Posts with the tag grassroots

Venezuela's Popular Power

Liberaltarian — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 12:05:13 EDT

An interesting rundown of some of the fascinating on-the-ground changes happening in Venezuela at the moment.

The creation of communal councils, legally recognised in April 2006, served to bring together these different sectoral organisations around discussing and acting upon a local development plan.

The idea behind the councils is that it be the communities themselves that diagnose the local problems, democratically decide on the tasks to be solved and, with funding from the national, regional and municipal budgets, begin to tackle these basic problems.

According to Farias, there are currently 36,000 communal councils.

I'd love to see a documentary about these budding institutions. While Obama merely talks about "from the bottom up," average Venezuelans are actually living it.

EDIT: Wikipedia actually has a great systematic look at the structure/function of communal councils. Sweet! Participatory democracy = awesome. Capitalism, not so much.

This kind of innovation is just the kind of experimentation that cretins like Youth for Western Civilization would oppose.

Ron Paul's Amazing Race

Matt Szewczyk — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:05:28 EST

$4.2 million in one day, not too shabby.

Analysts say Ron Paul's traditionally conservative constitutionalism and his "Out- of-Iraq" foreign policy give him broad support.

Could Ron Paul be the first legitimate dark-horse candidate in modern history?

How to Court a Millenial

Jesse Singal — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 19:24:41 EDT

A few hours ago I attended "We Voted, Now What?: Building A Youth Movement," a panel discussion over at the Take Back America conference. The panelists, moderated by Anna Lefer of the Open Society Institute, came from a variety of progressive organizations. Lefer noted that conservatives pour $40 million a year into youth development, and that millenials (that is, Americans born between 1977 and 1997) are the largest and most diverse generation in American history. Millenials, in other words, are up for grabs, and the panelists that followed outlined some of the ways progressives can work toward appealing to them and building a long-term majority.