts the latest Cassus Belli of Trump's perfidy

She notes that “Stone virtually confessed to a quid pro quo,” (To me he was boasting), telling Howard Fineman,

“He [Trump] knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.”

I don't think anyone with integrity doesn't feel that this wasn't a high crime and a misdemeanor.Rubin writes:

“Silence for clemency. A separate system of justice for the president’s henchmen. This is the very definition of corruption.”

Former Candidate Romney put it baldly in a tweet:

"Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president." Link to Tweet

She reports:

“By this action, President Trump abused the powers of his office in an apparent effort to reward Roger Stone for his refusal to cooperate with investigators examining the President’s own conduct,”

She also reports how House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) said in a written statement released Friday:

“No other president has exercised the clemency power for such a patently personal and self-serving purpose.”

Actually, her hero George Herbert Walker Bush, exercised his clemency and pardon powers in 1992 for just such a patently corrupt and self serving cause when he pardoned the perps in the Iran Contra scandal. But what counts with Republicans is what they are doing now, so I can forgive past crimes as long as folks have seen the light. This post is about her suggestions for fixing the problems. I'm endeavering to analyze the problem by critiquing her suggestions. Most of them are obvious or things that were taken out of the law due to misuse or to protect the wrong people. Any reforms made should be based on firm Constitutional Grounds. And if that is not adequate, it might take a Constitutional Amendment.

Related Posts

Iran Contra and Bill Barr

Trump Got His Chaika

Impeachment As Regulation

Clarify Impeachment

Nancy Pelosi was asked about President Trump's plan to commute Roger Stone's sentance and replied that she is looking into legislation that would forbid the President using his pardon power that way.  This is exactly the scenario I forsaw 2 years + ago.  

Simplistic legislation would probably fail a constitutional test. But there is a way to proceed that might succeed. There are two basis for this.

The house has "Sole Power of Impeachment"

That means not only does the house have the power to impeach executive & Judiciary members, but it has the power to write the rules of impeachment.  That means they can define the officers and offices involved, procedures, entry points and when and how a case should go to the Senate for trial.

Except In Cases of Impeachment

As I noted before, the President:

“shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."

Thus the power to pardon is limited by impeachment.  So the House should be able to stop the President using his pardon power? But how.

Simply forbidding him won't work. He is not impeached at the moment because the case went to the Senate and they acquitted him.  SCOTUS would laugh such a law out the door.

Define the rules of impeachment

What congress needs to do is the opposite of what they have done in the past. The house needs to make impeachment part of its regular order, defining what can be impeached and setting up administrative bodies combining the powers of special prosecutors and Inspector Generals to police those infractions.

Open Impeachment

Essentially the house needs to have an open impeachment inquiry run by an inspector general under the supervision of a house Impeachment committee and define the terms under which individuals are part of an impeachment inquiry into the President and he cannot pardon them, or they are under the panels protection until it goes to trial in the Senate. It would function like a grand jury except legal products would become parts of censure resolutions & legislation.

Nancy can use Roberts 4 guidelines as input into defining impeachment legislation.

Related Posts

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2018/12/why-congress-must-impeach-trump.html?m=1

Scrutiny and the Courts

Thousands of U.S. judges who broke laws or oaths remained on the bench

In a research article published by Reuters: (https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-judges-misconduct/) They report on how too many judges at state and local level have been given immunity, impunity and passes to commit crimes themselves. Worse their victims have found it nearly impossible to get compensation or accountability when they've been clearly harmed by the behavior of the judges. The article sums itself as follows:

Reuters Report

Reform Emergency Response to get Community Policing & Communities

Reform Emergency Response.

I've been listening to people talk about reforming the police and they all have good ideas. Some want to simply defund the police – even eliminate them – One twitter friend says [same as me].

"We need REAL police reform:

• no outta town cops
• no guns unless SWAT
• no shooting suspects in the back
• no military assault gear
• no qualified immunity"

Constituting a National Health Service

Governor Cuomo is calling for the reorganizing of our disjointed and dysfunctional health service into a National Health System.

This would necessarily include a National Health Service, public private partnerships, and a mix of reserve elements and active elements. A lot of people, including me, have seen the need for this for a long time, and so it is about time we begin taking the concept seriously.

Training and Disciplining "according to the discipline prescribed by Congress"

A national system has to be organized under either the current National Guard or in parallel to it. The easiest way would be to add a Reserve Health Guard Militia to the National Guard Schema. The existing Uniform Health Service would be expanded. And Reserve Health Guard Officers trained using existing medical schools in country, of Citizens, in return for service according to uniform standards. These officers would then be used for emergencies, shortages, to serve the Naval and Land forces, and in deprived locations where market based healthcare fails. Once they had completed a term of active service they would remain either reserve officers or Auxilliary Reserve officers but be free to go into private practice.

Public Private Relationships

Private doctors and healthcare companies would fall under the Reserve Health Service as Private Reserve Auxilliary "militia" members. Their entire companies could be called into service during emergencies. As a condition of their operating license, each company, institution, installation and provider would have to sign a contract with the National and State HealthCare Reserve and agree to meet readiness demands, in return for Federal compensation at a reasonable price when they are called into service or voluntarily serve emergency medical needs. They would have to meet federal and state standards.

Emergency Reserve Capabilities

Just in time supply would be supplemented by Emergency reserve capabilities. The scenario is that factories producing consumer coulds would have standbye protocols and equipment for rapid retooling to produce vital goods. Active duty Public Health Medical Logistics and forecasting Professionals would be able to create forcasts and requisition reserve supplies to meet those needs rapidly when called on. Congress should reconstitute the Pandemic Response institutions necessary for this.

Healthcare is National Security

The plans can be put into place and prepared in advance. Drills can be done. Food, Medicine, Health Care is as much a Security issue as weaponry and force of arms. Wars have been lost because armies were too sick to fight. Cuomo's recommendations are overdue. Universal healthcare does not mean we have to nationalize industry. It does mean that industry needs to remember they are part of a country and have duties as well as privileges. It does mean that profiteering and privateering, for private separate advantage, have no legitimate place in healthcare.

Chris Holte

Related Posts

Why We Need a National Health Service

National Health Service as Part of the National Militia System 2017

National Emergency Response Service and the Militia

Election Judges! Election Courts!

Judging Elections

Elections are, in essence, a judicial process where common citizens acting as voters, judge the fitness of candidates and elected officers to serve them. They need the power to:

1. Scrutinize candidates, officers and their promises
2. Determine Fitness for Office
3. Hold officials accountable for performance.
4. Enforce transparency

Elections are where voters judge who is fit to lead them.

These are judicial functions, but also personnel decisions. Election courts don't decide whether or not a person is guilty of crimes, but whether they are fit for the office the people are electing him or her to.

Best Practices for Elections

Because elections are a judicial process they should be run with best practices that embody the best and most appropriate judicial principles.

Election Courts

The role of the election court is to ensure that the hiring authority, we the people, oversee the appointing of officers, Governors, Presidents, legislators. The people deserve to know what they are getting into.

Election courts have two missions;

Vetting, Shepherding elections and scrutinizing candidates

Scrutinizing Elected Officials at end of Term

Election Stakeholders

There are five sets of Stakeholders in an election.

1. Voters are first.
2. Parties, Factions, Movements and Activists.
3. The Candidates, their factions and associations.
4. Reporters and Investigators.
5. Election Officials

All these stakeholders need to be represented in the process, which is why elections need to be run as if a court.

A judicial process requires judicial structures

The required scrutiny, vetting and accountability, requires the election be run as a court would be run. A proper election court must involve all the stakeholders who have an interest in the outcome of that election. It is up to the hiring authority, thru elections to judge candidates and officers on their qualifications and accomplishment. To do that requires that the court include representation of the candidates, their factions and parties, and that they are able to argue their case. The Beauty of using election courts is that the judge and juries involved can verify and validate the claims made by the candidates and their factions.

Election Judging Requires they behave like judges

We we need better election judging because currently "election judge" is often a misnomer. They need to behave like judges. That happens when they are prohibited from holding other office for the term of their office and beyond at least one term. It also happens when the local factions and candidates have a right to representation in the processes and events of the election. Representation of candidates in the court should be mandatory. The representatives should have a say in selecting the review panels that question candidates. The judge function should be limited and subject to agreement from stakeholders except on matters of law. Election Judges, through the the processes of the election court and the actual election, should have the power to enforce that these functions are done according to law but not to dictate outcomes or excert undue influence.

Election judges would have a prescribed, limited role to:

Oversee the scrutiny of candidates and officers.

