The blame game is alive and well and living in our nation's capitol. Each party is quick to blame the other for our nation's woes. Everyone claims to hate it. Everyone does it. Each accuses the other of playing the game and no one takes responsibility for problems. Most of the time everyone is to blame because everyone is playing the game.
The problems we have in the face of the S & P downgrade are actually attributable. There is blame. It is no longer a game. All of those Tea Party clowns who glibly pronounced that nothing bad would come of defaulting on our debt have set us on this path. They were told time and time again that this would happen. Just as they refuse to believe the scientists who explain to them about climate change, they refused to believe the consequences of their irresponsible behavior. I suppose if you'd rather believe in fairy-tales than evolution. If you'd rather believe our President is a Kenyan. If you'd rather believe up is down and right is left. If you'd rather believe that Jesus hated gays and Muslims. Well...your just an idiot.
We have a very diverse society. One with room for geniuses and idiots. As charming as that is we don't want the idiots in charge. They are idiots and they have brought us to brink of disaster. It's time for them to shut up and take their proper seats in the back of the building. It's time we get back to the tradition of electing people smarter than us to lead us.
Our democracy and electoral system was built on the premise that the voter is incapable of making sound choices. This is why the President was elected by a handful of people, the electoral college. The Senate was elected by the members of the House. The House was the only branch of the Federal government that was elected by popular vote and had the least amount of power.
In our country's beginning our founding fathers recognized that the people were hampered by a fractious and inadequate system of public information distributed on horseback. Today, voters are burdened with immediate and overwhelming blasts of information and misinformation with no filter as to what is a fact and what is not. By virtue of this phenomenon we are capable of choosing information we wish to be fact rather than informed as to what is factual. The idiots in our society choose to be represented by people who are repeating the misinformation they choose to believe is fact.
The result of this is the Tea Party, a dis-aorganization that rallies around the idiots who have brought us to the brink of disaster. They are to blame for the collapse of wealth in the last few days. That is a fact.
Volunteers are back
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Monday, August 8, 2011
Monday, January 3, 2011
American Justice
We have become a society in which we are judged guilty until proven innocent, and the cost to civility of wrongful and unreasonable prosecution has become tolerable. Why aren't we talking about it?
We talk a lot in this country about human rights and the fairness of our awesome system of justice. We piously condemn other governments for their abuse of their own citizens. And yet, we have by far the most imprisoned citizens per capita than any, that's right ANY, country in the world. More than Russia. More than China. More than Iran and North Korea. More than every other country in the world. We represent only 5% of the world's population, while we hold 25% of the worlds incarcerated population. We spend $68 billion on prisons each year. When you throw in the costs of the court system and law enforcement, we spend over $200 billion a year to put people in jail. With a growth rate of over 500% since the early 80's, our "corrections system" is the fastest growing sector of our economy...even faster than the cost of health care. And yet, the waste, corruption, and efficacy of this taxpayer funded industry goes unchallenged.
Over the Holidays I read Grisham's latest novel, "The Confession", about a young man wrongly accused of murder who was put to death in Texas. It observed a system of justice that was anything but judicial. While this was, indeed, fiction, there have been 138 death row inmates who have been exonerated since 1973. About 3% of all death sentences in that time span. It got me to thinking: If we are this inaccurate with our prosecution of the most serious of punishments, how many people are languishing in prison wrongly convicted of less serious crimes?
I would assume that a jury does not easily arrive at a sentence of death. A death sentence is given an incredible amount of scrutiny both before sentencing and after. And yet we know that at least 3% of the time these sentences were levied upon innocent people. When we speak of ending a person's life, being right 97% of the time is not tolerable. We must be sure. We must know beyond any possible doubt. We cannot be wrong. If we cannot be right 100% of the time we must stop.
Lesser offenses are not afforded the same resources as capital offenses, so it would only make sense that a far greater number of mistakes are made. However, for the sake of argument, let's say that only 3% of our prison population is wrongly convicted. This would mean that there are at least 75,000 innocent people of the 2.5 million currently locked away in our "corrections" system. Putting aside the toll on human rights, the direct financial burden of incarcerating these people is over $1.6 billion each year.
The true waste, however, may not be wrongful conviction. The extraordinary growth is not due to an increase in violent crime. Violent crime has actually gone down slightly. Due in large part to the "war on drugs", the vast increase in prison population is non-violent drug offenders. This nation's failed drug policy is a completely different topic worthy of another post at another time. For now, it's important to note that the only demonstrable result of the increase in the prosecution of drug crimes is the enormous cost to our criminal justice system. Over 500,000 prisoners doing time in our prison system are non-violent drug offenders at a cost to us of over $11 billion per year without including court and law enforcement costs.
