Political Sociology of Social Media: working papers

What is the role of authorship in the social context of Web 2.0? In order to begin to understand the transformation that has taken place - reshaping the institution of authorship as it existed previously to the expansion of Web 2.0 - it is useful to begin by examining the changes in many of the legalities thatare attached to Web 2.0 authorship. For and foremost, legal institutions have been developed such as the Creative Commons licensing, which effectively remove many of the prohibitions that are associated with the use and re-appropriation of materials that were once restricted due to the rights associated with the proprietorship of publicly available documents. The expression, “Share and share alike,” has become a common phrase - in the context of Web 2.0 - indicating that the use of material authored by another is only restricted if one attempts to lay claim to that work in a way that reflects more traditional conventions embedded in authorship that demand reference and citation as well as only non-monetary benefits that might result from possessing a copy of another’s work. A Creative Commons is typically tailored in order to allow others to use one’s work for commercial purposes as long as they make that work available for others to similarly benefit from its existence. Although the seloss of proprietorship once attached to instances of authorship is certainly not the only form that canbe assumed by a Creative Commons License, it does reflect to preponderance of uses associated witha Creative Commons. Further, the conventions set out by GNU also reflect the loss of the legacy ofauthorship,which extend implications from the institution of property, in order to abandon the effectsof more conventional institutions dictating the meaning and social consequences of property in favorof the ramifications concomitant with sharing and sharing alike.

What can be inferred from the preceding that might shed light on the appropriate path of inquiry for understanding the meaning of authorship in Web 2.0? First off, the use of the term, “Commons,” certainly possesses semantic significations that extend beyond the lexicon’s role in forming a distinctive referring expression. the Commons is an institution that entails an absence of private property, in order to create a field of resources that is publicly available - and the public in the traditional formations of the institution of the Commons only extended to include those who could lay claim to opportunities to access the resources by membership to a Peoples or a Public. The same description holds sway in the context of Web 2.0, because membership to the Public entails the adoption of the conventions and ethics associated with institutions, such as sharing and sharing alike, which provide qualifications that must be met in order to obtain a status of membership in the public. This does not entail an interpretation of Web 2.0 communities as exclusionary, because such an adoption of the aforementioned conventions is not something that ascribes a status of outsider to anyone who electsor desires to enter into the social contract defining the Commons.

To further tease out the significations of the role of authorship in the context of Web 2.0, it is advantageous to look at social institution that belongs to a field of social activity that falls outside the Commons, but nevertheless produces commodities that are relevant to the resources sought in the Commons, and attempts to benefit from the integration of some of its intellectual projects into the open field of resources constituting the Commons. The recent developments in Microsoft’s releasing of programming for purposes of engendering open-sourcing communities under the auspices of peculiar licenses is of interest because it is demonstrativeof an entity that is attempting to come to terms with Web 2.0 while continuing to promote its own interests, which are defined in the context of alternative - sometimes competing - social fields shaped by different conventions and conceptualizations of social institutions such as property. Microsoft seems to allow for the use, modification, and enhancement of its code. However, it insists on implementing a restriction forbidding the live deployment of applications, derived from Microsoft coding, by independent developers without the expressed consent of Microsoft. The licensing agreement is certainly more complex than the description provided above; nevertheless, the preceding encapsulation appears to be the understanding that is circulating among programming communities coalescing around message boards and so forth, so I shall use it for the time being. This is an issue that calls for further exploration due to its relevancy in the more general considerations concerning the form that has been assumed by authorship in the changing environment of knowledge development and distribution.

