In the past 12 years, politics worsened. Unnecessary wars were waged, often poorly, rights were violated, climate change denied, huge economic mistakes had global repercussions, the national debt soared, unemployment surged, and wealth became increasingly concentrated. And all of it happened as citizens became more and more disempowered and political discourse became more divisive. How can this be turned around?
Systems have behaviors. Problems are usually caused either by an anomaly or the design of the system or both. Though we have plenty of anomalies, what I see is that the results we have are a natural consequence of the design of our system.
Our system of government was designed during a time when travel and communication were slow, the country was sparsely populated and industry was primitive. During the past 200 years, people have always tried to game the system and use it to their advantage. People fought back. In the past 30 years, the practice of influencing government has been honed and refined. It’s time to fight back again.
Today, with modern communication and organization technologies, large, wealthy organizations have gained political power. Our government is almost completely manipulated by these organizations- the parties, corporations and special interests. While our constitutional foundations are sound, they weren’t designed for today’s world. Our current system cannot deliver a responsive, effective and accountable government capable of supporting a thriving society. It can only deliver what we have, a divisive, dysfunctional government that often not only can’t avoid problems, but can’t even react well to them and often can’t solve them. Some kind of government reform or political transformation is required, but what?
This state of America is roughly inevitable. Little power is left in the hands of the people because we, the people, are not organized. We retain the ultimate power, but it’s almost useless to us because we don’t know what we all want, and we can’t communicate effectively, either with each other or with our politicians. Without effective communication, we’re left with broadcasting and ads, shouting into the political din. A natural side-effect is that elections are expensive.
The problem with America is that we, the people, don’t have effective political communication.
And we can remedy this. If Americans vote on issues at PeopleCount.org, we can know what we want and we and politicians can know what they’re accountable for. After attracting users, PeopleCount’s next goal will be to show the results, so we and our politicians can see what we want in our districts, states, and in the country. We’ll then add to this site an accountability system, a revolutionary communication layer allowing politicians to communicate effectively with us. This inexpensive system will both enable officials to be accountable and allow more challengers to communicate with us, giving us real choice in elections. Our promise is that, with your participation, within four years we’ll have able people representing our interests, with solutions in place to our deficit and debt problems, global warming, campaign finance and much more.
PeopleCount.org is a system that enables millions of people to communicate effectively so we can design our future together. It’s the missing piece to bring America back to having a government of, by and for the people.
What works in America can go global, for global issues, to solve conflicts between countries, and to empower democratic communication in other countries. The world is ours. If we work together and can constructively and clearly communicate, we can achieve anything. Come begin this journey with us. As part of your civic participation, vote today on PeopleCount.org.