I believe that penal and judicial reform is the most overlooked issue of our time. Conservatives and liberals alike are unwilling to even mention this issue for fear of looking soft on crime, but this reluctance is costing taxpayers billions and tears away at our social fabric. This is a subject which we should all agree needs a strong, public and post-partisan debate.
I think we need to start this conversation.
We talk a lot in this country about human rights and the fairness of our awesome system of justice. We piously condemn other governments for their abuse of their own citizens. And yet, we have by far the most imprisoned citizens per capita than any, that's right ANY, country in the world. More than Russia. More than China. More than Iran and North Korea. More than every other country in the world. We represent only 5% of the world's population, while we hold 25% of the worlds incarcerated population. We spend $68 billion on prisons each year. When you throw in the costs of the court system and law enforcement, we spend over $200 billion a year to put people in jail. With a growth rate of over 500% since the early 80's, our "corrections system" is the fastest growing sector of our economy...even faster than the cost of health care. And yet, the waste, corruption, and efficacy of this taxpayer funded industry goes unchallenged.
Over the Holidays I read Grisham's latest novel, "The Confession", about a young man wrongly accused of murder who was put to death in Texas. It observed a system of justice that was anything but judicial. While this was, indeed, fiction, there have been 138 death row inmates who have been exonerated since 1973. About 3% of all death sentences in that time span. It got me to thinking: If we are this inaccurate with our prosecution of the most serious of punishments, how many people are languishing in prison wrongly convicted of less serious crimes?
I would assume that a jury does not easily arrive at a sentence of death. A death sentence is given an incredible amount of scrutiny both before sentencing and after. And yet we know that at least 3% of the time these sentences were levied upon innocent people. When we speak of ending a person's life, being right 97% of the time is not tolerable. We must be sure. We must know beyond any possible doubt. We cannot be wrong. If we cannot be right 100% of the time we must stop.
Lesser offenses are not afforded the same resources as capital offenses, so it would only make sense that a far greater number of mistakes are made. However, for the sake of argument, let's say that only 3% of our prison population is wrongly convicted. This would mean that there are at least 75,000 innocent people of the 2.5 million currently locked away in our "corrections" system. Putting aside the toll on human rights, the direct financial burden of incarcerating these people is over $1.6 billion each year.
The true waste, however, may not be wrongful conviction. The extraordinary growth is not due to an increase in violent crime. Violent crime has actually gone down slightly. Due in large part to the "war on drugs", the vast increase in prison population is non-violent drug offenders. This nation's failed drug policy is a completely different topic worthy of another post at another time. For now, it's important to note that the only demonstrable result of the increase in the prosecution of drug crimes is the enormous cost to our criminal justice system. Over 500,000 prisoners doing time in our prison system are non-violent drug offenders at a cost to us of over $11 billion per year without including court and law enforcement costs.
I believe that penal and judicial reform is the most overlooked issue of our time. Conservatives and liberals alike are unwilling to even mention this issue for fear of looking soft on crime, but this reluctance is costing taxpayers billions and tears away at our social fabric. This is a subject which we should all agree needs a strong, public and post-partisan debate.
I think we need to start this conversation.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Three degrees of separation
How a big volunteer operation wins
By Mark Sump
One of the lasting affects of the old political paradigm is that volunteer activities are free or cheap ways to marginally influence an election. It follows the old school thinking that it’s the number of phone calls made or the number of doors knocked that are the real influence volunteers can deliver. By that thinking, the volunteer influence merely displaces some of the phoning or canvassing that the campaign plans to outsource at the end of the campaign leading up to Election Day.
On its face one would think that this form of stressing volunteer activity fits with the new paradigm. Let’s review the most essential element of the paradigm: Television now reinforces opinions voters form by virtue of recommendations from people around them, friends, neighbors, co-workers…etc.
Voter contact activities from volunteers in a campaign do have more impact than a telemarketing company or paid canvassers. This impact is still only marginal. So, how do volunteers substantially impact a campaign if not through direct voter contact?
Three degrees of separation!!
When I started working on campaigns 25 years ago, we had no email, no cell phones, no computers, no internet, no telemarketing centers, no mail houses. We had volunteers and we depended on those volunteers for nearly every element of voter contact.