There appears to be a slight stir regarding the impending irrelevancy of traditional academic journals and the formalized processes they enact when formulating their contents, which, of course, consist of submissions made by contributors to the field. The specific social process that is followed during the decision making regarding whose work merits publication - referred to as peer review - is conducted by established members of the discipline, who assess the scholarly merit of submissions according to the standards that they adopt, propagate and revision. The exclusionary properties instantiated by this internal decision making process, only including the input of those who are already recognized as dominant members of the profession, is rapidly becoming obsolescent, due to the publicity that is provided by online venues of representational space. This availability of representational space that is not controlled and distributed by an oligarchy of alleged experts - and we certainly have no reason to suspect that they are anything other than experts, since they are also charged with determining what qualities are consistent with one’s possession of expertise - has already motivated in one case a formidable figure in mathematics, from Russia, to bypass the peer review of the academy, and, instead, publish his work directly on an online journal that provides.These are important developments for the following reasonings: The products of academic research should be freely available to the people who fund it. In short, if my taxes are responsible for the funding of research - such as my taxes contributing to the budget of state universities - then I should not have to pay Blackwell - or, even worse, Nature - to read the conclusions derived from the research I have, in part, paid for. Additionally - and this is related to the erosion of the powers traditionally wielded by the oligarchs of disciplinarity - the pursuit of knowledge should not be predicated upon professional membership; rather, it should be founded upon a social condition that is open and inclusive, engendering a positive attitude toward epistemic pluralism, where social identities and individual biographies are not parsed, for purposes of determining who exhibits the semiology of professionalism, when assessing the merits of the work. Instead, in the tradition of Popperian philosophy, objectivism should be the measure determining the inclusion of contents into the agreed upon knowledge belonging to any particular field of study.Russell Cole

Democracy is an egalitarian space for a multiplicity of perspectives. No one perspective, or standpoint, is prioritized over other perspectives unless it happens to meet at a particular time and place the needs, stemming from the contingencies of the present, as they are understood by a variety of standpoints - who have come to know one another; understand one another; by performing the hermeneutic task of ascertaining the alien; in total, formed a community--an intersection of subjectivities. Democracy in its purest form is the synthesis of hermeneutics with pragmatism. It is a communal value that respects diversity of opinion concerning values and facts, and chooses among the divergent beliefs of different worldviews according to their ability to solve problems; and, we must say that the problems must be mutually recognized by the various parties that form the wholeness of the community. One might say that nobody has the right to his own facts, but the fact of the matter is that what determines what is a fact is a product of one's values. In Western cultures, for instance, we believe that an aspect of objective reality can only consider something a fact if it is publicly verifiable. In other cultures, there might be different evaluative principles involved in determining what constitutes a fact, or a part of the 'real' world, assuming that the alien culture has a corridor of Truth in their worldview that allows for what is equivalent in our cosmology to an objective assertoric proposition--a fact. Furthermore, we must recognize that democracy is a community of communities in the egard that there exists a collection of diverse worldviews generated from different standpoints in society. Individual communities coalesce around these standpoints. To summarize this passage of writings, we have come to the conclusion that only hermeneutics is universal and the methodology contained therein, as Gadamer postulates, is the only universal facet of the collective traditions comprising humanity's Being-in-the-World. Democracy is the practice of hermeneutics in conjunction with the practice of pragmatics conducted under the auspices of mutual recognition within an egalitarian, communicative social space, where such a fusion of horizons, allowing agreement to arise, and solutions to be consented upon, concerning the resolution of a social problem that has been identified. As a slogan we can say, Sameness is derivative of difference. Russell Cole