Shepherd the process and ensure that the election is conducted fairly.

Select investigators and reporters to investigate and report on proceedings.

Select election panels to conduct scrutiny and debate, with input from the interested parties in the election.

Judge according to law and refer legal violations to an ordinary court.

Jury Panels Scrutiny

Every Candidate for a position of Trust, for elective or appointive office, should be vetted through an election court jury panel that includes the voters who stand to elect him or her. During Primaries the panels should be registered party members. During the general election, the pool of all registered voters. The purpose of these panels is to question candidates and investigators so that voters can judge the fitness for office of candidates and elected officers. The ultimate jury is the voters. The jury structures would serve the purposes of groups like the League of Women Voters or similar. They manage and develop information for scrutiny, vetting, debates. The panels would also rule on decisions made by election judges that are disagreed with by principles in the election (Candidates, factions, parties and their representatives).

Investigators and Reporters

The press is named and protected in the USA constitution for a reason. The reason is that elections require that ordinary people, who don't have time to be involved in elections full time, are kept informed. For that reason investigators and reporters need a license to investigate and report on candidates for office, and of elected officials seeking reelection and of the government offices they hold. This is a critical thing and needs to be resourced and funded by the public. The press should have a right to participate in elections in this role. They should be part of the election courts, questioning candidates and presenting information to voters.

Entry Points to Elections

When an election is scheduled, an election judge should stand up an election court for each phase of the election. Candidates should have to sign an agreement that their background be checked and scrutinized. The court can decide how much of the details of that information can be kept confidential, but the public should be informed of any past criminality or relevent scandal through the election jury panel.

Step One: Confidential Scrutiny

As an entry point for running for office each Candidate for office should agree to be investigated and scrutinized then and at the end of their term should they win the election. Candidates for reelection should have the performance of their previous term investigated, scrutinized and reviewed by the "Election Jury" panel under guidance of representation and testimony of investigators. If they want to run for reelection this should be mandatory. If they are stepping down, it should be done anyway.

We have a duty to look into candidate finances, associations, criminal and civil history, just as if they were applying for a clearance for a public trust job. Because they are. They should also agree to end of term scrutiny.

Step Two: Performance Review and report

This professional confidential review, should be done by a panel led by Election judge, with testimony by investigators and local reporters, some brought in by the Election judge, some by the interested Parties, including the candidate.

Those completing a term should have their performance reviewed and that review, with minority opinions represented entered into the public record after review by the panel. They work for "We the People."

Transparent Process

Interested parties and local press should have the right to petition to be part of this panel as witnesses and observers. They should be sworn to confidentiality for the duration of the hearings. Violating that oath should be cause for ejection and bar from further participation for a term. But once the work is done, it should be public record.

Inquisitory Powers

The Panel should have the power to subpoena, compel testimony, look at records, examine and cross examine investigators, witnesses, and claims based on evidence.

All this would be under oath. Perjury would be referred to an ordinary court.

Report Product

The product of this panel would be a report, which would be required to be a factual document allowing minority and majority opinions based on facts alone. The subject would be limited to fitness for office and background.

Disagreements on content would be referred to a jury of ordinary citizens using the voir dire process. Once all the panel, or jury, agree on the factual content of the report, it can be published and used in the election. Parts not agreed on in opinion, if they are factual, go to a minority report.

End of Term Performance Reviews

Election courts would be to use the same process of using experts and investigators for a review panel would look at elected officers at the end of their term, whether they run for reelection or not.

Judicial Powers

Election Courts should have subpoena and investigatory powers, and contempt powers, but no prosecutorial powers. They should have referral powers when a criminal action is discovered. The power to subpoena, take testimony, seek and seize documents and the power to put people under oath and refer them for perjury powers if they commit perjury, should be the limit of their power. In scrutinizing candidates and officers, they should have the power to examine financial, criminal, and background records. The agreement to submit this should be a condition of seeking office.

Election managers should be an executive position supervised by election judges but separate from them.

Judicial Election Judges

Forbidden to run for office for the term of their Judgeship + 1 election.

Oversee elections as judges, but have limited powers.

Must use Election panels to moderate different phases of the election.

Must use processes similar to a trial for the scrutiny power.

Investigatory Vetting Scrutiny process

Elections should employ reporters and investigators and empower them to dig into finances, backgrounds and qualifications in a manner nearly identical with clearance investigations. Indeed clearance investigations should use these courts.

Professional Investigators and Journalists should be empowered to look into all relevant matters of candidates and officers reaching term. Their results should be presented to the court during the preliminary sessions and after validation in open session. When in Open Session, that information must be public as well as accurate. Preliminary results should be verified and validated before being presented in Open Session. And during preliminary Session, and open session, the parties involved should have representation and be able to cross examine witnesses.

When there is a dispute between the parties, election juries should moderate those disputes. Selected on Jury trial principles but allowed to make some decisions on a majority vote. But not allowed to go beyond investigations and fact checking except to make referrals to a criminal court if illegal behavior discovered.

Preliminary Sessions

When the Candidate or officer is to be scrutinized, a panel should be assembled using a voire dire style process, of selecting ordinary citizens for the panel with 1/3 approved by the Candidate, 1/3 by an "Inquisitor" or by opposition candidate representative, whose job is to inquire as to the person under investigation, and 1/3 by the Judge. The panels should also include local press. Investigators gather documents, interview and record results and bring them back to the court. The information then is validated as much as possible and put into a preliminary report.

Preliminary Review

Once the Preliminary Report is assembled the Judge, inquisitor and representative review the preliminary report. Anything challenged gets investigated further. At some point the Judge shall present the Preliminary Review to the Jury. The Jury then shall work with the Judge, journalists, inquisitor and representation to validate the report. The Jury shall ask questions at this stage.

Open Session

The Final Fitness report shall be produced and reviewed in open session. Recording majority and minority views on the subjects reviewed, and the facts of the subject. This then becomes a record to go into election reporting, debates and election process

Election debates

Once the background checks and scrutiny are complete. The panels can then conduct debates to get candidates on the record as to proposed policies, goals, etc... These debates and sessions should also be public. and the reporters should be enabled to report on and summarize the positions.

Free Press

The Press, has a formal role in this process and may be subdivided up into jobs that are more than mere stenographers and archivists, but may involve reporters and investigators who's training overlaps that of police detectives. This process would ensure that the free press can do its actual job.

Rationale

A free press is necessary to the health of our society because it has a role in the recording, vetting and accounting of what the government does. Reducing reporting to a clerical role destroys its power to check officials. In elective courts journalists would be required to do sensitive investigations, not release sensitive information until the proper time.

Elective Bar

Journalists, investigators, jurors, Judges, all officers of the Election court should be sworn in as officers of the court. Their words should be considered under oath and penalty of perjury.

Oversight including Impeachment

Impeachment Process is Oversight Process

I started this Post around June. I was listening to Representative Jerry Nadler, who heads the Judiciary Committee that would become an impeachment inquiry, and he was talking about "time constraints" and the difficulty of impeaching the President. It made me think, it really is difficult to impeach anyone. And that degrades the power of impeachment and attenuates its potential effectiveness. But:

Is that a real problem or an example of bad process? In this era of gigantic government, where too much power is already delegated to the executive, aren't these matters of "bad constitution" rather than things we can't address? If so then they reflect antiquated process and that should be dealt with. In this post I include a few suggestions on how to modernize that process without a new constitutional amendment.

What are the benefits if the House impeaches anyway?

What Would Impeachment Accomplish Now?

The benefits of the House impeaching the President anyway are:

1. Doing so will Document Trump's crimes.
2. This will provide input evidence for prosecutions once he's out of office.
3. Doing this will hammer home to the general public the depth of Trump's perfidy.
4. This will rebuke and may even shame the shameless Republicans in the House and Senate.
5. This may help us defeat him electorally.

For this reason, impeachment articles are worth doing, even with the knowledge that they'll get to the Senate and be ignored or tabled. It is my belief that each Article should focus on one set of infractions, document the criminality and abuse of power and why they are reason for impeachment. The reason for separate articles is that they should result in separate prosecutions, changes in law and impeachment/prosecution of co-conspirators. I personally like the "Drip Drip of investigations" idea. There are at least 8 or 9 articles needed, by my count, and each of them embraces several to hundreds of counts. For more on this see:

Impeachment Articles

Meanwhile this post addresses ideas for improving our antiquated process:

Election Judges should be Judicial Officials

The key to improving democratic systems world wide is the realization that elections are such a vital function in any democracy with parliamentary, republican and democratic features; that the following republican principles need to be applied:

Separation of Powers

Fair Judicial process requires separate Judge, Jury and executive functions

These functions are needed to ensure fairness

Neutral Judges

Elections require a neutral election judge.

