Terry Cooke, 2010 Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, talks about the recent visit to the U.S. of Chinese President Hu Jintao and the current status of U.S.-China cooperation in renewable energy, recorded from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on February 7, 2011
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Travis Bradford on "Solar Revolution"
Travis Bradford, Founder, President, and Director of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, talks about the ideas in his 2006 book "Solar Revolution," recorded from Chicago, Illinois, on February 8, 2011
Friday, February 4, 2011
Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry is “monitoring” state’s Smart Initiatives bill
Asked this afternoon about the lobbying group’s views on Nebraska Legislative Bill 566 (LB 566), Jamie Karl, Vice President of Public Affairs and Policy at the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry told Etopia News “We don’t have a position on it; we’re just monitoring it at this point.”
He didn’t recognize the bill by its number, but seemed to respond with alacrity when informed that it was the pending Smart Initiatives bill , which would allow Nebraskans to sign initiative, referendum, and recall petitions electronically online.
The Chamber of Commerce and Industry was among the largest contributors to the 2008 election campaign of two members of the state’s unicameral legislature’s Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, which will hold a hearing on LB 566 in late February or early March.
According to information on the Ballotpedia website, the Chamber contributed $3,400 to the campaign of Nebraska State Senator Charlie Janssen and $1,500 to the campaign of Nebraska State Senator Rich Pahls.
Given that no member of the committee that’s going to hear it, except for the bill’s author , nor Governor Dave Heineman , has yet taken a public position on the Smart Initiatives measure, one has to wonder how much “monitoring” the Chamber needs to do to stay on top of the bill’s progress.
He didn’t recognize the bill by its number, but seemed to respond with alacrity when informed that it was the pending Smart Initiatives bill , which would allow Nebraskans to sign initiative, referendum, and recall petitions electronically online.
The Chamber of Commerce and Industry was among the largest contributors to the 2008 election campaign of two members of the state’s unicameral legislature’s Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, which will hold a hearing on LB 566 in late February or early March.
According to information on the Ballotpedia website, the Chamber contributed $3,400 to the campaign of Nebraska State Senator Charlie Janssen and $1,500 to the campaign of Nebraska State Senator Rich Pahls.
Given that no member of the committee that’s going to hear it, except for the bill’s author , nor Governor Dave Heineman , has yet taken a public position on the Smart Initiatives measure, one has to wonder how much “monitoring” the Chamber needs to do to stay on top of the bill’s progress.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Governor of Nebraska has not taken a position on LB 566, Nebraska’s “Smart Initiative” bill
In an exclusive comment to Etopia News, since no one else has cared enough to ask, Governor Dave Heineman, said today through a spokesperson that he “has not taken a public position on this bill [Legislative Bill 566] and will do so if or when it makes it to his desk.”
Legislative Bill 566 , authored by Nebraska State Senator Paul Schumacher, would allow Nebraskans to use “state-qualified data” to authenticate themselves online while signing initiative, referendum, and recall petitions electronically.
Polled recently by Etopia News, most members of the Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee have said they will wait for the hearing on the bill before making up their minds on the legislation. A hearing on the bill has not yet been scheduled, but is expected to take place late in February or early March.
Senator Schumacher has said he thinks passage of this legislation is essential in order to counter recent court decisions and legislative changes that have made it almost impossible to qualify initiatives in the state. He’s said he does not think the bill will pass during the current session of the legislature.
Legislative Bill 566 , authored by Nebraska State Senator Paul Schumacher, would allow Nebraskans to use “state-qualified data” to authenticate themselves online while signing initiative, referendum, and recall petitions electronically.
Polled recently by Etopia News, most members of the Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee have said they will wait for the hearing on the bill before making up their minds on the legislation. A hearing on the bill has not yet been scheduled, but is expected to take place late in February or early March.
Senator Schumacher has said he thinks passage of this legislation is essential in order to counter recent court decisions and legislative changes that have made it almost impossible to qualify initiatives in the state. He’s said he does not think the bill will pass during the current session of the legislature.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Nebraska's "Smart Initiatives" bill is essential, but won't pass, says its author
Nebraska State Senator Paul Schumacher, author and sponsor of Legislative Bill 566 (LB566), which would create a “Smart Initiatives” system allowing Nebraska voters to electronically sign initiative and related petitions online, thinks that passing it is essential if the “people of Nebraska” are to remain “the second house” in the only state with a unicameral legislature. He doesn’t think, however, that the time is propitious for its passage in this session of that unicameral legislature, which he says will be “swamped in misery” dealing with Nebraska’s budget woes.