From perusing the literature there appears to be a tendency to assess the impact of information technologies adoption by an organization according to either structural alterations that are engendered by the incorporation of the new technological resources or by the impact of the technology to the existing organizational processes that lead to the elevation of the organization’ performance. Although the former of these two considerations seems to be a proper mode of inquiry, the latter lacks clarity and a definitive sense, since the criteria, which one would assume to consist of the quantifiable dimensions of the organization’s output are left undefined and, indeed, somewhat detached from the constituent ethos that have developed in the organization, which might instantiate reflexive awarenesses among the members of the social entity that do not coincide with the imperatives that a culturally alien sociologist might impose as the teleological properties: the organizational outputs that can be quantified in order to establishment measurements of the organization's productivity. Case in point, in my younger years I would often work in warehouses, typically as a Teamster, during the summer or periods where money was in short supply. From my experiences, the productivity of the organization, which can be delineated as the warehouse, itself, was not a concern of mine or any of the other employees. We only contributed to a level of output that would prevent punitive actions, taken against the union workers. We certainly did not pay notice to improving the efficiency and performance of warehouse to any extent that exceeded the bare necessities, which we calculated as the minimum level of output that would prevent interdiction by management. Consequently, there were competing interests embedded in the differing practices of the wage-earners as opposed to the management. Therefore, which organization is a sociologist to render in his or her descriptions resulting from his or her observations; the organization as it is understood and interpreted by management, or the organization as it was conceived within the ethos of the laborers? Further, was the warehouse a single organization or was it a network that instantiated relationships between and among its nodes that calls for a far greater level of analytical sophistication than what is conventionally applied within the context of the practice of organizational theory. Of course, one could contend that the organization is certainly to be perceived according to the managerial interpretive pattern, since their interests often coincide with the interests of the capitalists who have legal claim to the property and materials. This angle of analysis might lead someone to the adoption of a neo-Marxist organizational theory. However, what are we to make of social events, such as the Homestead riots, where the workers most definitely considered the steel plant to be a resource belonging to something akin to the commons. Carnegie’s claim to proprietorship was in conflict with the laborers understanding of the plant, who did not see themselves as alienated from the commodities being manufactured nor the modes of production used to produce the commodities. The plant was theirs. It was a extension of the community, and the zeal demonstrated by the Homestead residents who successfully out shot the Pinkerton assassins, who were hired to by Carnegie’s to seize the plant from the union members. As a result of these considerations, we must reevaluate the core of organizational theory, and the accuracy of the concepts and patterns of interpretation that are typically deployed by organizational theorists when endeavoring to come to terms with social interactions that are thought to constitute social organizations. The Changes to Business Culture resulting from the proliferation of Web 2.0 The emergence of Web 2.0 has often attracted a gluttony of negative commentary by people who do not entirely understand what Web 2.0 is and, subsequently, what it entails. Now, there is some truth to the relationship between Web 2.0 and the quantum increases in bandwidth that are primarily being created through the investments of ISPs. However, the necessary increase in the distribution of bandwidth is only requisite for Web 2.0 and is not one of its defining characteristics. Furthermore, as long as Net Neutrality is maintained, we need not concern ourselves over the egalitarian distribution of bandwidth, because there will be provisions requiring providers to make bandwidth available according to pricing schemes that are affordable to a broad spectrum of American consumers. This is not to say that more does not need to be done to improve accessibility of high-speed Internet connections for all segments of the population. However, this does exclude arguments against Web 2.0 that rely upon futuristic hypotheses prognosticating the establishment of a stratified consumer market consisting of the haves and the have nots. Web 2.0 is a paradigmatic shift is the way software development is conceived and practiced. It involves a flattening of the traditional vertical structures comprising of the vendors who have the resources to dominate the market and smaller startups that hope to grow into profitable outfits. Additionally, the traditional boundaries between manufacturers and consumers is blurred, since all parties involved in this new configuration of development and end-use possess the ability to assume different capacities in the relationships between and among identities within the market. Although, this pains me a great deal to acknowledge this, but there is a semblance of truth to the conditions predicted in the Army of Davids. Furthermore, new spaces of social knowledge production will be generated through the proliferation of Web-based servers that will facilitate collaborative, inclusive knowledge-production. To sum it all up under a description that can be considered the central crux of Web 2.0, Web-based applications that are primarily open-source, so to attract other developers to further enhance the functionality of the components belonging to the service and its Web-based applications, will become the norm for future software development. This optimistic account of the social conditions to follow the unfolding of the Web 2.0 revolution should not be interpreted as an indication that there is no more fight to be waged against the powerful and the privileged. Nevertheless, this does call for an approach to the advocacy for Electronic Democracy that embraces technological possibilities rather than simply implanting ourselves in the current landscape of the status quo, because we are too shortsighted to think of how things might be better, not just the continuation of the limited positive aspects that we currently enjoy. Russell Cole

The Populist Party of America has scored a fairly massive hit from the inclusion of one of the articles it has recently published into Netscape’s social journalism network, which has referred over 75.000 hits of traffic to the Populist Party’s Web site in a single day. From looking around I detected a swarm of buzz regarding the site from bloggers who had just been introduced to its contents. This will be interesting to monitor in order to assess whether this has long term ramifications.

The project referred to as Internet 2.0 in a collective endeavor intended to cultivate an resource that is not partitioned by the institution of privatization. Rather this social cooperative constitutes a social activity comparable to the Commons in English history. How would a neoliberal respond to this social phenomenon and the benefits that it promises to foster for all who care to access its resources?

