At 13:06 -0400 5/31/99, Steve Kurtz wrote:
>Dear Thomas,
>
>re:
>> The real question
>> is which ideology should be dominant - democracy or capitalism. The people
>> continually, whether marxists, socialists or capitalists, at their human
>> individual level, continually opt for more security. The problem to me
>> seems less in how we elect them, but rather in how we can make them produce
>> the effects they promise.
>
>
>I agree with you here. George Soros has come to the same conclusion, at
>least the way I read you both.
>
William Greider in *Who Will Tell the People?* points out that the
intermediary institutions that connect the citizenry with their
representatives have been weakened (as in the case of labor unions) or
taken over by the power elite (the media). Without institutions of this
kind, the voters are limited to an up or down vote every four years. A
representative government, by itself, is no panacea for the abuses of power.
The problem is to either rebuild the existing intermediary institutions or
come up with new ones - I believe it was Robert Theobald who called for
"social entrepreneurship". Robert Putnam of Harvard has done considerable
work on voluntary civil institutions: http://epn.org/prospect/putn-cor.html
Tom Lowe
_____________________________________________________________________
Tom Lowe Judge a moth
Jackson, Mississippi by the beauty of its candle
[EMAIL PROTECTED] -Rumi
http://www.jacksonprogressive.com