In an exclusive phone interview this afternoon with Etopia News, Senator Schumacher, who represents District 22 in the Nebraska legislature, explained how the state’s initiative rules were “reasonably healthy until the 1990s,” when a combination of court decisions and actions by the legislature made it increasingly difficult to collect the signatures required to qualify a proposed measure for the ballot.
These decisions included the substitution of the term “registered voters” for “electors” (people who actually voted) in the state constitution, which effectively doubled the number of signatures required. Also adding to the difficulties was a requirement that the signatures needed to be gathered in a large proportion of counties across the state. The addition of a vague “single subject” rule has meant that some proposed initiatives needed to be divided in several parts, each of which needed to get the required number of signatures.
All of these impediments made qualifying initiatives in Nebraska difficult but not impossible, he said. But the passage in 2008 of Legislative Bill 39, which imposed residency requirements on signature gatherers and prohibited paying them according to the number of signatures they collected effectively blocked, according to Senator Schumacher, any possible efforts to qualify ballot initiatives in the state.
So, in order to circumvent these restrictions, he’s introduced Legislative Bill 566 , which would set up a system for collecting electronic signatures online in support of ballot initiatives.
“Nebraska is in a unique position” with its unicameral legislature, he said, and for this reason “reserved the right of the people” to legislate through the initiative process, which he now thinks needs to include online signature gathering in order to remain viable.
“We know that all kinds of things can be done over the internet, including massive cash transfers,” he said, so why not be able to collect initiative signatures the same way? Collecting signature online, he added, allows this to be done without the need to “bother people on the street,” where they are susceptible to being harassed by “hawkers” and “anti-hawkers” sent out by opponents of a ballot measure.
Identification and authentication of the electronic signatures can be accomplished by relying on a variety of existing bits of digitally-stored data, including those associated with driver’s licenses, state taxes, or even from newly-created electronic records created when citizens make an online contribution to a special state maintenance fund set up to pay for the online signature gathering process itself.
Using this method to validate signatures, says Schumacher, is just as secure as “hiring people to be handwriting experts” to check manual signatures by hand. Allowing signatures to be gathered online, he argues, would address the problem created by the need to separate provisions of a measure into multiple petitions to satisfy the “single-subject” rule; would reduce the cost of circulating initiative petitions; and would generally increase the convenience of the process.
And, in order to provide another check on misuse of an electronic system, postcards would be mailed to everyone who electronically signed, notifying them that someone had signed in their name, and providing a means by which falsely submitted signatures could be weeded out.
Despite the advantages of cost and convenience, and the security with which signatures could be verified, Senator Schumacher does not think his bill will pass the legislature, at least not this year.
He says that this is primarily because the legislators will be “obsessed with the budget crisis” facing the state. “It’s not going to wind its way through the process,” he told Etopia News.
Nevertheless, he said it was “integral” to democracy in Nebraska that the right of initiative be preserved as a “viable tradition” in the state. “We have to figure out a way to do it, in order to bring ourselves into the 21st century and to retain the status of the people as the second house of Nebraska.”
(In violation of this article's own "single-subject" rule, it might be noted that the European Union, a political jurisdiction containing roughly 500 million people [approximately 250 times that of Nebraska], has already adopted Smart Initiatives in the form of the European Citizens' Initiative [ECI], which is discussed in detail by the Institute for Initiative and Referendum-Europe's President, Bruno Kaufmann, in a remotely-recorded video interview from Etopia News here.)
In an exclusive phone interview this afternoon with Etopia News, Senator Schumacher, who represents District 22 in the Nebraska legislature, explained how the state’s initiative rules were “reasonably healthy until the 1990s,” when a combination of court decisions and actions by the legislature made it increasingly difficult to collect the signatures required to qualify a proposed measure for the ballot.
These decisions included the substitution of the term “registered voters” for “electors” (people who actually voted) in the state constitution, which effectively doubled the number of signatures required. Also adding to the difficulties was a requirement that the signatures needed to be gathered in a large proportion of counties across the state. The addition of a vague “single subject” rule has meant that some proposed initiatives needed to be divided in several parts, each of which needed to get the required number of signatures.