Electing Partisan hacks by misapplying the principle of majority rule fails with judges.

Judges must be non-partisan, neutral, and ensure the process is administered justly.

Therefore, Judges should be appointed for long terms (life works),

Judges should be barred from outside income except teaching, and lectures to non-partisan groups

And Election Judges should be Judges, barred from running for partisan office.

Election Judges should have Juries!

Jury like structures should be responsible for overseeing the election along with the Judge and representatives of the election factions.

Jury like panel structures are necessary to vett candidates and elected officers.

Elected Officers should be subject to performance reviews at the end of term!

Investigators should be empowered and required to compel document discovery, testimony and perform accounting reviews of the officers performance.

The Sessions should be carried live unless a matter is determined sensitive and out of scope.

That material should then be provided to a review panel, reporters and made available to voters.

Separate panels should moderate forums, debates and review sessions of candidates.

Imagine if candidate promises were under oath? Do you think they'd break them so easy?

Discussion

If there is one thing that current events show is that there is severe risk in vesting control over justice in the Political Executive. Donald Trump is not the first executive to abuse his powers with the judiciary. On a process level no person should ever have judicial, executive or legislative powers over their own case. It is appropriate that officials have "informal" adjudication powers, but not when it is a case that concerns themselves. It is never appropriate that formal adjudication should ever effectively involve interested parties except as defendants or plaintiffs. Some of these principles were written into law, though we are seeing the laws involved are inadequate.

Juries ARE Democracy

Judges are an elite role. The reason US elections require juries, is that without them, judges are tempted to make themselves nobility, behave in a self interested fashion. Juries are there to ensure non-partisan, justice. They have the power to resist venal, partisan or corrupt judges.

Judicial judges aren't always non-partisan or just. They can apply the law using sophistry or worse, if they are getting outside income or are part of a faction by wealth or interest. When that happens Justice remains the subject but the product is injustice. Juries are genuine democracy. Ordinary people are drafted to step up and speak for the people of the community. They can check such judges.

Even Worse with Election Judges

On those principles, it is absurdly bad process, not to mention corrupt, that election judges should ever be the election judge while they are in the running for office. It is like the town Sheriff being also the town judge and being also the only defense lawyer. It is a travesty of justice, unjust, for election officials to represent a political party as election judge, run for office while working as election judge, or seeking any elected post other than election judge while or after serving as election judge in the same jurisdiction. This is such an obvious bit of corruption that the remedy should have been in law long ago.

And like with jury trials, all the factions in the election should have a say in picking the members of the Election Jury.

But there is an even Deeper Level

In elections, we rely on investigative reporters and the partisan system to vett candidates. This rarely works as intended. Candidates don't always tell the truth. Candidates can use money and influence to hide information from the electorate, or to push out false information that blocks people from voting for their opponents. When any one party has a monopoly over the election, the temptation to cheat is going to be there. Changing the officers doesn't change the temptations. Making elections a Judicial function opens elections to checks and balances that a purely bureaucratic or partisan process can't supply.

Better Vetting

The usual remedies for that involve transparency, competition, open access to both the ruling party and the loyal opposition as vehicles for getting out information. During elections debates, town halls, etc... allow some proper vetting. But they don't always work. With a formal process both parties have a voice, a judge is expected to enforce "truth and nothing but the truth" and a Jury, made up of neutral people from all factions, can keep an eye on reporters, activists, Judge and other officials!

Election Judging requires Judge, Jury, prosecutor and defense

When I discovered the ancient principles of Euthenia and Dokimasia (vetting and scrutiny) were used by the Athenians, I saw they were using a judicial process. The exact methods they used, don't apply in our day. But the principles do. We need two structures to protect our system. It turns out that we need precisely a judicial process to manage elections.

• End of Term Accounting
• Election Vetting

End of Term Accounting Scrutiny

Every Elected Officer should face an end of term accounting Scrutiny. If a private person works for a private company, the owners do a performance review, periodically. We the people should do an end of term accounting review of every officer. This should be mandatory, not voluntary, and run in a quasi Judicial manner. A Kind of Jury should be assembled, more like a Grand Jury than a trial Jury. Professional investigators, preferably a mix of police type investigators and journalists should have the right to pour through their records under the supervision of an election judge, who is more a Judge than simply running an election. The results would get presented to a panel selected from the jury pool. Representatives of the person would defend or direct prosecution of the information. All would be sworn to secrecy, but the result of the investigation would be a public report of the relevant facts, not an indictment. The panel would be able to take testimony under oath and if it were found that the people testifying lied they could be referred to a grand jury. The results would be available to the public. The officer would be judged based on his/her job description, promises made and promises kept.

Election Vetting Scrutiny

Similar panels would be convened for elections. Again the panels would have ordinary citizens, journalists and investigators, led by a Judge and representatives of the candidates. Accounting Vetting material would be available to them. This time they would manage debates, ask questions, get candidates on the record, and oversee the election. The panel in this case would have the duty to make sure voters are informed, are enabled to vote and that their votes are cast and counted. They would have a duty to be as neutral and factual as possible.

Power of the People

Scrutiny is important. Too many people think their power in their office is only tangentally derived from the people who elect them. Making Elections governed by people forced to act like they are on a jury would fulfil the promise of why we call election official "election judges."

Empowering and Resourcing the Press

The interface between elections and the people should be a press, with cameras (including video), recordings and on hand listening and participating in the vetting and scrutiny. Establishing a process such as that should provide jobs for reporters and ensure that local government has a free press.

Improving Scrutiny - Lessons from Trump and Kavanaugh Part I

Without Scrutiny Any System Fails

The Athenians were driven to put the vetting job into jury functions or ruling councils by experiences with demagogues or military rule. The difficulty of controlling officers was such that Athenian born philosophers came to be somewhat cynical about the prospects for survival of Democracy. But the lesson of history, including recent history, is that without formal vetting and accounting, monarchy, dictatorship, oligarchy and plutocracy all degenerate into tyranny, kakacracy (rule by the worst) and kleptocracy (rule by thieves); and resulting violence, inequity, & misery. There really is no good alternative to creating a system of scrutiny that has integrity.

Vital to our Survival as a Nation and a World are:

Separation of Powers

Scrutiny involving:

1. Free Press
2. Legislative Oversight
3. Executive Oversight
4. Judicial Oversight/Jury Forms
5. Scientific Scrutiny
6. Establishing Measures
7. Holding officers to account by those measures

National Emergency Response Service and the Militia

National Health Service

The best way to manage our health care rationally, and to provide for good healthcare for everything, is to put at least a component of it under a National Service Framework. The education, training and minimum provisioning "arming" of healthcare providers all should be organized at a National level and also carried out in each State.

Putting the "d" into the Democratic Party

Implementing Electronic Democracy

Fixing our Democratic Party Is how to strengthen the Party

Tom Hartmann made the statement a few years ago during one of his programs about the need to:

"weaken the parties and strengthen the people.*"

On the contrary we need to strengthen our political party system in order to empower the people.

The Democratic Party was created out of Democratic Societies or Clubs that represented the interest of common people against the then centralizing interests of the Federalists who created the Constitution we operate under, partly with an interest in weakening the power of common people. This battle became a tug of war between party and leadership interests, the country's interest and that of party or leadership. To bring all this together requires structural form. The way the party is constituted and operates is as important as who is involved. The current Key Issue Gaps in both our party and our country are:

1. Selection and Vetting Process for Candidates
2. Vetting, Review and Accounting Process for Officers
3. The way we identify and Track Issues
4. Our Weakened Press and Speech capabilities.
5. Our weakened deliberative Process.

Little "d" in the Democratic Party

All these issues are tied to one another. And all of them can be addressed with threshold kludge fixes and by setting an objective to make more permanent fixes to our charter and constitute a more just society that addresses those issues. Ultimately they need to be addressed permanently with a Second Bill of Rights, but as a Democratic Party, we can institute many of these changes as a party. Thomas Jefferson did this when he constituted the Democratic party in the first place.

We Democrats win when we;

1. fight to make our party inclusive and that our leaders represent us.
2. Organize so that people are involved in every election top to bottom.
3. Organize electronic democracy and provide social & official communication between candidates, representatives & general members.
4. Use electronic democracy as an informal tool in decision making.
5. Use the Chapter, Club and member organization system to provide diverse yet inclusive leadership backup and local participation.
6. Make people feel this is "our Democratic Party" instead of seeing it as some tool of corporate interests.
7. Stop talking about "those Democrats" and start using we and us.
8. Articulate our ideas, concepts, democratic and non-violent strategies and legislative principles.
9. Recruit people of all faiths and beliefs.

