Accountability & Authority

I’ve broken down authority into four areas that I want to discuss as topics on authority: rotational, temporary, responsive & accountable. So let’s start with accountable authority. When I speak of accountable authority, I mean that those who hold the position of authority are accountable to those who have established that authority and placed the individual into the position of authority. So for example, the sheriff in a community is given the authority to police the city, providing the security necessary to prevent violence & crime. Every action must be accountable to those he represents. No other agency should have any lien on his accountability. In a community of cooperative, self-reliant individuals, the authority given to those who provide security must be constantly accountable to the community for all actions. We (self-reliant individuals in positions of authority) must stand tall as individuals for our every action. This means that the situations that have arisen of police brutality, excessive force & blatant disregard for those that they supposedly serve would be brought to immediate resolution. There would be no time for arguing the validity of police ‘immunity’ from misbehavior. 

Our society as it is currently organized prevents this from happening. There are various interests, from the group of individuals who make up the police force & form the ‘thin, blue line’ holding themselves above the accountability to the community through a process of fraternization, to the politicians who seek to maintain their power and protect themselves from the accountability of the masses for their actions and policies. There are the various interest groups that benefit from an excessive & aggressive police force (the prison system, now privatized; the corporations which want to hide their white-collar crimes behind street crime; the police & prison worker unions who wish to protect their jobs; the communities where prisons provide a source of income and employment). The list goes on and on. Meanwhile the public is neither protected nor able to hold those who abuse the system accountable for their actions. 

In much the same way, the Board of Directors of a corporation, who have the authority to determine the direction & actions of the corporation are not held accountable to anyone but themselves & large shareholders (who in fact are the same). 

In the Marines the policy of leadership and authority was that of responsibility for those subordinate, for the success and failure of the unit. The officer could not blame his subordinates. He had to take responsibility and was held accountable to his commanding officer. That was the policy, but the Marines also had an unwritten comment about the reality of authority: “The Corps eats its own.” Marine leadership was more than happy to throw subordinates under the bus when they could foist their responsibility onto their subordinates & blame them for the failures of their command. I saw this happen in the Corps while I was there, & I see it happen throughout the world of business & politics.

So in a cooperative community, which would have to be small enough to remain ‘responsive’ and ‘accountable’ to the needs of the community, the authority given would have to regularly respond to the complaints & recriminations of the community. If there were no complaints, then there would be no need for any regular action, but I don’t think that this would happen with human beings. Humans will always see their rights as sacrosanct and won’t always recognize when their rights have actually impeded or subordinated another or the community’s. So a regular way to hold authority accountable to the establishing group will have to be created and maintained. 

So let’s take a few examples of authority run amok. For instance the idea that we can trust the FCC to keep the Internet open, free & accessible to all. Let’s start with the fact that the head of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, worked for the very corporations that want to control the Internet & make it tiered so that their content loads faster. For most libertarians & anarchists, the very fact that a government agency wants to regulate the Internet indicates the abuse of authority.

While the FCC claims that they have held public hearings, have released a report, and have accepted public comment via email, the reality is that this isn’t much different that New York City’s Department of Education’s Public Education Panel (PEP), which rubber-stamped the mayor’s “reforms” & helped to close schools in neighborhoods that had no voice. Parents spoke of the panel members texting & reading while “listening” to the public’s comments, then resoundingly voted to close schools that the parents had begged be kept open. The result: overcrowded schools, teachers placed into the “rubber room” simply because their school closed, & Bloomberg placing one of his pet charter schools (read: public-in-name-only) into the publicly owned building, rent free. We can expect the same respectful listening from the FCC.

Yet the cheerleaders of authority claim that if we just call Tom & the president, they’ll stop this:

…we are walking a very tight rope on net neutrality. President Obama holds our fate and will be making a decision soon.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is reportedly pursuing a terrible proposal disguised as net neutrality. But it isn't. Wheeler's proposal is legally untested, and paves the path to allow internet service providers to extract additional fees from websites for preferential treatment and delivery on the internet. It's called "paid prioritization."
Paid prioritization is something which corporate media like Fox News could afford, but grassroots media like Daily Kos could not. It would crush all voices online that are not already giant corporations.
We can change the course of this decision, but our ONLY path to victory is to influence the influencer: President Barack Obama.
Please, click here to call the White House now to demand full net neutrality with Title II protections. We will provide you with the phone number and the script.
This can go either way—and it’s going to happen fast. The White House may be releasing its official statement as early as next week—we’re expecting it to come quickly.
We know who has FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s ear and where he takes his signals from––it’s Obama. And, while the President says he can’t influence an independent agency, the truth is he can influence the people in the agency.
The Internet, Daily Kos and free speech all need you.
Please take a moment to call the White House and demand full net neutrality under Title II by treating ISPs as common carriers. President Obama can choose to be known as the President that saved the internet or the President that broke it.
Keep fighting,
Rachel Colyer, Daily Kos (a mass email from DailyKos)

