In the last post, I gave part of a paraphrased conversation that I had with a friend on Facebook about people hearing a new possibility. So I told

He then read the How it Works page, and focused on the first part, where you, the citizens, will direct your representatives. He said,

I must admit, I’m probably NOT going to support you in “You will direct them.” That sounds like our officials will be slaves to the whims of the people. Maybe that is why people are not listening to you or supporting you?

I said “You will direct them”, not command them. That’s an example where your listening created “they will be slaves.” That came from your brain, your listening. Plus, it’s more common for people to think that due to reading it, rather than speaking with me. Few people think it when I talk with them. We’ll definitely produce a video.

Listen for a new possibility, like an employer/employee relationship

This new possibility is more like an employer/employee relationship. We, the employer, say what we want and our employees, our representatives, actually hear us and respond. This is like an employee given a problem and a recommended solution. She is free to study it and recommend a different solution. Imagine we citizens say “We want a wall!” She might say, “75% of people want this, so we’ll move ahead, but 25% of people don’t, because of the expense. So we’re looking at a compromise- a wall in a few places and electronic surveillance in others.” Or she might say, “Our committee analysis shows that a wall would invite all sorts of tunneling. So we’re looking at some other solutions. You can read more about it on this linked page. We’ll publish our analysis in 3 weeks and work with PeopleCount so you can vote on new solutions as well.”

The point is, they’ll know what we want, and can account to us for their actions and intentions. This is very different from what we have today, where our representatives are effectively silent. Most of us can’t hear them because we have no way of just listening for reports on the issues we care about. Plus, we don’t know what others in our district or state want, so we don’t know what we all prefer, so we don’t know whether our representative is representing us well. Public polls are only done annually, are untrustworthy because of the low rate of participation, rarely poll a specific district or state, and even when they do, few of us find them. On our site, we’ll show everyone how people are voting as the votes come in. You’ll know what your representatives know about what people want.

If people are not hearing a new possibility for political reform,
what are they hearing?

People find it hard to hear for a variety of reasons. Some people are listening for how hopeless or rude politics is. Some are listening for how they can win or how they are losing. Often our listening is shaped by the negative campaigning about how evil the other party is. Some are listening for how unjust things are, how expensive it’ll be to take action, or how the real problem is something else. Most people are hearing what they are listening for.

I’ve talked to many people. Few people are listening for how to achieve accountability. Most of these are certain that the only way is to express their anger and/or elect their people.

Others are certain the only way to achieve accountability is to limit campaign financing and pass anti-corruption legislation. These seem to me to be fine things to do. It will lessen accountability to wealthy donors a bit. But it doesn’t do anything to lessen accountability to parties, or cause accountability to citizens.

As you can probably tell, the real problem is that I write too much. I’ll tell you why in the next post.