Organizing and unleashing two-fisted democracy power at a treadmill pace

My Assessment of the Two NGOs' Achievements

Clearly the Center has achieved some immediate outcomes such as building up a miniature bureaucracy and linking to a network of some grassroots organizations and alliances. As for whether there have been any proximal achievements, let's take a look at the Center's focal issue area of "criminal justice and mass incarceration." Listed are the most recent lawsuits, petitions, and amicus briefs, 17 all told. The outcomes of some are still pending and some have been settled. Whether some of these cases represent proximal achievements is a judgment call hardly worth making considering that with so much emphasis by the Center on prison reform, the website's internal search engine incredulously came up blank on the topic of "privatization of prisons and work camps." Turning prisons and work camps into corporate profit centers will swell the overflowing prisons and camps even more and worsen treatment of the incarcerated and confined.

Without taking a fine tooth comb through the Center's website and annual report to detect any proximal outcomes for the other focal issues I am just going to assume that given the Center's wherewithal it conceivably has achieved a few such outcomes here and there. I was surprised, however, not to find any remarkable activity by the Center on the critical Constitutional issue of corporate personhood. I would think on this issue alone the Center would be right in the think of the battle.

Common Cause makes it much easier to find its achievements because they are listed chronologically in the "History and Accomplishments" section of the NGO's site (even though the site is current, for whatever reason the list ends in 2008). There are 22 accomplishments listed. I sorted them by focal issue. Two combined, "ethics in government," and "elections and voting" accounted for more than half of the items listed. In my opinion none exceed the proximal level and some seem almost preposterous at face value. Take "ethics in government." Who's kidding whom here? Or take "money in politics," represented only twice on the list. The headline on the NGO's home page that I saw on February 16 read "President Obama's signal to Super PACs is disappointing" and the text went on to lament that "President Obama's signal that he wants wealthy donors to support a Super PAC backing his re-election is disappointing, though not unexpected given the fundraising arms race that the presidential campaign has become." Face reality Common Cause. It will take some dramatic and sweeping reforms before we see the end of bought elections and the automatic trading of favors that ensues at the expense of Americans' general welfare. To be fair to Common Cause, the entire lot of NGOs is not even remotely close to ending bought elections and bribery, and doing so would only be a penultimate achievement, not an ultimate one.

My overall assessment of these two NGOs is that their work is going like mine, at treadmill pace. The two NGOs are spending enormous amounts of donor money and enormous energy and seem to have mostly activity reports to show for it all.

Three plausible explanations come to mind for the rejections and non-replies I have been getting so far. NGOs work hard to establish their "turf" and want to protect its boundaries. NGOs, like most of us, resist change, and organizing and unleashing two-fisted democracy power certainly constitutes a radical change. NGOs' very existence depends more on occasionally winning tactical battles with the corpocracy than on actually ending it.

Where is America Headed?

The nation ceased to exist.

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