I’d like to believe… not. Just listen to the sycophantic language: "President Obama holds our fate" and "our ONLY path to victory is to influence the influencer." Try calling the White House (or most any elected official) and see what influence you wield. You can bet that if Robert Marcus calls, he gets a direct line to President Obama. These supposedly elected authorities have no accountability to the public, the community, or you. They have accountability to the corporations who fund their election campaigns

So how can authority be held accountable? On a national scale, it can’t. People genuinely fear a stateless society. Yet they seem comfortable with a state where they have no voice. Why is that? When people have a voice in their government, at the local level, the government does much less. Generally a local government only does what the populous wants done. When the mayor is your neighbor, he tends to listen better than when he lives in a gated community or his own dream land. So accountability means local and direct. How large can that be? If you can’t talk to the authority directly, it’s too large. So the question always becomes: “who will protect us against…”. I don’t have ‘the’ answer to that, but I’ll venture a guess that whoever the entity is from whom we need protection, it’s a state of some sort. Even ISIL/ISIS/IS calls itself a ‘state’, at least in translation. The first way to eliminate unaccountable authority is to seek local processes & local cooperative efforts among self-reliant individuals. When we do, the local issues become far more important, and groups like ISIL, Israel/Palestine, & Ukraine seem far less of a concern. The policing arm of the state seems to be a much bigger threat to our neighborhoods than the terrifying boogieman.

Authority

In Japan, a Portrait of Mistrust

Trust the “authority”. How is that working out for humanity? Communities establish “authority” to provide information, security, and justice. Society and communities give authority power by the trust given to the authority to provide what they’ve been “authorized” to provide. That’s the dilemma faced by the Japanese people in this NYTimes video. Who can we trust? We spend a great deal of time putting trust in “authorities” that tell us what is safe, what is news, what is just. How often do we explore the accuracy of these “authorities”? Not often enough.
How often do we rely on the “authorities” to provide us with accurate and relevant news? How often are we presented with non-news by these same authorities? We have “authorities” telling us that medications are safe, that coal is a “clean” energy source, that Jamie Dimon had no idea that his corporation had made very bad bets. Pick your choice, but “authority” had a mixed track record at best.
We rely too heavily on “authority” obviously. We fail to consider the ad verecundiam fallacy or the appeal to authority. We don’t bother to consider the accuracy of what the “authority” says. So in the video above, we have the produce merchant at the beginning appealing to the authority of the government to approve her produce as safe for consumption. This is the same government who told the Japanese two years ago that radiation from Fukushima was contained. The women shopping in the store question the authority’s declaration. They demonstrate a rejection of the appeal to authority. Even still, they assume that the produce labeled from other regions is safe, simply because it isn’t near Fukushima. They have reached a point where they feel they can’t trust the “authorities” to provide them with reliable information or safety. The statistics regarding the low levels of trust in the veracity of the Japanese government demonstrate the horrible contradiction that these people face. They want to provide for their children, but they have no way to verify what they’re purchasing.
Here in America we face similar contradictions. We watch as the government spent trillions to fight a war based on a lie, yet they now claim to have to tighten our belts, while they protect their own pay, benefits, and medical coverage. The stock market is reaching new highs even as more and more people are feeling the crunch of the recession that is “authoritatively” over. We grab “organic” foods from the market without questioning the veracity of what “organic” actually involves. Some “authorities” tell us that “guns kill people” while others say “guns don’t kill people”.
My point is this: our loss of self-reliance has more to do with mental laziness than anything. We don’t spend enough time verifying the sources of our information or the veracity of our “authorities”. We put too much faith in the good intentions of our leaders and authorities. The trust in “authority” has taken away some of our self-reliance. The last posting had less to do with going back to some bucolic, simpler lifestyle than it did with how much we’ve given our trust over to authorities. These “authorities” have abused our trust, and we must find a way to develop alternate ways to establish “authority” whether it is news, security, or justice. I don’t want to attempt to offer the answers to any of these questions or how to resolve the question of “authority”. I will pose two suggestions to limit authority: that it be temporary and rotational. I’ll elaborate more on that in my next post.