All of these impediments made qualifying initiatives in Nebraska difficult but not impossible, he said. But the passage in 2008 of Legislative Bill 39, which imposed residency requirements on signature gatherers and prohibited paying them according to the number of signatures they collected effectively blocked, according to Senator Schumacher, any possible efforts to qualify ballot initiatives in the state.
So, in order to circumvent these restrictions, he’s introduced Legislative Bill 566 , which would set up a system for collecting electronic signatures online in support of ballot initiatives.
“Nebraska is in a unique position” with its unicameral legislature, he said, and for this reason “reserved the right of the people” to legislate through the initiative process, which he now thinks needs to include online signature gathering in order to remain viable.
“We know that all kinds of things can be done over the internet, including massive cash transfers,” he said, so why not be able to collect initiative signatures the same way? Collecting signature online, he added, allows this to be done without the need to “bother people on the street,” where they are susceptible to being harassed by “hawkers” and “anti-hawkers” sent out by opponents of a ballot measure.
Identification and authentication of the electronic signatures can be accomplished by relying on a variety of existing bits of digitally-stored data, including those associated with driver’s licenses, state taxes, or even from newly-created electronic records created when citizens make an online contribution to a special state maintenance fund set up to pay for the online signature gathering process itself.
Using this method to validate signatures, says Schumacher, is just as secure as “hiring people to be handwriting experts” to check manual signatures by hand. Allowing signatures to be gathered online, he argues, would address the problem created by the need to separate provisions of a measure into multiple petitions to satisfy the “single-subject” rule; would reduce the cost of circulating initiative petitions; and would generally increase the convenience of the process.
And, in order to provide another check on misuse of an electronic system, postcards would be mailed to everyone who electronically signed, notifying them that someone had signed in their name, and providing a means by which falsely submitted signatures could be weeded out.
Despite the advantages of cost and convenience, and the security with which signatures could be verified, Senator Schumacher does not think his bill will pass the legislature, at least not this year.
He says that this is primarily because the legislators will be “obsessed with the budget crisis” facing the state. “It’s not going to wind its way through the process,” he told Etopia News.
Nevertheless, he said it was “integral” to democracy in Nebraska that the right of initiative be preserved as a “viable tradition” in the state. “We have to figure out a way to do it, in order to bring ourselves into the 21st century and to retain the status of the people as the second house of Nebraska.”
(In violation of this article's own "single-subject" rule, it might be noted that the European Union, a political jurisdiction containing roughly 500 million people [approximately 250 times that of Nebraska], has already adopted Smart Initiatives in the form of the European Citizens' Initiative [ECI], which is discussed in detail by the Institute for Initiative and Referendum-Europe's President, Bruno Kaufmann, in a remotely-recorded video interview from Etopia News here.)
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
“Smart Initiatives” might fit the bill in the Middle East, too.
As Nebraskans start discussing “Smart Initiatives” and Europeans move steadily forward towards implementing them throughout the EU , the time may have arrived to consider this approach to direct democracy, which allows citizens to propose legislation using online electronic signature gathering, as part of the evolving transition to democracy in North Africa and the Middle East.
Much discussion has already taken place about possible paths towards democracy for previously-authoritarian states. One approach (“invasion and nation-building”) was that applied by the Bush Administration to transition Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship to an American-compliant form of “democracy.” A similar effort is still underway in Afghanistan, and, obviously, still faces a lot of problems.
American democracy grew out of centuries of previous evolution towards the rule of law and representative government in England and in the colonies. It’s not surprising that countries and cultures with radically-different histories don’t easily slip into their own versions of the Jeffersonian democratic ideal.
Tunisia, and now Egypt, represent a different path from dictatorship to democracy. Two fundamental aspects of these two revolutions are their decentralized, leaderless form and their mediation by electronic social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and related technologies.
The “law of uneven development” argues that societies can often transition directly from a less-developed form to a more-developed one without having to go through the transitional states characteristic of societies that have evolved further, but more slowly, to a certain state.
Phone technology is a prime example of this law. Cellular telephony is now more ubiquitous in Africa than landlines, which never really penetrated deeply into the society. Farmers and others in Africa, in some cases skipping ahead even of their counterparts in more developed countries, can now use their cell phones to manage their businesses in real time. Money can be transferred directly using cell phone networks from village to village and from village to city. The law of uneven development has allowed Africans to go from “no phones” to “advanced digital cellular networks” in much less time than it took the West to deploy its landline networks, without going through that part of the development process themselves.