I recall my first presidential campaign in 1988 and my boss explaining to me the first tenet of my three degrees of separation theory: Every volunteer on a campaign will influence the vote of 50 voters by virtue of who they talk to in their own lives…friends, neighbors, family, co-workers. It isn’t about how many people they reached on the phone bank or at the doors. It’s all about who they come into contact with in their daily lives.
Remember, the new paradigm: Voters are primarily influenced by people around them, people they trust.
Okay, so lets do the math. If a campaign has 1000 active volunteers and they each influence 50 voters, the first degree of separation is 50,000 votes.
So lets say that the second degree of separation is calculated at 20% of that, so those 50,000 voters each influence 10 voters. The second degree of separation adds 500,000 voters. So now we’re at 551,000 voters.
Okay, now we’re cooking. The third degree of separation is calculated again at 20%, so those 500,000 voters will each influence 2 voters. The third degree of separation adds 1,000,000 voters.
Now we’re at 1,551,000 votes! Think about it. How many campaigns are won with 1.55 million votes?
Figuring out how many volunteers you need is rather simple. Take the expected vote and divide it by 1,551 and that will give you the number of volunteers a campaign needs to win.
This is the crux of the new paradigm…people win campaigns.
Next week I’ll define “active volunteer” in Volunteers Win Campaigns.
How a big volunteer operation wins
By Mark Sump
One of the lasting affects of the old political paradigm is that volunteer activities are free or cheap ways to marginally influence an election. It follows the old school thinking that it’s the number of phone calls made or the number of doors knocked that are the real influence volunteers can deliver. By that thinking, the volunteer influence merely displaces some of the phoning or canvassing that the campaign plans to outsource at the end of the campaign leading up to Election Day.
On its face one would think that this form of stressing volunteer activity fits with the new paradigm. Let’s review the most essential element of the paradigm: Television now reinforces opinions voters form by virtue of recommendations from people around them, friends, neighbors, co-workers…etc.
Voter contact activities from volunteers in a campaign do have more impact than a telemarketing company or paid canvassers. This impact is still only marginal. So, how do volunteers substantially impact a campaign if not through direct voter contact?
Three degrees of separation!!
When I started working on campaigns 25 years ago, we had no email, no cell phones, no computers, no internet, no telemarketing centers, no mail houses. We had volunteers and we depended on those volunteers for nearly every element of voter contact.
I recall my first presidential campaign in 1988 and my boss explaining to me the first tenet of my three degrees of separation theory: Every volunteer on a campaign will influence the vote of 50 voters by virtue of who they talk to in their own lives…friends, neighbors, family, co-workers. It isn’t about how many people they reached on the phone bank or at the doors. It’s all about who they come into contact with in their daily lives.
Remember, the new paradigm: Voters are primarily influenced by people around them, people they trust.
Okay, so lets do the math. If a campaign has 1000 active volunteers and they each influence 50 voters, the first degree of separation is 50,000 votes.
So lets say that the second degree of separation is calculated at 20% of that, so those 50,000 voters each influence 10 voters. The second degree of separation adds 500,000 voters. So now we’re at 551,000 voters.
Okay, now we’re cooking. The third degree of separation is calculated again at 20%, so those 500,000 voters will each influence 2 voters. The third degree of separation adds 1,000,000 voters.
Now we’re at 1,551,000 votes! Think about it. How many campaigns are won with 1.55 million votes?
Figuring out how many volunteers you need is rather simple. Take the expected vote and divide it by 1,551 and that will give you the number of volunteers a campaign needs to win.
This is the crux of the new paradigm…people win campaigns.
Next week I’ll define “active volunteer” in Volunteers Win Campaigns.
Friday, February 5, 2010
Walter Cronkite is Dead
And so is trust in the media
By Mark Sump
The new paradigm hinges largely on the theory that broadcast television is no longer the chief source of information on which voters base their voting decisions. The fact is that the people who tune into Fox News are not looking for a fair and balanced discussion. They’re looking for reinforcement of their core beliefs.
I’ll admit it. I watch MSNBC because I generally agree with the views expressed on MSNBC. (Love Rachel!) But, it isn’t where I my vote is shaped.
Cronkite is dead, and people no longer trust as fact what they see on television. Without that trust, TV is no longer the pervasive source of information from which voters make their core voting decisions. So, where are they getting their information? How are votes being shaped?
Twenty-five years ago when I was just out of college, I was sitting with a friend, Amy, bemoaning my life. “What do I want to be when I grow up” as is the common refrain for a twenty-something waiting tables and biding time. Amy asked me what I enjoy. I said I like politics. She said, “Then do that.” Not knowing what she meant I shrugged my shoulders and said “yeah that’s a good idea.” “No,” she said, “pick two campaigns that interest you, call them and volunteer”.