What we need to do is to:

strengthen the Democratic Party and its democratic attributes so that the people will be strengthened

Parties like the Democratic party exists in order to serve their members and to give us the power to be stronger together, and has so since the beginning of the country. Since the party is a big tent and contains all sorts of interests, from ones that are powerful with or without a party, to others who are only powerful when they work with others. The purpose of letting the party have clubs and other semi permanent sub groups is to channel all that information and energy to running the country sanely.

Ultimately we would have a system where the Republicans were run similarly and the country as a whole run justly as a result.

The Democratic Party as a Networked Utility

The Democratic party is US. And our leaders are our standard bearers, not "them", or they need to be replaced. We have to have officers to run the party and those officers should probably be prohibited from also being candidates or running for election. This would be a major change, but it would deconflict the primary process and prevent the kind of games that lead the personal ambitions of politicians to over-rule the function and health of the party. The Democratic party has to be run as a democratic utility.

Centralized Issue Tracking and Bottom up Information Flow

The purpose of organizing the IT centrally is to keep well ordered control over how those groups debate and work together. They need to be free to work out their differences. But there need to be rules to minimize trolling and oppressive bullying.

We are going to have internal struggles, and one of the purposes of an institution like the Democratic Party is to moderate and officiate/adjudicate these internal struggles through the candidate selection system and primaries. There has to be vigorous debate to achieve true unity and consensus. Fake unity is when 51% permanently decides or minorities stop debate. Real unity is achieved through relentless deliberation and parliamentarian participation.

Better Primary process

The Primary process should be about identifying, vetting, training and fostering candidates for public office.

As a party we should train everyone in civics and legal issues, broadcast pertinent information, record issues, and moderate the debates between candidates.

Primary Vetting

Anyone should be able to throw their hat in the ring for public office. But when they do so as Democrats we should require them to sign a contract with the People to:

• Testify on their background and fitness for office, preferably under oath.
• Provide documentation of their fitness, criminal and civil record for review by a review panel
• A review panel should have the power to issue a report on their fitness an qualifications. No more.
• The Review panel should also moderate debates and get candidates to commit to plank and campaign promises, on the record.

Primaries

Once all the candidates are done debating etc... the Party should provide a report & summary of the debates, with objective information, and leaving out the personal feelings of the reporters.... to the people in the party who will vote on them. Then the voters can make informed decisions about who to select to be a candidate for elected office. This can be replicated at State and National level. Candidates for State Office should be vetted by representatives from around the State. Local Candidates locally.

Presidential Campaigns

Presidential candidates By representatives from around the country. Debates should be held in each subdivision that the candidate represents. The process should be longer the larger the representation. My opinion is we should elect Presidential candidates on a Single Primary Day after they've debated around the country. But the exact rules should be set by the Democratic party at an annual convention. There is value to making them visit each State. There should be a debate in each State.

Performance Accounting

At the end of each elected or appointed term of office, there should be an accounting audit. First auditors should examine the economic behavior of the Officer for appropriateness and financial rectitude and create a report. Next a panel should examine the record of the candidate against his campaign promises and interactions with lobbyists and special interests. That panel would also look at the audit report. If the officer wants to run for new or re-elected office, that panel report should be a public record going into the vetting for the next election. The panel should also have the ability to refer such reports to prosecutors.

Internal Officers And Clubs

Each sub-division of government in the United States should have a formal subdivision of the Democratic Party with everyone living in that subdivision having a right to participate. [this is pretty much already the case] Officers should be elective and serve a term that ends with an election and a Party Convention. The Party conventions should be televised and offer virtual participation. Party Officials should be prohibited from being elected officials. In addition to these the Democratic party should have Democratic Clubs to represent all the various subgroups of our party: women, liberals, conservatives, youth, minorities etc... These should also have elected officers, but membership should be fluid. Elected Club Officers should have the power to moderate discussions. The Democratic party membership should be open to all declared Democrats. The rules should be standard and National clubs encouraged to have chapters and recursive subchapters. The Clubs would provide news, two way communications and have access to a tool for tracking issues, debates, policy and legislative proposals. Most of this should be transparent to everyone. Candidates could create campaign Clubs with even more fluid rules. The purpose of this is to promote debate and two way communications. Information should be pushed up to national officers on national issues.

Reconstituting a Free Press

Unfortunately the Press is being oppressed or disappearing in much of the Country. The Democratic party should have a built in Press Feature. Members of the Press should have some rights and responsibilities. There should be a volunteer press, and a certified press. The Press should be subject to some standards of objective reporting and these should be determined by the members of the Press itself. The Press would be a special Democratic Club. They'd have a responsibility to record & report on:

• All meetings, activities, legislation and policies of the Government in their Area of Jurisdiction
• Any legal or social matter of their choosing, of interest to the general public.
• All Democratic Party deliberations should be reported on and/or broadcast.

The Certified Press should be cleared to listen in on "private matters" of the Government as background information. Members of the Press should have the ability to Join the Press freely. Certification should be granted by the Press Club. They should be sworn to embargo time sensitive information, and to keep confidences on sources and confidential information, and follow basic Press Ethical rules created by the club. The punishment for breaking such confidence would be loss of certification initiated by the parties who agreed to share confidence with them. Their colleagues would have the power to restore certification via panel. But mainly both Certified and Volunteer press would be given a broadcast medium for Stories. Maybe through a deal with groups like the AP. Maybe the Dem Party having it's own network.

A Free Press is absolutely necessary to investigate matters such as corruption. Vetting and Accounting panels would have certified Press members monitoring them. The Party would be required to let certified Press sit in on meetings. Eventually the formal government would use similar procedures. WE should be broadcasting Government proceedings as a rule and private meetings should be an exception for time sensitive matters.

Improved Deliberative Process

The purpose of all this is to bring an improvement to our deliberative process. Members of the party should have the power to influence the plank that candidates run on and enforce that they represent members rather than special interests, often outside the party. Improved deliberative process is also served by setting up the Club and Party System with media built in.

Kludges

If the party doesn't do this, we can build some of this informally. We already have democratic groups on facebook and similar. The risk is that Facebook is a private for profit organization that is not exactly democratic. That is why we need to build the infrastructure I'm talking about.

Further Reading

Related Posts

Note, this post draws on previous posts, but also refers to them. All these were inspired by wanting to throw a shoe at Thom Hartmann*

Vetting and Accounting for Democratic Candidates And Officers

Implementing Democratic Subsidiarity

Lessons from Organizing for America

What Electronic Democracy Means

A More Effective Democratic Infrastructure

Definitions Related to Democratic Republicanism

Principles of Federalism

"Demos" in the Federalist Papers

Lakoff & building a Party that can be all it can be

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-more-effective-democratic.html

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2016/06/it-takes-party-it-takes-movement.html

Critical

The Trouble with Bernie Sanders

If the DNC (tries to) Rig the Primaries they risk the election

*Note, they didn't rig the primaries, but that was a concern. This is here because of Project Ivy

Our Democratic Movement is not a Totalitarian Movement

The Paranoid Left's insane demonology

Wonky

Community Policing and Democratic Subsidiarity

Organizing Local Democracy around the Post Office

Appendix note:

I had reruns of Thom Hartmann I was listening to a couple of years ago. He started talking about the need to "weaken the parties and strengthen the people.*" My immediate reaction was that I emphatically believe that is demented! (fortunately he later started talking about the need to participate in the party). As long as we see "the Democrats" as "them", we'll keep losing. The Democratic party is US. And our leaders are our standard bearers, not "them", or they need to be replaced. I started to draft a series of articles then as I thought about how you go about strengthening a party and putting the little "d" into the Democratic party, effectively. I wrote that series of posts. But the more I read and wrote, the clearer I got on what was needed. But it all comes back to the same vision. I also lost interest in Thom's show. I still feel so close to him in some ways, but I think he's off track on others. I learned a lot from him. But it was time to move on.

* I just wanted to throw a shoe at the TV. But I would have broken it, so I just fired up my blogger instead. About half the list above were inspired by that shoe.

