"What’s Next for AE911Truth?" — Richard Gage, AIA Jan 20, 2010
From 911blogger:
What’s Next for AE911Truth? — Richard Gage, AIA Jan 20, 2010
Apparently, any political strategy has been abandoned, unless Gage is keeping his cards close to his chest.
The political / sociological questions are obviously (to me) much more vexing than growing the membership of ae911truth. In a way, I can't blame him - good ideas for attacking the systemic corruption of the US government are few and far between.
I will predict that, unless there's even a failed attempt to transform the ae911truth organization's size into some sort of political result, a lot of 911 truthers will catch on - say, within a year or two - and there will be a lot less enthusiasm for ae911truth.
OTOH, this could be a good thing - there's some very dedicated activists within the 911 truth field (I'm thinking of We Are Change), and if they come to the realization that they are on a road that leads nowhere, politically, they can start to focus their attention on the bigger issue, which is solving the problem of systemic corruption. It's my opinion that the 911 truth movement is remarkably non-partisan. Not only do you not find Democratic and Republican lemmings, you find what seems to me to be a near-universal recognition that both parties are corrupt, and in at least a perverse way, collaborate to disempower the public.
Unfortunately, a lot of 911 Truthers go too far (perhaps under the influence of Alex Jones), and say that the D's and R's are a complete facade, just put there by the NWO to fool us. They don't seem to know that first past the post voting leads almost inexorably to a 2 party system*, and that the the plutocratic control of government can develop quite well without a tiny cabal of cigar-smoking NWO types pulling all the strings, behind the scenes. That makes for a less entertaining narrative, however, which is probably why Alex Jones doesn't go there. He may have a more accurate picture of discrete, somewhat hidden and greatly obscured, injurious conspiracies - the motivation for and utility of, being eminently logical - than the average Joe, and he may interview great guests, but if he didn't project colorful, centrally controlled NWO plots into the gaps between his knowledge base, he'd probably lose some audience.
It's my impression that a lot of the WAC groups are younger. Hopefully, as they mature, they can increase their political effectiveness, and even provide a huge spark to a democratic revival. To this end, if there are any WAC'ers reading this, they might want to check out "Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems" by Thomas Ferguson. Said one Nathan Aschbacher, in a comment to his own excellent diary at FireDogLake, called
The Flawed Logic of Supporting Coakley
One of the most interesting books I’ve read lately is, “Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems” by Thomas Ferguson. When you analyze the comparative value of a vote to a Dollar, and understand the distribution of them amongst a populous, it’s exceedingly clear that your vote (both at the point of election and through the term of office) is worth essentially nothing in the shaping of policy.
A modern day example of this is TARP.
The WAC'ers don't need to become experts in political game theory, but if they learn what the real pressure points are in our corrupted system, they should be able to re-focus their energy and idealism to lead the charge to bring about real change.
* Actually, according to
Nathan Aschbacher, (who knows some game theory) the long term trend is to a single dominant party
A first-past-the-post system doesn’t actually incentivize two parties. It incentivizes one party. Because the outcome is winner-take-all, the trend amongst players in the game is to appeal to the criteria that they most believe will win them the plurality; as such, over time the two broad coalitions (parties) that form will trend further toward significant overlap as they both chase the same set of criteria. In American politics today that criteria centers largely around big-money; which is why both parties have become pro-corporate parties. New Democrat neoliberalism is the real-world manifestation of first-past-the-post game theory probabilistic outcomes.
I can actually show the mathematics that derives this conclusion if you like, but I don’t have a very good way to display the theorems and show my work in plaintext, and I don’t know how to add images to comments, so we’d have to find some other forum of display. There are ********* of books on this topic though, three of the seminal works are on my shelf thanks to that good ol’ Comp Sci curriculum.