Amy handed me the phone and that’s when my life took one of those proverbial forks in the road. I was living in Kansas City, right on the border between Kansas and Missouri. The first campaign I chose to call was Kit Bond’s campaign for Senate in Missouri…a Republican. I didn’t know much about him, but I thought anyone named Kit Bond had to be cool. I called the campaign, no one was there, left a message.
The second campaign was for Tom Docking running for Governor in Kansas…a Democrat. Again, didn’t know much about him except that his dad was Governor and my dad always said good things about him. I called the campaign, no one was there, left a message.
My choices were virtually random. It had never occurred to me to call a campaign and volunteer and the Bond and Docking campaigns were simply the only ones that came to mind at that very moment. I didn’t know who was the Democrat or who was the Republican and I didn’t much care.
Here’s the punch line: The Bond campaign never called me back. The Docking campaign did. That’s how I became a Democrat. I started volunteering that next week and a week after that they hired me.
Today I am surrounded by other Democrats. My clients are all Democrats. The few Republican friends I have are just token friends who are to be tolerated. (I don’t mean you if you think you’re my friend and you’re a Republican).
I have gone from completely non-partisan to moderate Midwestern Democrat to Minnesota Liberal. After 12 years inside the Washington Beltway, I have became a nauseatingly Northeastern Progressive.
My progression in political thinking did not come about based in any way on what I saw on television. My core beliefs are very clearly formed by the people who surround my daily life; my friends, my co-workers, my neighbors.
The point is that the most powerful source of information for voters is other voters. The best way to affect a voter is a friend’s recommendation. The bigger your army of volunteers, the more votes you’ll get. This year the winning campaigns are going to have a new player in their inner circle; a consultant whose job it is to keep the campaign focused on a single mantra: Volunteers are back and they’re winning campaigns again.
That’s the new paradigm
Next week I’ll do some math and talk about the 3 degrees of separation.
And so is trust in the media
By Mark Sump
The new paradigm hinges largely on the theory that broadcast television is no longer the chief source of information on which voters base their voting decisions. The fact is that the people who tune into Fox News are not looking for a fair and balanced discussion. They’re looking for reinforcement of their core beliefs.
I’ll admit it. I watch MSNBC because I generally agree with the views expressed on MSNBC. (Love Rachel!) But, it isn’t where I my vote is shaped.
Cronkite is dead, and people no longer trust as fact what they see on television. Without that trust, TV is no longer the pervasive source of information from which voters make their core voting decisions. So, where are they getting their information? How are votes being shaped?
Twenty-five years ago when I was just out of college, I was sitting with a friend, Amy, bemoaning my life. “What do I want to be when I grow up” as is the common refrain for a twenty-something waiting tables and biding time. Amy asked me what I enjoy. I said I like politics. She said, “Then do that.” Not knowing what she meant I shrugged my shoulders and said “yeah that’s a good idea.” “No,” she said, “pick two campaigns that interest you, call them and volunteer”.
Amy handed me the phone and that’s when my life took one of those proverbial forks in the road. I was living in Kansas City, right on the border between Kansas and Missouri. The first campaign I chose to call was Kit Bond’s campaign for Senate in Missouri…a Republican. I didn’t know much about him, but I thought anyone named Kit Bond had to be cool. I called the campaign, no one was there, left a message.
The second campaign was for Tom Docking running for Governor in Kansas…a Democrat. Again, didn’t know much about him except that his dad was Governor and my dad always said good things about him. I called the campaign, no one was there, left a message.
My choices were virtually random. It had never occurred to me to call a campaign and volunteer and the Bond and Docking campaigns were simply the only ones that came to mind at that very moment. I didn’t know who was the Democrat or who was the Republican and I didn’t much care.
Here’s the punch line: The Bond campaign never called me back. The Docking campaign did. That’s how I became a Democrat. I started volunteering that next week and a week after that they hired me.
Today I am surrounded by other Democrats. My clients are all Democrats. The few Republican friends I have are just token friends who are to be tolerated. (I don’t mean you if you think you’re my friend and you’re a Republican).
I have gone from completely non-partisan to moderate Midwestern Democrat to Minnesota Liberal. After 12 years inside the Washington Beltway, I have became a nauseatingly Northeastern Progressive.
My progression in political thinking did not come about based in any way on what I saw on television. My core beliefs are very clearly formed by the people who surround my daily life; my friends, my co-workers, my neighbors.