A More Effective Democratic Infrastructure

Democratic Clubs And Organizing For America

The Democratic Party has One mission and that is representing the people in our country who form our coalition and of serving them. As such the party has two different roles in moderating our selection and election of officers to represent and serve us. The first role is to ensure that the people in our party select the best possible candidates for office and the second one is to ensure that as many of those candidates as possible get elected. This first role is served in our primary system specifically. The second is served in the general elections that follow candidate selection. In the first phase the party has to provide neutral judges and processes to ensure that candidates are vetted and fit for office.

What Electronic Democracy Means

Local Democracy Necessary for Democratic Republics

Key principles:

For our system to be more democratic we need 5 mandatory things at all levels of public deliberation:

1. Trouble Reporting and tracking of issues, complaints and commentary with follow up at periodic milestones
2. Officer vetting Before Selection/Election
3. Accounting for Performance at End of Term
4. Top down, bottom up systematic deliberation
5. Appropriate power with necessary resources in each part of Government

This post focuses on the electronic portions of these ideas.

Vetting and Accounting for Candidates and Officers

Improving Scrutiny of Government Officers

To modernize the Democratic party and counter the effective but diabolical marketing agitation-propaganda psy-ops of the Mercers, Bannons and their Ilk, we need to use electronic democracy to ensure that people have a direct channel to information, to working together and to communicating with elected officials and party leaders. We need to institute the lessons from OFA (see Post on Lessons from Organizing for America).

This will have the benefits of:

Countering targeted but deceptive moral messaging.

Ensuring that we get the best possible candidates for our efforts

Ensuring genuine debate and deliberation in choosing candidates, platforms and laws.

Countering deceptive advertising and big money.

Promoting local democracy and thus strengthening the democratic features of our system

Extreme Vetting of potential officers

Key to making any kind of government, and especially a Democratic republic, more functional and responsive to the people (representative) is to put effective controls over officers. That requires better scrutiny of candidate officers and accounting for their behavior at the end of their term. Any control mechanisms can be subverted, so the controls have to be designed well from the start and applied systematically and using the most virtuous people available to execute them.

Election Judges need Juries

In our society that means using Jury like structures to judge the deliberations. We already use election judges to manage elections. However, a just judicial system employs juries to ensure that decisions are made objectively, on the facts, and in the case of elections represents a broad spectrum of the population. Using election judges with the power to supervise the process but not boss, requires juries. The juries need to be run under well defined democratic deliberation procedures with the powers needed to get testimony & debates under oath and examine records. They should have the power to make recommendations, refer for prosecution and put out reports.

We need such juries involved because neither legislatures, Judges or Executives should be trusted to police themselves, even if they can, on principle. Judges are expected to be less political than legislators and executives, juries can be representative of a spectrum of points of view. They need formal oversight and that would be the purpose of election judges. Judges know how to both unobtrusive as possible but also ensure the panels follow best process. Eventually we can do this for the country as a whole yet. But for now we could make this part of the Democratic Party process.

Professional Investigators would drive the process. Election Juries would moderate debates, question candidates and review accounting data based on professional expertise.

Vetting and Accounting

The controls I'm talking about start with democratic features that worked well for hundreds of years in Athens. The greek terms for them are Dokimasia and Euthenia. There is a lot of talk about "extreme vetting", mostly in the context of preventing immigration. And politics has all been about "accountability" as a slogan for years. But the Greeks effectively implemented these concepts thousands of years ago. We can do the same thing, updating them for the Present.

Dokimasia δοκιμασία; Scrutiny as in Vetting/Testing

Euthuni Ευθύνη (modern pronunciation: Efthýni); Scrutiny as in Accountability

The greek term is also associated with Euthenics, which is the study of improving human conditions. And the Greek Goddess of Prosperity. As used by the Ancient Athenians it was a performance review that officers had to endure.

Essentially a Jury works with investigative officers to investigate and vet candidates for office or re-election. They would perform the following functions:

Each Jury would be constituted for a short term from the Jury Pool

They would perform or review background checks on the Candidates.

They would interview them under oath (eventually) and with a Judge overseeing the interview on their plank, history, past transgressions, etc...

Those deliberations would be public record.

They would Judge debates between candidates (threshold), under oath (objective), and question them.

They would have the power to issue a report with majority and minority opinions.

If someone lied to them they could request the Judge cite them for contempt.

If a candidate lies to the Jury, later they can be tried for Perjury.

A second Jury type structure would review the finances and performances of Officers at the end of their term.

These structures would be supplemented by electronic reporting of Town Halls, Leaders Meetings and a requirement that all of them are televised, shared electronically, and that people can participate electronically.

Implementation

Of course, the Democratic party can't implement this idea initially in it's full fledged form. The Juries ought to have powers to put people under oath, to question and to review records. The juries be formal but they'd have no prosecution power, they'd be like grand juries in that they could refer evidence to the courts for actual prosecution. We might not be able to force others do do this but we could institute these ideas within our party informally.

Trouble Reporting, Surveys and Votes

Vetting and Accounting also needs to be performed using electronic democracy. The candidates might not be under oath, but everything said or talked about would be a permanent record that we the people can use to judge their merits for reelection and such.

In addition to the vetting and accounting milestones, the system should provide issue reporting so that complaints and infractions can be reported, tracked, returned to periodically until marked as resolved. Anyone should be able to report an issue. And it should stay open until someone at a final accounting session moves it be closed as resolved by the Accounting "Jury." Or until the person reporting the incident or issue reports it as resolved.

Additionally, anyone should be able to suggest items for legislative consideration, propositions, amendments, etc... and these should be deliberated on until sufficient majorities support them to move them on to the formal legislature or take public action.

Encouraging Participation and Activism

We Democrats need Social Media. We need objective reporting. We need a systematic way to ensure that everyone's concerns are addressed. And we can do that by taking control of our electronic media and making it as "bottom up as Possible." More Democracy is the answer to the fascism we are encountering. Not circling wagons or hiding. The "other side" is using our emotions and prejudices to con us.

Dokimasia

Euthenia

Related Posts:

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2017/02/lessons-from-organizing-for-america.html

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2016/07/economic-democratic-subsidiarity-and.html

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2016/09/sustainable-economic-policy-v.html

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2016/06/principles-of-federalism.html

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2016/12/implementing-democratic-subsidiarity.html

Further Reading

http://www.tawananna.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Principles-of-Athenian-Democracy.pdf

http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/article_democracy_overview?page=all

http://www.publicus.net/articles/edempublicnetwork.html

http://www.centreforedemocracy.com/

Wonky:

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/11/elinor-ostrom-and-her-8-principles-of.html

Lessons from Organizing for America

Review of "Obama's Lost Army"

The New Republic article "Obama's Lost Army" [https://newrepublic.com/article/140245/obamas-lost-army-inside-fall-grassroots-machine] which tells part of the tale of how "Organizing for America" got lost in the shuffle of his Presidency. MICAH L. SIFRY wrote this on February 9, 2017. I was a member of OFA during the election season and loved it. I also remember a few angles on the story that seem to be lost in the reporting. So I tweeted about the meaning of the article and how the structures and capabilities of "Organizing for America" could be the nucleus for modernizing our party and instituting real electronic democracy.

Economic, Democratic Subsidiarity and local democracy

Greece in 2015, Puerto Rico Now, What to do?

Almost a year ago I blogged a series on the Eurozone and what was happening to the Greeks and what that means for us:

"The privateers give a Broadside to the Greeks",

Privateering through Banks and the EuroZone and

Going Greek on the Whole World

And I showed that neo-liberalism is not Bill Clinton, us Democrats and Company. It is our Republican movement:

Neoliberalism versus Economic Policy that Really works

Finding PLACE

The other day, there was a presentation at the Kaplan. The Powers that Be have ignored local folks. But as with the saying "An Expert is someone from out of town" they brought in some mavens from out of town, and with the input from those folks they seem to be getting closer to the right idea:

"A meeting to help shape Brunswick’s future took place Monday inside the brick shell of the four-story former Kaplon department store. About 20 business people, elected leaders and nonprofit redevelopers considered options to fill space in the city with a combination of arts venues, small stores and places to live on any income."

Inductive, Deductive Processes Democracy and Good government

Using Process to restore integrity to the system.

There are two main forms of reasoning. Inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning. To use them well they need to be incorporated into processes, formalized into institutions and then employed.

What is a Deductive Reasoning

At the risk of oversimplifying, deductive processes use deductive reasoning:

"Deductive reasoning is a logical process in which a conclusion is based on the concordance of multiple premises that are generally assumed to be true."

What are the risks of Deductive Reasoning?

Deductive reasoning frequently results in formal fallacies (due to misapplication of logic) and in fallacies due to faulty premises. Thus for deductive reasoning to be refined and validated the premises of the deduction have to be tested.