Similarly, the largely-leaderless and Internet-mediated revolts in Tunisia and Egypt point to the possibility that governance there could also skip transitional democratic structures and go directly to an Internet-centric, directly-democratic form, employing, at a minimum, some form of Smart Initiatives, as are now being implemented in the European Union under terms of the Lisbon Treaty.
These rebellions have been powered by Internet-savvy social networkers much of whose organizing has been done online. They are looking for new ways of governing themselves that allow for collaboration and cooperation. They have already demonstrated to themselves and the world that they can use these digital tools to achieve great things through collaboration and cooperation.
Maybe it’s time for them and us to think about the possibility of continuing their explorations into new forms of democracy by letting them use the Internet to formulate policy and aggregate popular demands for specific legislation through a form of Smart Initiatives similar to the one now being implemented in Europe and starting to be considered in Nebraska.
Of course, universal broadband Internet access for everyone in these society is necessary for Smart Initiatives to be implemented fairly and for reasons of justice and equity. That’s another goal worth vigorously pursuing, not least for its ability to enable Smart Initiatives (and someday, Internet voting), but also for its economic, social, cultural, and ecological benefits.
Finally, implementing Smart Initiatives in the new democracies of North Africa and the Middle East could serve as an inspiration for our own adoption of this method as a way of strengthening and broadening democracy back here in the United States. Then we can benefit from the law of uneven development ourselves.
Much discussion has already taken place about possible paths towards democracy for previously-authoritarian states. One approach (“invasion and nation-building”) was that applied by the Bush Administration to transition Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship to an American-compliant form of “democracy.” A similar effort is still underway in Afghanistan, and, obviously, still faces a lot of problems.
American democracy grew out of centuries of previous evolution towards the rule of law and representative government in England and in the colonies. It’s not surprising that countries and cultures with radically-different histories don’t easily slip into their own versions of the Jeffersonian democratic ideal.
Tunisia, and now Egypt, represent a different path from dictatorship to democracy. Two fundamental aspects of these two revolutions are their decentralized, leaderless form and their mediation by electronic social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and related technologies.
The “law of uneven development” argues that societies can often transition directly from a less-developed form to a more-developed one without having to go through the transitional states characteristic of societies that have evolved further, but more slowly, to a certain state.
Phone technology is a prime example of this law. Cellular telephony is now more ubiquitous in Africa than landlines, which never really penetrated deeply into the society. Farmers and others in Africa, in some cases skipping ahead even of their counterparts in more developed countries, can now use their cell phones to manage their businesses in real time. Money can be transferred directly using cell phone networks from village to village and from village to city. The law of uneven development has allowed Africans to go from “no phones” to “advanced digital cellular networks” in much less time than it took the West to deploy its landline networks, without going through that part of the development process themselves.
Similarly, the largely-leaderless and Internet-mediated revolts in Tunisia and Egypt point to the possibility that governance there could also skip transitional democratic structures and go directly to an Internet-centric, directly-democratic form, employing, at a minimum, some form of Smart Initiatives, as are now being implemented in the European Union under terms of the Lisbon Treaty.
These rebellions have been powered by Internet-savvy social networkers much of whose organizing has been done online. They are looking for new ways of governing themselves that allow for collaboration and cooperation. They have already demonstrated to themselves and the world that they can use these digital tools to achieve great things through collaboration and cooperation.
Maybe it’s time for them and us to think about the possibility of continuing their explorations into new forms of democracy by letting them use the Internet to formulate policy and aggregate popular demands for specific legislation through a form of Smart Initiatives similar to the one now being implemented in Europe and starting to be considered in Nebraska.
Of course, universal broadband Internet access for everyone in these society is necessary for Smart Initiatives to be implemented fairly and for reasons of justice and equity. That’s another goal worth vigorously pursuing, not least for its ability to enable Smart Initiatives (and someday, Internet voting), but also for its economic, social, cultural, and ecological benefits.
Finally, implementing Smart Initiatives in the new democracies of North Africa and the Middle East could serve as an inspiration for our own adoption of this method as a way of strengthening and broadening democracy back here in the United States. Then we can benefit from the law of uneven development ourselves.
Bruno Kaufmann updates the ECI story
Bruno Kaufmann, President of the Institute for Initiative and Referendum-Europe, talks about his recent trip to Germany, Brussels, and Vienna, during which he collected new information about the deployment of the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI), recorded from Falun, Sweden, on February 1, 2011
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