The point is that the most powerful source of information for voters is other voters. The best way to affect a voter is a friend’s recommendation. The bigger your army of volunteers, the more votes you’ll get. This year the winning campaigns are going to have a new player in their inner circle; a consultant whose job it is to keep the campaign focused on a single mantra: Volunteers are back and they’re winning campaigns again.
That’s the new paradigm
Next week I’ll do some math and talk about the 3 degrees of separation.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility
When people are talking to people sensibility prevails
By Mark Sump
This week’s election results in Oregon tell a story that the media has missed, but it’s not the first time. The fact that Oregon voters turned out in huge numbers to pass two “tax hike” propositions belies the narrative among Republicans and swallowed hook-line-and-sinker by the media. This was a campaign that engaged thousands of supporters across the state who in turn engaged hundreds of thousands of voters by explaining the facts of Measures 66 and 67. Yes for Oregon adopted the new paradigm in effective campaigns; that volunteers are back and they’re winning campaigns
The media is of course singularly focused on recent Democratic Party failures in Virginia, New Jersey and, of course, Massachusetts. They were colossal failures, and each of them was a reflection of the old paradigm in political campaigns. It is no longer true that the successful campaign is the one that has the most and best television advertisements. It is no longer true that campaigns can be won without engaging the public.
Coakley is the definition of this old paradigm. The fact that she was up by 30 points after her primary is not the relevant issue. The fact that she did not see the need to run a campaign after the primary is relevant. The fact that she did not see the need to engage the public and rally her supporters is relevant. Relying on a blitz of paid media at the end of the campaign no longer wins campaigns for Democrats even in the most liberal of states. Coakley is proof of that.
The new paradigm in winning elections is that public opinion is important, but paid media no longer carries the sway to change public opinion it once did. The new paradigm is that you have to earn public opinion through direct interaction with the public.
While the media is focused on in a few high profile campaigns, there is a quiet undercurrent that has so far gone unnoticed. The latest is Oregon, but just last month, the city of Houston…not known for its liberalism…elected Annise Parker the first big city mayor who happens to be a lesbian. A month before that, the state of Washington rejected proposition 71 ensuring the most sweeping gay rights legislation ever up for a public vote in the nation’s history.
Each of these campaigns had two things in common. Each of them embraced this paradigm shift toward engaging an army of volunteers, and each of them won.
This year, the smart campaigns will begin building and training their army of volunteers months in advance so that on Election Day they are not left to the whims of a media who is more interested in the “gotcha” than the truth.
When people are talking to people sensibility prevails
By Mark Sump
This week’s election results in Oregon tell a story that the media has missed, but it’s not the first time. The fact that Oregon voters turned out in huge numbers to pass two “tax hike” propositions belies the narrative among Republicans and swallowed hook-line-and-sinker by the media. This was a campaign that engaged thousands of supporters across the state who in turn engaged hundreds of thousands of voters by explaining the facts of Measures 66 and 67. Yes for Oregon adopted the new paradigm in effective campaigns; that volunteers are back and they’re winning campaigns
The media is of course singularly focused on recent Democratic Party failures in Virginia, New Jersey and, of course, Massachusetts. They were colossal failures, and each of them was a reflection of the old paradigm in political campaigns. It is no longer true that the successful campaign is the one that has the most and best television advertisements. It is no longer true that campaigns can be won without engaging the public.
Coakley is the definition of this old paradigm. The fact that she was up by 30 points after her primary is not the relevant issue. The fact that she did not see the need to run a campaign after the primary is relevant. The fact that she did not see the need to engage the public and rally her supporters is relevant. Relying on a blitz of paid media at the end of the campaign no longer wins campaigns for Democrats even in the most liberal of states. Coakley is proof of that.
The new paradigm in winning elections is that public opinion is important, but paid media no longer carries the sway to change public opinion it once did. The new paradigm is that you have to earn public opinion through direct interaction with the public.
While the media is focused on in a few high profile campaigns, there is a quiet undercurrent that has so far gone unnoticed. The latest is Oregon, but just last month, the city of Houston…not known for its liberalism…elected Annise Parker the first big city mayor who happens to be a lesbian. A month before that, the state of Washington rejected proposition 71 ensuring the most sweeping gay rights legislation ever up for a public vote in the nation’s history.
Each of these campaigns had two things in common. Each of them embraced this paradigm shift toward engaging an army of volunteers, and each of them won.
This year, the smart campaigns will begin building and training their army of volunteers months in advance so that on Election Day they are not left to the whims of a media who is more interested in the “gotcha” than the truth.
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