The invocation of an allusion to the now closed social institution known as the Commons is certainly appropriate in this circumstance. The work that is being done under the auspices of Internet 2, which is based upon a new protocol for objects connected to the Internet that optimizes the process drastically involved in the procedures implemented for these devices to successfully communicate, correctly recognizing one another’s queries, requests, and responses, so the enable the transmission of information from the respective counterparts in the exchange. This is in its present form a cooperative project engaged in by various technologically inclined as well as socially adept collaborators, who are not directly, immediately profiting from the efforts expended in the promotion of this project, resulting in the proliferation of nodes constituting the objects instantiating the relationships with the consented upon values, which engender the type of exchange described in the crude explanation of the mechanisms enacted in the communications among computational objects belonging the expansive grid which embodies the properties subsumed under the concept, Internet. At the same time, however - although the motive of profiteering can only be considered a distant, uncertain, motivation - this community persists in its labors to create a

shared resource that possesses the potential to provide for resources far more extensible than the current environment manifests. I suppose this could be explained by some extension of Game Theory, according to complex functions multiplied in protracted calculates, with indeterminations, rendering the system, in fact, only a mutually depended alignment of estimations.

I would exposit, as an alternative mode of understanding, a conceptualization that inculcates a Zeitgeist, in a qualified sense, modifying the meaning of this Hegelian concept from its typical use. It is certainly a spirit of the particular age in which we find ourselves, but under another pattern of interpretation it is the continuation of a theme that refuses to be extinguished despite the best efforts of the provincial interests embodied by antagonistic manifestations of aspects to the Spirit, such as neoliberalism, which would care for nothing more than the privatization of this resurfacing form of humanity referred to as the propertied-less spaces called the Commons.

Russ Cole

Et Tu, Democrats!

I had never imagined that such a thing as Super-delegates could exist in the Democratic Party, until the media â?? due to the pending significance to political outcomes that this obscure classification of Party Membership might have â?? finally illuminated for the public this vile aspect of the Party structure; a component to the Democrat's primary process that is exemplary all of the worse values and qualities that have defined the ethos possessed by the privileged factions in this country, who have endeavored â?? since this Nation's inception â?? to monopolize its political institutions as much as possible while, nevertheless, maintaining a façade of democracy.

These anti-democratic patterns of political behavior â?? which spawn from ideological convictions that are so deeply entrenched that they qualify as genetic coding: the building blocks of American sociality â?? are embraced by a status that regards itself as uber-citizens: Those who possess self-alleged prowess and mental fitness enabling them not only to politically advocate their own interests, but to represent others in the process, despite the absence of any consent on the part of those for whom the elitist camp of surrogates will speak. The core of elitist collaborators, who ultimately control, to a large measure, the American system of government, relish the opportunity to insert complexities into the political operations of this country.

This amounts to a hierarchical inter-grouping of political decision-making bodies that distance â?? through the unnecessary multiplication of entities â?? the lowest common denominator of the American citizenry from the institutional spaces in which the final determinations, deciding the posture of American governance, are ultimately worked out. Take for instance, the use of proportionate voting on the part of the Democratic Party. When analyzed in isolation from a detached perspective, this appears to be a relatively simple and straight forward reform that is designed to increase the influence of those who are not members of electoral majorities; providing an alternative to the more conventional American electoral practice in which the winner takes all. However, when purveyed within a scope that includes other provisions, such as the practice of valuating the votes of particular districts in some States higher than the votes cast in other districts in the same State: a device used to reward geographically defined populations that have demonstrated higher levels of electoral support for past Democratic Presidential Candidates â?? we are quick to fine that no concise and generally intellectually accessible description of the primary processes can possibly be constructed. To cite another example of these excessively complicated processes, the State of Texas affords citizens the opportunity to vote twice in the Democratic Primary: once through a type of caucusing; the other instance by means of a primary ballot. I would endeavor to go on in further detail the primary selection practices, however, in order for me to do so, I would be pressed into conducting extensive investigations; a less than inspiring research project that would involve reading state party bylaws and state statutes as well as the National Democratic Party's Bylaws, so that I could eventually interrelate all of the various stipulations, emanating from different bodies, when arriving at some sense of the applicable procedures that ultimately dictate how this ridiculous carnival is performed.

