A Quote by Franklin Foer
There's this proud American tradition of worrying about the power of communication companies. That going all the way back to the founding, we've tried to limit the power of monopolies that played a role in our democracy.
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Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple are among the most powerful monopolies in the history of humanity. So, the problem is, is that they have tremendous ability to shape the way that we think, the way that we filter the world, the way that we absorb culture. And if they were just companies, maybe we shouldn't be so concerned about them, but they play an incredibly vital role in the health of our democracy.
On first blush this looks to be about money, but it is about power. Is power going to go to the information monopolies, or will it go to developers and users?.
To call the American role in the world imperial was, for many who did so, a way of asserting that the United States was misusing its power beyond its borders and, in so doing, subverting its founding political principles within them.
The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy.
Political civility is not about being polite to each other. It's about reclaiming the power of 'We the People' to come together, debate the common good and call American democracy back to its highest values amid our differences.
What worries me most about Trump, other than all of the other crazy things, is that I believe that he wants power and I believe from my point of view that power corrupts, and that the whole purpose of our founding fathers and America was to contain power.
Despite my great disappointment in American foreign policy, I am very proud of the American tradition of wild land conservation. It is the best tradition and example of land conservation in the world. It goes back a long way.
Rights are not the language of democracy. Compromise is what democracy is about. Rights are the language of freedom, and are absolute because their role is to protect our liberty. By using the absolute power of freedom to accomplish reforms of democracy, we have undermined democracy and diminished our freedom.
Relationships are never about power, and one way to avoid the will to power is to choose to limit oneself - to serve.
The problems that exist on Wall Street today go to the center of a debate in this country about wealth and democracy. We cannot keep our democracy if those who are in charge of handling the engines of our economy are not honest with their shareholders. That's why there is a role for government regulation here. That role for government is breaking up the monopolies, insisting on public disclosure, insisting on public audits, insisting on restitution whenever someone has been cheated.
You are already leaders. Your ideas, your actions and your decisions make a difference. More than any other generation, you have a voice. Social networking is changing how we interact - and it can change our world. You are in touch with peers from around the world. You understand the power of instant communication. I appeal to you to use that power for the common good, the power of communication and the power of networking.
When they talk about family values, it's in a repressive way, as if our American tradition were only the Puritan tradition or the 19th century oppressive tradition. The Christian tradition.
There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.
Our Founding Fathers well understood that concentrated power is the enemy of liberty and the rights of man. They knew that the American experiment in individual liberty, free enterprise and republican self-government could succeed only if power were widely distributed. And since in any society social and political power flow from economic power, they saw that wealth and property would have to be widely distributed among the people of the country. The truth of this insight is immediately apparent.
We Indians do not teach that there is only one god. We know that everything has power, including the most inanimate, inconsequential things. Stones have power. A blade of grass has power. Trees and clouds and all our relatives in the insect and animal world have power. We believe we must respect that power by acknowledging it's presence. By honoring the power of the spirits in that way, it becomes our power as well. It protects us.
In a democracy, supposedly we hold power by what we do at the ballot box, so therefore the more we know about political power the better our choices should be and the better, in theory, our democracy should be.
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