How do my last two posts tie into the theme of this blog

The theme of this blog is "thoughts about knowledge for development". International development has two key themes:

• Development strategies that further enrich the rich in the hope that the wealth will trickle down don't work for the poor.
• Economic Development programs work for all when accomplished in a framework of pro poor policies.

The trend towards enriching the rich in the United States, leaving the middle class and the poor behind, is clearly dangerous. The first step in dealing with the problem is gathering the knowledge of the situation. In fact enough information exists to amply demonstrate the problem that the nation faces. However, the information has not been internalized by the voters, and it is necessary that that information be converted into knowledge.

Both the Occupy movement and the Tea Party movement reflect deep dissatisfaction of the public with the status quo. Main Street is suffering while the government has bailed out Wall Street and the plutocrats are more comfortable than ever, and people know that.

The voters do not seem to realize that corporations have organized to exercise political power in support of the interests of their top executives and their major stock holders, and that they are using money to do so. Some of that money goes into electing people who will support the corporate positions. By funding candidates in key swing elections a lot can be done with relatively modest funding. The current system in which sitting legislators almost always get reelected means that getting your man in once makes it a lot easier to do so again and again. The role of big money in elections has just gotten worse with the Supreme Court's decision that corporations have the same rights of free speech as people, and the development of the SuperPACs.

Voters don't seem to understand how much corporations are putting into lobbying, and the lobbyists are paying off big. Here is the finding from one study:

The lobbying industry has experienced exponential growth within the past decade. The general public, the media, and special interest groups perceive lobbying to be a powerful mechanism affecting public policy. However, academic research finds inconclusive results when quantifying the rate of return on political lobbying expenditures. In this paper we use audited corporate tax disclosures relating to a tax holiday on repatriated earnings created by the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 to examine the return on lobbying. We find firms lobbying for this provision have a return in excess of $220 for every $1 spent on lobbying, or 22,000%. Repatriating firms are more profitable overall, but surprisingly, profitability is not a predictor of repatriation amount. Rather, industry and firm size are most predictive of repatriation. Cash on hand, a proxy for ability to repatriate, is not associated with the repatriation decision or the repatriation amount. This paper provides compelling evidence that lobbying expenditures have a positive and significant return on investment.

Part of the reason that voters don't know all that they should know is that they aren't sufficiently interested to find out. Part however, is the failure of the news media and the media in general. We still depend on television and print media for a lot of our information, but increasingly we focus on media that provide news biased towards our parochial interests. We listen almost always to people who purvey the myths to which we already subscribe or who entertain rather than inform. The Internet makes a huge amount of information available, and it only took a few hours to put together the last two posts, but how many people really mine the Internet for credible information that would inform their political behavior?

As the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community showed several years ago, the famous tendency of Americans to organize civil society to work together for common purposes has greatly diminished. It used to be that our local organizations stimulated political interests and provided political information we need. Especially problematic for the middle class is how weak the unions have become. According to Wikipedia:

In 2010, total labor union density (the percentage of workers—both public and private—belonging to a labor union) was 11.4% in the United States. For comparison, it was 18.6% in Germany, 27.5% in Canada, and 70% in Finland.[1] Union membership in the private sector has in recent years fallen under 9% — levels not seen since 1932.

Voters can reverse the political trends that have led us to more and more inequality with knowledge of those trends and their impact, but only be organizing to do so.

This and the previous two posts are a very small effort to promote that organization. I suspect that it need not be done via traditional face to face organization as in the past, but via online organization.