Because of this condition â?? what we can call political scholasticism â?? an inquiring layman, who is struggling to come to terms with the Primary selection process, will soon find himself lost in the convoluted mesh mash of procedures belonging to this social construct that is awash in a sea of obfuscation. In fact, I would venture to suggest that an accurate and precise conception of these complexities can only be rendered by the Party-hack-scholastics; some of whom were, in part, responsible for crafting this monstrosity.

By extension, it surely is not spurious to suggest that there is a circuitous motivation inducing these insider-hacks into concocting what amounts to some kind of esoteric electoral alchemy: If one can monopolize the production of gold by virtue of a mastery of an arcane knowledge, then he would surely want his practices to remain opaque; or else, the precious metal could be produced by most anybody and it would fail to retain its special value. It would be partially reassuring if the Democratic Primaries were an anomaly when understood comparatively within the full scope of institutions and practices comprising American politics and governance. Unfortunately, however, ranging back to the very inception of the United States, we can trace the same sort of Byzantine procedures, creating the same types of obscure and sometimes convoluted governing practices. To cite an obvious exemplar, consider the Electoral Delegates: super-voters entrusted with the capacity of choosing the President.

Collectively, this body â?? which qualifies as an appendix in the sense that it is utterly extraneous to a democratic polity â?? counts as a democratically superfluous sub-aggregate, whose political purgatives procedurally preempt the Popular Will of the Citizenry: The common denominator that could, otherwise, in a more authentic democratic environment, select the President independently and directly; whereby a majority or, even, a plurality of votes cast would act as the final adjudicator when selecting a candidate for the High Office.

The institution of the Electoral College, concocted by our Constitutional Founders, marks a latency in our sociopolitical history: a subtext that follows a pattern in which the uber-citizenry â?? those feigning the embrace of democracy while, concurrently, enacting political obstructions serving to compromise the Popular Will â?? has persistently committed to praxis a political philosophy that essentially boils down to a doctrinaire attachment to a Tory exceptionalness. Taking into consideration this pattern of elitist, anti-democratic conduct on the part of the privileged few in our Country's history, one might ponder why there appears to be no resistance to this muffled, semi-tyrannical hegemony in our society.

First off, it should be mentioned that there have been popular insurrections against the American elites and the conditions they have endeavored to impose by virtue of the networked coordination of their economic and sociopolitical influences. The most salient instance of rebellion among American Plebes consisted of the formation of various Farmer Alliances and the People's Party they would come to conjointly form.

However, despite the poignancy of the first Populist Movement during the final decades of the Nineteenth Century, this episode in American sociopolitical relations has been predictably left relatively untreated by our educational institutions. This lack of attention to an extraordinary event in American history is understandable, due to the fact that the Agrarian Revolt does not fit into the preemptive interpretive pattern organizing how we are supposed to conceptualize the course of American history. A thorough study and understanding of the People's Party would expose contradictions to the Whiggish orthodoxy that enforces a dogmatic interpretation of American history in which democracy is in a state of perpetual improvement.

Therefore, the aforementioned question â?? why no rebellion to sociopolitical elitism? â?? is in need of reformulation: There have been a few, sparse uprisings to the old guard of American sociopolitical relations. However, why do we fail to treat these instances of American history hermeneutically? We neglect to come to an understanding of these instances according to their own terms and their own political self-understandings, along with the related complaints that they leveled against sociopolitical institutions that they regarded as oppressive; exploitative; unfair; or unfitting for a democracy to instantiate.

Rather, such incidents of insurrection find themselves excluded from the historical alacrity that is directed upon what are conventionally conceived as American sociopolitical accomplishments. In other words, historical events that are contrarian to the established ideological order are treated as transient deviations; inconsequential digressions, diverting consciousness away from the core thesis embodied by the American Experience: An overall process that tells of advancement and ongoing maturation of American Society and of the American State, as they evolve into a more democratic condition.