Deductive Process

Thus a Deductive Process needs to things, one is that it's formal logic be defined (and modeled) to identify "formal fallacies" and avoid conclusions that don't follow their premises and faulty premises. Then even if the logic seems to be unassailable the premises still have to be examined. Deductive process works through an iterative process of detailing from abstract theory.

[http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/dedind.php]

Inductive reasoning and Inductive process

Inductive reasoning:

" Inductive reasoning makes broad generalizations from specific observations."

This article explains it better than most:

"Inductive reasoning works the other way, moving from specific observations to broader generalizations and theories. Informally, we sometimes call this a "bottom up" approach (please note that it's "bottom up" and not "bottoms up" which is the kind of thing the bartender says to customers when he's trying to close for the night!). In inductive reasoning, we begin with specific observations and measures, begin to detect patterns and regularities, formulate some tentative hypotheses that we can explore, and finally end up developing some general conclusions or theories." [http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/dedind.php]

Induction and Deduction must be used together

Some people like to pit inductive reasoning against deductive reasoning as if one method were superior to the other. But both are necessary to process success. And both kinds of reasonings have risks. Abstract theories are generalized from observations, experimentation and sometimes inspiration based on those. There is no deduction without induction. One can come up with faulty theories even if the theory seems to explain the observations. There is no science without verification, validation and refinement processes

Scientists of the Euro-American Gold age got around the dangers of logical trap fallacies by using extensive experimentation and testing to verify, refine and validate hypothesii. As we've moved into a more gilded age, even some of the process improvement people have forgotten about the role of "refining" models. There is a rush to get them to the market as fast as possible, that just doesn't work. Even as hucksters continue to talk about Verification and Validation, while the feedback loop is still drawn, it's not in their minds. In the rush to move science to production the role of experimentation in refining efforts gets forgotten. Experimentation isn't just for verification and validation. It is also for refining the requirements for functionality, and refining one's understanding of what one is looking at. A lot has been dumped in the privateering rush to privatize science and try to make riches. Good process has been one of them. The reason that practical engineers did extensive testing is that science is built on failure. And it's not right to test concepts with train wrecks using live Guinea Pigs. That was a lesson learned through many train wrecks in the early days of train building.

Deductive reasoning has to be tested through inductive processes. And inductive processes are the source for general principles and lessons needed to make progress. The moment a new idea comes along, if the idea contradicts some established theory it tends to get rejected unless there is testing and validation and some "bottom up" means to bring the idea to the attention of the theoreticians.

Governing as the use of Inductive and Deductive processes in Concert.

In requirements we talk about "Bottom up" and "top down." Good requirements has both bottom up inductive processes and top down deductive processes. Requirements have to be fleshed out using engineering principles and iterative experimentation. I want a vehicle for getting from one continent to another. How do I do it? I can do it over the ocean in a boat. But there are constraints on the speed of a boat. The concept may be top down, but now we have a process of discovery. It took 400+ years of failure and experimentation to get boats that could travel at top speeds greater than 10 knots. At 10 knots Europe ruled the world, But ships have never been good at mastering more than 30 knots safely.

But now I want my trip to be fast. For faster speeds you need something that can move over oceans through the air. That is called flying. How do you make something fly? Observation suggested we could do it with wings like birds. It took 1400 years before anyone could figure out how to do that successfully and demonstrate it. It took 50 years before flying was safe. Years of failure and experimentation. My Grandfather perished in 1938 while flying a PB-Y. He was a Pilot, so between the inherent dangers of flying an immature technology and the looming Great War, his odds were 50/50 of making it 5 years after he graduated the Academy. For space shuttle pilots the odds were a little better. That they only had two catastrophic failures showed that they took risk seriously. Risk is part of life. The purpose of science is to use tools that can keep one eye open when humans/sentient beings are walking the cliffs and valleys that make it up.

Process models understand this. They build Deductive process models and Inductive process models, and they use both. These models are useful for trying to understand and predict behaviors. Scientists are trying to use create artificial intelligence using deductive and inductive models. I'd like to see them used for improving the natural intelligence of our governing processes and society. Seeking artificial intelligence is kind of useless unless it is part of improving our own intelligence. Some people are so frustrated with the messy, poor processes they live with they concentrate on building AIs in ivory towers. We fear "Skynet" because we know there is something wrong with our use of intelligence.

We need to use Deductive Processes and Inductive Processes to systematically govern ourselves as societies and a world.

Good Government as acknowledging the value of and employing both Inductive and Deductive Processes.

It hit me a long time ago (before 2010) that the value of Enlightened ideas is is in enlightened processes and enlightened requirements and constraints. If the AI and process people could design an ideal government Democracy probably wouldn't come to mind first, but if they were tasked to apply the principles of Inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning to a business process model for governing a society using these principles -- they'd come up with a Democratic system. This is because top down processes are faulty without verification, validation and refining processes -- Inductive process. And Bottom up processes are faulty without generalization, standardization and requirements. Which are deductive processes.

Democratic representation is (or should be) an inductive process. Local Direct Democracy is in your general assemblies, in accepting feedback from workers. In letting them choose representatives. Workers are your best testers and validators for concept. Oppressive and tyrannical process is also bad and dysfunctional process. Good representation hears all voices because the best way to avoid conflict is to find out what issues are and solve them, rather than exploiting them for pyramid games. The point is that a functional Representative Republic is also good governing process that employs inductive and deductive products to feedback for success.

Boss types want to believe their general theories are valid "a priori" but in real life most governing theory rests on shifting sand. What works strategically at one moment may fail as conditions react to that strategy. Thus good government requires continual feedback, and sometimes a changing of the guard. But for now:

More to come

Further Reading

Article:

I'm not citing the dictionary as I used several and forgot which I quoted from.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2009.01050.x/epdf

Modeling Design Processes: [http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/855/773]

Inductive Reasoning

http://www.livescience.com/21569-deduction-vs-induction.html

This article is just as fallacious:

http://www.iep.utm.edu/ded-ind/

Deduction and induction were defined thousands of years ago, and they try to invent new definitions and claim the old ones are somehow invalid because they invented new ones. Mathematical induction is the definition of inductive reasoning.

Very Good:

http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/dedind.php

Notes

Process improvement people have been looking at the processes of management for some time. And it hit me during a very boring (because I was being lectured on a subject I'd already studied ad nauseum) training session on process improvement that I hadn't seen much of that applied to governing. So I started looking at the subject, all the while hoping that I'd find some thinker who'd already covered parts of it so I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. By looking at the process of government as a system with a series of processes that need to be systematized. One can apply the process improvement ideas of the Golden Age of Euro-American Science to Government. For example, when looking at the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist papers, and other philosophical writings of the 18th century and early 19th century the philosophers and "social-scientists" were grasping at engineering models that would use tools not that different from the process diagrams used to describe requirements, or airplane acquisition, etc... Consequently I've been consciously and subconsciously at work on this since 2010. But the first step was to re-read the writings with that in mind. I found some of the concepts I was looking for in Artificial Intelligence thinking, which is mostly the product of engineers trying to architect the ideas of some brilliant science fiction writers and scientists, so it shouldn't be surprising.

Positive law and negative law

Negative law is expressed as "thou shalt not" terms. A lot of the bible is "negative law" and telling people what they can't do. It's purpose is to set boundaries and rule those boundaries with measurements and punishments. Thou shalt not steal is defined in hundreds of more detailed laws from laws against shoplifting to unenforced laws against banks swindling people out of billions.

Positive laws are expressed as "thou shall". The bibles "Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself." Positive laws start with setting goal posts and then work to define the requirements for virtue and good function. Positive laws define both the good and the means for attain the goood. Our laws for creating corporations are an example of positive law, implied by the requirements within the constitution:

“The power of creating a corporation, though appertaining to sovereignty, is not, like the power of making war or levying taxes or of regulating commerce, a great substantive and independent power which cannot be implied as incidental to other powers or used as a means of executing them. It is never the end for which other powers are exercised, but a means by which other objects are accomplished. No contributions are made to charity for the sake of an incorporation, but a corporation is created to administer the charity; no seminary of learning is instituted in order to be incorporated, but the corporate character is conferred to subserve the purposes of education. No city was ever built with the sole object of being incorporated, but is incorporated as affording the best means of being well governed. The power of creating a corporation is never used for its own sake, but for the purpose of effecting something else. No sufficient reason is therefore perceived why it may not pass as incidental to those powers which are expressly given if it be a direct mode of executing them.” [McCulloch vs Maryland]

A society cannot survive without both positive law and negative law. Negative laws keep people within their swim lanes, out of each other's hair and keep them from killing people. Positive law through it's implied power defines what civilizations should look like, how they should provide for the common good, and what it takes to attain that good. They then establish and insititutionalize organizations and give them the resources to accomplish that good.