I would venture to assert that it is almost an Aristotelian metaphysics of political history: The American nation-state possesses an essence that is tantamount to its potentiality that it strives to actualize, which translates into a course of events where the essence of America protrudes and emerges; a process that parallels the advancement of perfecting democratic polity. The Whiggish character of American historical orthodoxy, however, cannot be attributed with the function of the sole antecedent precipitating the compliant and obedient dispositions that have been all too pervasively exhibited by American Plebes.

In order to understand the submissiveness among American Plebes, we need to direct our attention upon another factor; one whose indications are nearly ubiquitously represented within the glimpses we are offered of our Nation's governmental administrations we are fed via various streams of media. distributed political elitism is justified by virtue of an underlying polemical theme wherein their roles â?? the public roles of those assuming politically elitist statures â?? are of practical necessity. This necessity is reinforced by the arcane procedures and practices that have come to litter â?? and, in fact, dilute â?? American systems of democratic participatory polity. By creating a situation whereby the elites are the limited few who actually possess an operational understanding of the processes through which political decisions are made â?? whether in the party primaries; or, to cite another example, the parliamentary conventions of Congress â?? they incite participatory reticence on the part of outsiders â?? who have neglected to pass through the socializing institutions through which the Power Elite transmits its esoteric knowledge and reproduces itself. Thus, we arrive in our analysis at the concept, wonkish: a self-congratulatory expression chattered in self-reference by the governing elite. This terminology's meaning essentially boils down to the following definition: a state of public policy expertise.

The professionalization â?? (a concept that is most always predicated with the notion of expertise) â?? of politics resembles the historically recent trends in the rest of our society. Especially in the decades following the Information Revolution â?? which happened to transpire in a time span that overlapped with a movement in the American Academe toward the hyper-specialization of its professionalized disciplinarity â?? American governance has evolved into a condition that is sometimes referred to as technocracy. This political state can be characterized as one were the ability to formulate and administer public policy has become the province of technocrats in society; a form of plutocracy in which the common masses of citizenry no longer possess the knowledge and ability to fully participate in their political and governmental affairs. The task of governance has become highly compartmentalized, technical, and esoteric; whereas, seemingly, the only members of society who possess the necessary skills to govern are those trained in the specialized knowledge pursuits that are related to public policy concerns. The propagation of this class of public-policy-technocrats â?? which includes the politicians who are trained in the lawmaking rituals from which earmarks and other benefits are procured for constituencies â?? is justified by the following chimera: In order to administer government, one must possess the technocratic specializations associated with being a Wonk; or else, he would buckle under the enormity of the intellectual, technical challenges he would face, and he will be rendered impotent, incapable of effecting the desired outcomes from participation in the processes of polity and public administration. To quickly dispel such an polemic, which insists upon the necessity of a technocracy, we can reference recent history: The FBI, following the 9/11 Tragedy and the scrutiny it incited â?? which was directed upon the agencies of the Federal Government â?? it was found that the FBI possessed an antiquated information technology infrastructure; a partial explanation of the nearly unbelievable inability for the FBI "to Connect the dots." In short, the FBI's organization of information had yet to embrace mechanisms and processes associated with the informational economy and its digitalization of documents, that can, subsequently, be manipulated through computational machineries in order to find and establish relational values between and among the various types of information, which can be used in order to produce inferences regarding additional parameters. Although this seems nearly inconceivable, the FBI's manipulation of information was actualized, for the most part, in the deployment of pre-digital technologies, involving FBI employees sorting various document types, which embodied ink on paper, into filing cabinets. It should be mentioned, there was some sort of computerization extant within the FBI. However, the dumb terminals provided to agents where practically left in their state of dumbness, because one could not use them to retrieve â?? through some effective search engine algorithm â?? materials relevant to the subject, or topic, that was being addressed by an FBI agent. As a result, the nodes belonging to the FBI's informational networking â?? a system, which had, in some extensively qualified capacity, crossed the digital divide; or, at least, had attempted to accomplish as much â?? was never endowed with the intelligence â?? or smartness â?? that is associated with terminals that constitute the nodes belonging to an advanced informational network. It is only through the role assumed by a machine, acquiring a position within many linkages through which information is transferred in and throughout a network, that it becomes a useful tool for an agent looking to increase or intensify his knowledge and understanding of a topic by relating relevant information types to other information types. As one can anticipate, the FBI, following the revelations related to the antiquated condition of its information management, set out to create an information architecture that was in line with contemporary technologies and procedures. However, the problem with the subsequent efforts made by the FBI, when working to modernize itself, can be characterized through the following: It was the FBI that was left in charge of the project. Consequently, after spending millions upon millions and expending valuable time and man-hours when attempting to install an information management system, the FBI finally had to report to Congress that the entire project had failed; could not be salvaged; and, therefore, had to be scrapped entirely. What are we to extrapolate from the FBI's follies? The incompetency of the FBI is not an isolated incident. If one reads of the many accounts published that chronicle the events transpiring after the American invasion of Iraq, the lack of adequate management and foresight â?? which amounted to the absence, in some cases, of planning, altogether, for predictable contingencies â?? is profoundly dislodging. Additionally, to cite the affairs of Congress, the clandestine committee inner-workings in which earmarks are bartered in an affair that would look unseemly, if not utterly corrupt, if rendered a public spectacle indicates that the professional politicos are less concerned with practicing good governance as they are with self-promotion among the special interests who are the typical beneficiaries of Congressional pork. It is my contention that the debacles and flat out circuitousness in the conduct of the professionals who wield power in government qualify as the routine and ordinary; not the exceptional. However, as a result of the scarcity of investigative journalism, which might uncover the vastness of the waste and incompetency encumbering our governmental apparatuses â?? not to mention the unequivocal corruption; whether in the explicit form of bribery; or, more often, in the systems of reciprocity, quid pro quo, - This audacity on the part of those who claim to know better than others know for themselves is justified by what amounts to a plutocratic apologia: The popular will of the unrefined and vulgar American people constitutes a threat to the vested interests of those who are endowed with the prudence and sound judgment necessary to advance not only their own interests, but, additionally, the long term interests of the nation as a whole. This is the type of thinking that spawns absurdities such as "Trickle-down economics:" a theory of convenience, which Naomi Klein has revealed in some of her weblog writings to be a device deployed to obfuscate unbridled greed on the part of corporatists and, more generally, the ownership class in society; economic elitists who were in need of an intellectual diversion so that the swelling of class antagonisms, fomenting among those suffering under supply-side tax reforms, could be assuaged. At this pointAlthough it might seem unfair to lump the uber-citizens controlling the Democratic Party with their brethren who populate the other side of the isle in the sociopolitical institutions that both factions conjointly dominate, there, nevertheless, remains a thematic congruency between the two uber-factions; a convergence comparable to the opposing sides of a coin: The antithetical representations â?? where one side is emblazon with the head; the other side, the tale â?? that, despite their surface distinctions, continue to be of the same ilk; formed within the same mold; and made out of the same alloy. In fact, both the Clintonian Third-way neoliberals â?? who feign empathy with the plight of American labor suffering from free-trade â?? and the neoconservatives â?? who do not even bother to express acknowledgement of such hardships â?? share in the same condescending rhetoric that is used to dismiss voices, emanating from the masses, that raise objection to American trade policies. The elitist corps have fashioned a rhetoric with pejoratives, such as neo-populism, that they use when disdainfully depicting the sociopolitical interpretations and reactions to socioeconomic conditions produced by the populace; which stand in contradiction to the uber-citizenry's self-allegedly detached and rationally disposed estimates of current affairs and their overall significance within larger historical chains of events; narratives that are structured according to the Whiggish premise that American social conditions are always advancing toward a better state. Under the pretenses reinforced by the Whiggish mythology, the uber-citizenry instructs the rest of us to turn cheek when hit with economic upheavals, because these incidents are merely hiccups and fail to warrant even the entertainment of the notion that there might, just be, a pressing necessity for the reappraisal of the post-World-War-Two free-trade policies and the de-industrialization of the American economy that they are causing. These utterly indefensible values â?? or, what we might call the evaluative prejudices embodied by the Power Elites - have stood as justification for the imposition of as many barriers between the Will of the People and its affect upon the formation of public policy. The seedy plutocratic tendencies of those who disproportionately influence the American State which so insincerely markets itself as a democracy to the rest of the world, all of the while possessing all the attributes that one would rightly associate with a plutocracy.