Bullying and what to do about it

Today I saw a horrible story about bullying from my friend Bridgett on Facebook, and it brought back memories of my own childhood. I usually keep those memories fully buried, but this image brought them all back:

The image breaks my heart. The URL says she beat herself up:

Little Girl Kicked & Assaulted, School Determines That She Injured HERSELF

http://realitywives.net/blogs/little-girl-kicked-assaulted-school-determines-injured-self/

The article via Gulf Live says:

An Arlington Elementary student was injured on the school’s playground on Tuesday and her mother filed a police report on Thursday, according to Pascagoula Police Department Lt. Jim Roe.

The child was beat up on the playground.

“The mother alleges another child kicked her child on the slide,” Roe said. “Right now, there’s no indication something criminal took place. I have spoken with school security and an assistant superintendent is investigating the matter.”

Instead of acknowledging the reality the school Authorities here are real ********, they compound her injuries with the same kind of bull chips that authorities always put out in response to bullying. The idea of confronting it is foreign to authorities, who just plane don't know how to confront bullies. Teachers are intimidated. They often are bullied by the same miscreants themselves!

Roe identified the mother as Lacey Harris and the student has been identified on social media sites as AvaLynn. There is a Justice For AvaLynn Facebook page created as well as a gofundme.com account that is raising money to help pay for her medical bills. It indicates about $1,000 has been raised in one day.

I think I'm not the only one who has first hand memory of being Bullied. But the School district? Do they know what to do? No:

"The Pascagoula School District issued the following statement about the incident:

“A student was injured while playing on the playground at Arlington Elementary School Tuesday afternoon. School officials responded to the situation. The parent was contacted and the student received medical treatment. No other children were involved in the incident. The Pascagoula School District remains committed to the safety of all its students.”

So regardless of the little girl's testimony, "no other children were involved" -- which is an obvious lie.

"The gofundme.com page indicates AvaLynn was “was badly injured in an incident at her elementary school.”"

The Justice for AvaLynn Facebook page says she was “attacked by another student on the school playground. We are fighting for answers and for greater supervision at school.”

[http://realitywives.net/blogs/little-girl-kicked-assaulted-school-determines-injured-self/]

Greater supervision is important. But I don't see any evidence schools are any less clueless now than they were then.

My own experience with Bullying

I'm sure I also did some bullying. But I also remember going through years of bullying that in retrospect I see as even more horrendous than it seemed at the time. We had unrestricted play time in my school. They might have had one playground mom, but there were hundreds of us. Then they integrated the school and new kids came in who picked on me. I remember getting into fights and getting beat up. And then after that every day at lunch time I raced the bell out into the field and dived into where there was a thicket with blackberries, wild roses and rasberries. I'd dive under the bushes and wait until the bell ran again and then run again. I was terrified.

Then one day the kids ran with me, caught me and formed a circle around me punching me over and over again until I collapsed on the ground. Then they kicked me until I couldn't move. Finally one of them helped me into the Principle office and said "This kid got beat up on the field". Instead of being grateful I shouted he was one of the kids who beat me up. He got suspended. After that I sat out recess reading books.

Eventually I got to know some of the kids a little. But I'll talk about that more. The bullying went on, but one day I traded lunches with the smallest of them. I had forgotten my lunch and left it outside the school in the morning. A boy nick-named Junior with a tiny thumb who sucked it all the time. He had a really small lunch and I remember being hungry that day. I was angry because after lunch I realized my mom had simply packed the wrong type of cupcake. I traded lunch for a wishme sandwich because I couldn't believe my mom would give me a coconut covered cupcake. I guess I was an entitled little asshole. But it became a lesson later.

My Karma sucked. We moved and I rode the bus with the same kids. One day one of them put out a cigarrette on my head and I got even more hurt when I tried to hit the guy who did it. They would just laugh at me. Shortly after that two other kids. One named Daniel and the other one I've been wracking my brain to remember ever since, stood up for me and stopped them. I became friends with Daniel and his friend. This was the sixties. I learned a lot from meeting Daniel. For one thing I learned to look at the people bullying me as individuals. I also was being bullied by white kids, so it was really nice to find friends. Later the kids from my own neighborhood tried to attack me and I simply attacked one of them and broke through their circle. I'm sad to say I didn't become a bully myself, but I did come close to killing people. I remember having fantasies of bringing a machine gun to school. Fortunately I was broke.

I don't even like thinking about this, but there are methods for dealing with bullying, and they involve a variety of approaches that are also approaches for improving school hermaneutics.

Lessons Learned

1. Bullying doesn't end by ignoring it.

What is happening to that little girl will no more stop because the School administration denies it, than bullying stopped for me when I was a kid. Later, when I was a little more recovered friends would excuse it by telling me "well you're so pickable." Bullies pick on people because they are vulnerable. If Children aren't protected, the bullies take advantage. Unfortunately.

2. Bullies ignore efforts to stop them and escalate.

As we are learning from the experiences of law abiding black people with bullying cops one of the important things is to know how to de-escalate situations. When I was a kid I would fight back when I shouldn't or react to taunts, and that pretty much guaranteed Bullying. But the way to de-escalate is to act somewhat submissive while while trying to switch the conversation transaction from "parent-child" or "child-child" interactions to adult ones. That is why black people, who are expert at dealing with bullying, raise their hands and bow their heads a little. Cops would understand how to de-escalate situations but currently our cops are being taught bad Doctrine, Policy and getting bad guidance on how to deal with suspects or crowds, all involve teaching de-escalation. And that is also true with handling bullies. As long as a person is in "macho mode" (male or female) they're "fight or flight" brain is engaged and the rational analytical one is suppressed. You have to stop bullying. But then you have to find a way to de-escalating the conflict that drives the bullying. Whether it is angry racist prejudice, or criminal rebellion and fear, it won't stop until the parties decide to stop it. And that requires de-escalation.

3. Bullies need Intervention. Ironically intervention involves as a first step de-escalating the situation. The Crisis Prevention Website [http://www.crisisprevention.com/Resources/Knowledge-Base/General/De-escalation-Tips] has instructions for Police, for intervention. But they apply to bullies and demonstrators dealing with dysfunctional police too:

4.  First step in intervention is de-escalation

Dealing with Bullying as law enforcement with the Mentally ill

“A difficult and potentially dangerous situation for officers involves being called to a scene and engaging with a person who may be mentally ill. Most individuals with mental illness are not dangerous, but a special set of skills is required to bring a mutually successful end to the encounter.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Essentially dealing with bullies or cops is dealing with mental illness. It may be illness so common it's like the common cold, but it is illness nevertheless. Bullies are often hurt people themselves. The kids who bullied me on the playground were dealing with issues I (literally) could not comprehend at the time. The ones in my neighborhood also. In fact a study out of Brown University says that:

“Bullies often continue the cycle of social abuse that they have experienced themselves.”[http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/10/22/bullies-more-likely-to-have-mental-disorder/]

The author, Hilfer, continued:

“They can be depressed, fearful, and they often take out some of their anger and frustration on others down the pecking order,”[mental-disorder study]

And he continues:

“Support is often given to the bullied peers who are seen as victims. Many bullies should also be viewed as victims and offered help to change their behavior, they said.”[mental-disorder study]

So it is apt that a conflict de-escalation involves treating police, rioters, mobs, and deranged individuals as folks needing mental health support.

“This finding emphasizes the importance of providing psychological support to not only victims of bullying but bullies as well.”[mental-disorder study]

So while “The study did not look at the likelihood that bullies would have a mental health disorder.” experience with bullies suggest they need to be treated as if they have one. Bullying Behavior may be a symptom of a disorder. It certainly is disordering to both bully and bullied. The report notes that those bullied often bully in turn.[mental-disorder study]

Thus de-escalation requires intervention, and de-escalation:

“Although an officer's inclination may be to intervene immediately, that may not always be the best response. As long as the individual isn't an immediate danger to self or others, there's time to make a quick assessment. CPI, an international training company specializing in violence prevention and crisis intervention, recommends evaluating the person's behavior before acting, if at all possible.”[De-Escalation Tips]

The following steps apply to stopping bullying as well as stopping violence. I've added [or teacher/principle] to emphasize the quotes apply to schools too:

“How does an officer [or teacher/principle] make the decision about how to treat that individual? Of course the answer is communication: talking to the person and evaluating the responses. But what if the person is unable or unwilling to speak? Again, as long as the person is not a danger to self or others, there is time. Use it to listen to what the person is saying—not only with words, but also with body language and tone of voice.c[De-Escalation Tips]

Empathy

“CPI stresses the importance of listening with empathy, trying to understand where the person is coming from. Like other skills, empathic listening can be learned. The five keys are: give the person undivided attention; be nonjudgmental; focus on the person's feelings, not just the facts; allow silence; and use restatement to clarify messages.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Empathy is important because there is a strong link between bullying and trauma. Not only is bullying traumatic for the victim but bullies are often passing on what they learned as victims of trauma, of other people's bullying. The British Journal of Psychiatry [http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/193/5/378.short] reported:

“Adolescents who reported psychotic symptoms were significantly more likely to have been physically abused in childhood, to have been exposed to domestic violence and to be identified as a bully/victim (that is, both a perpetrator and victim of bullying) than those who did not report such symptoms.”

Bullying and Being Bullied as forms of Trauma

Bullying and being bullied are both forms of trauma. It could be that they induce Post Traumatic Stress symptoms in people. It really changes perspective to consider that both victims and victimizers are being traumatized. [http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/11/28/bullying-can-lead-to-ptsd-symptoms/48213.html

So when we endure Bullying from police, authorities, school mates and others some empathy is needed. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have to stop. Or that it is right. It just means that stopping it requires a different paradigm than simple violence or punishment. We are dealing with wounded people. Empathy has a practical role too. When someone is out of their mind or one is dealing with a person who is not fully rational. Empathy also helps one figure out where the person is going and maybe even understand where they are coming from. A good hunter knows his quarry so well he/she can anticipate their moves. That too is empathy. "Not fully in one's right mind means "handle with care." We have to give them:

Undivided Attention

“When people are paid attention to they feel validated; they feel important. The converse is also true: people feel less important and sometimes feel they need to up the ante if they feel like they need attention. Paying attention doesn't just mean saying, "I'm listening." It means looking at the person, making eye contact if it's culturally appropriate, and virtually listening with the entire body. By really listening, and conveying that through body language as well as words, an officer [or teacher/principle] can take away the person's reason for escalating the situation.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Often times just listening to a person calms them down enough so that they begin to think more clearly. So because school bullies, police, violent people aren't always in their right mind. De-escalating a situation usually also requires we make sure we understand the situation fully. That means:

Be Nonjudgmental

“If someone says, "The sewers are talking to me," an officer's [or teacher/principle] immediate reaction might be to think that the person is crazy. That reaction, especially if verbalized, will probably upset the individual even more. Even if not said aloud, that attitude may be conveyed through the officer[or teacher/principle]'s body language. If someone is psychotic, she may tune into the nonverbal communication much more than words. So besides paying attention to what is said, ensure that body language and tone are nonjudgmental as well. This will go a lot further in calming the individual.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Focus on Feelings

“Going back to the previous example, if an individual says, "The sewers are talking to me," a feeling response might be, "That must be pretty scary," or even, "Tell me what that feels like." This isn't getting into a therapist's bailiwick, but it is using a handy therapeutic tool. Most likely it will elicit a response that is positive, since the individual will know that the officer [or teacher/principle] understands what's happening.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Allow Silence

“As people devoted to protecting and serving, officers [or teacher/principle] are quite comfortable using silence during interrogations, but may not be quite so comfortable using it on the street. Officers [or teacher/principle] want to make sure the incident is handled quickly and peacefully. However, sometimes allowing that moment of silence can be the best choice.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Patience

“If the individual doesn't immediately answer a question, it doesn't mean he didn't hear you. It may mean he's thinking about his answer, or even that he wants to make sure he's saying the right thing.”[De-Escalation Tips]

More Patience

“Allow a moment of silence. If the person's face registers confusion, then repeat the question and let the silence happen again. Just as officers [or teacher/principle] are taught in basic training, another good reason for silence is that no one likes it—and people tend to start talking when silence lengthens.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Clarify Messages

“When a subject makes a statement, an officer [or teacher/principle] may think he knows what the person means. The only way to be sure is to ask. Sometimes a question may be perceived as challenging and can make the subject defensive. So restatement is used instead.”[De-Escalation Tips]

“For example, someone living on the street might say, "I don't want to sleep here anymore." The officer [or teacher/principle] might think he knows what the person is saying, but instead of just making an assumption the officer [or teacher/principle] could restate, "Oh, you're ready to go to the shelter?"”[De-Escalation Tips]

“The homeless person could say, "Yes." Or perhaps, "No, I don't want to sleep here anymore. I'm going to move over to Main Street where it's safer." In either case, the officer [or teacher/principle] has shown an interest in the individual and has kept the lines of communication open.”[De-Escalation Tips]

“One of the most important actions in any crisis is for the officer [or teacher/principle] to remain in control of himself. This factor, which CPI calls rational detachment, will be the key to whether the officer [or teacher/principle] helps de-escalate or escalate the situation. To rationally detach: develop a plan; use a team approach whenever possible; use positive self-talk; recognize personal limits; and debrief.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Develop a Plan

“Devise a plan before one is needed. Decisions made before a crisis occurs are more likely to be more rational than those made when on the receiving end of emotional outbursts. Think about those things that are upsetting and practice dealing with those issues ahead of time. This is called strategic visualization and is effective in helping officers [or teacher/principle] get through some stressful and even dangerous moments. Just as with other professional training officers [or teacher/principle] receive, this training will kick in when needed.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Use a Team Approach

“It's easier to maintain professionalism when assistance is nearby. Support and back up are both crucial pieces when trying to rationally detach.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Use Positive Self-Talk

“Positive self-talk has been the butt of many jokes. Picture Al Franken on Saturday Night Live saying, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me." Sure, that's funny, but positive self-talk really can work wonders. Just as saying, "I can't deal with this" might cause an officer to behave in one fashion, saying to oneself, "I'm trained, I know what to do" will cause another response.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Recognize Personal Limits

“Being a professional doesn't mean that a police officer must be able to excel at everything. That's an unrealistic expectation. Know what your limits are. Know that sometimes it's not easy to leave problems alone. Sometimes the most professional decision is to let someone else take over, if that's an option.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Debrief

“Be sure to debrief with coworkers, team members, or a supervisor after a major incident. Talking about it can relieve some of the stress and is also a good time to start planning for next time: what was done correctly, what could have been handled better, how could the response be improved the next time a similar situation occurs. This serves to assist in being able to rationally detach in the future.”[De-Escalation Tips]

“Assisting someone with a possible mental illness is only one example of when an officer's evaluation, assessment and negotiation skills come into play. There are many other examples: domestic disturbances, dealing with children, assisting victims, helping traumatized witnesses, and even calming down an out-of-control colleague. No matter what the situation, keeping the lines of communication open can help to de-escalate a potentially dangerous crisis.”[De-Escalation Tips]

Bullying is also socially unacceptable and requires Adjudication

But like dealing with criminality. Dealing with bullying doesn't stop with de-escalation. It requires an adjudication. Someone has been hurt. And someone else hurt them. All this trauma doesn't justify bullying. It just is the vehicle by which bullying is passed on generation to generation.

It's pretty established that our formal legal system is incapable of handling school crime. There have been scandals where judges have been caught funneling children to private prisons. One reason why schools are loathe to turn offenders (such as the bullies of the little girl in Arlington Elementary, into the police is that the consequences are either the ruination of a child's life, or the kids getting away with it. There has to be a better way.

Trial by Peers in School

Schools have used mock trials for years to teach kids civic and laws. I'd suggest that schools have real trials with the Principle acting as judge and teachers acting as counsel. The trials would not have force of law beyond school discipline, but the students would pass judgment on the accused and the teachers would ensure that rules of law and procedure are followed. A conviction might involve escalation to the the Police. But more likely some kind of arbitration type solution can be found. And kids know the circumstances of what happened better than outside adults. The goal isn't to shame the perpetrator but to teach the kids about bullying, violence and the consequences of violence. I can't find any literature on that idea. But it seems like common sense idea so long as the basic principles of separation of officers (Separate Judge, jury, executive and counsel for all involved) are observed, and the adjudication is informal and informational. Kids literally are a jury of one's peers.

I'm not anyone important and I can't find any evidence of this working well.

Mock trial information: http://19thcircuitcourt.state.il.us/services/pages/mock_trials.aspx