Essay by Eric Worrall
Speaking to World Socialist Web Site, convicted Aussie climate activist Deanna Coco explains why we need a form of democracy which doesn’t involve public elections to solve the climate crisis.
Australian climate activist Violet Coco speaks on her jailing for Sydney Harbour Bridge protest
Our reporters 27 December 2022
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In a serious attack on basic democratic rights, Coco was initially sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment, with at least eight months without parole, and denied bail. She was the first to be sentenced under laws introduced by the New South Wales (NSW) state Liberal-National government to impose fines of up to $22,000 and jail terms of up to two years for protests on roads, rail lines, tunnels, bridges and industrial estates.
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VC: People are becoming increasingly concerned about the lack of action on the climate and ecological emergency and that is a threat to the people who are making a lot of money off the fossil fuel industry. The more we make noise about the climate and ecological emergency the more they are threatened. It makes sense that they are going to try and silence us, and we can’t let their bullying tactics get in the way of protecting the habitability of our planet.
WSWS: What are the political implications of the fact that both Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition support the implementation of these laws to defend the profits of big business?
VC: It is clear that our politics has failed us and what we need is a different form of democracy to resolve this emergency situation. I have done a lot of work with Extinction Rebellion, who promote citizens assemblies. It is a form of deliberative democracy with a random and representative selection of the population, informed and facilitated. A bit like jury duty, but for legislation.
We cannot trust either Labor or the Liberal-National Coalition to act in our best interest.
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Read more: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/27/efxg-d27.html
Climate activist attacks on forms of democracy which aren’t delivering the outcomes they want are nothing new.
The reality is all activists need to do to get their way is persuade ordinary people to support them. But despite decades of disappointment, activists still can’t bring themselves to admit the failure is their fault. They just aren’t persuasive enough.
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She’s right. It’s hard to imagine anyone voting themselves back to the stone age.
They have so little foresight that they don’t see it coming.
The strength of democracy is that it makes it harder for a small clique to ruin everything, but the a country’s people certainly can still foolishly vote for their own ruin.
The different form of democracy she wants was planned and articulated by the Russian thinker and political activist Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924). He called it Democratic Centralism.
The best analytic works that explain the marvelous successes of Lenin’s political thinking are:
“The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago
And The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression • Stéphane Courtois ed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism
You have been warned.
Alinsky simplified the scheme into 8 levels of control:
1) Healthcare– Control healthcare and you control the people, especially the aged.
2) Poverty – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control– Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income)
6) Education and Media – Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school and what the general public are exposed to.
7) Religion – Remove the belief in God from the Government and schools
8) Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.
I would add to the list that Alinsky made to bring it to the modern authoritarian program:
9) Energy Control. – All activity is limited by energy. Restrict reliable energy and you accelerate the spread of poverty, debt, welfare, and class warfare.
The green loonies are some of the useful idiots that have bought into the propaganda for the Great Reset.
“It is a form of deliberative democracy with a random and representative selection of the population, informed and facilitated. A bit like jury duty, but for legislation.”
Jurist are selected after both lawyers get to question and approve or reject them in the presence of a judge.
Sounds like she wants “mob rule” with her groups getting to pick the mob’s rulers.
It is these mew government controlled cashless society schemes that are really sending a chill down my spine lately. This has the potential to destroy all our individual liberty in one swipe of the pen. Very very scarey.
Asking for a new form of democracy by asking to undermine democracy. The propaganda continues. Her view of a good democracy is one where she gets what she wants no matter how many others disagree – exactly the thinking of dictators everywhere. In reality these people are just a new form of stupidity accompanied by a privileged sense of self-righteous entitlement. Fifteen months of self reflection in custody is probably not nearly long enough to cure this mental illness.
It is clear that our politics has failed us and what we need is a different form of democracy to resolve this emergency situation.
Those steenkin’ voters are just too dumb. We need a bigger mob! Round ’em up, get ’em in the streets! Tell ’em anything that will rile them up, and shoot a few policemen.
She needs to move to a planet that “actually has” a climate crisis.
Where do we sign the pettition to send her to Venus?
There is no such thing as democracy – Brexit showed that even when a majority vote for something, if it’s the wrong something as required by the establishment, they will make it go away, insidiously, but definitely
Reminds me of Obama explaining that the reason why ObamaCare wasn’t more popular was because he hadn’t given enough speeches.
Whos paying for your health insurance then. I wish you a long and well life as you will suffer if get a serious illness, insurance or not.
Who is paying for my Healthcare? Not Obama.
Obamacare is just a system of health insurance by private companies.
let me guess that you are on Medicare? ROTFL
Yet we can’t get rid of it, can we? How many people believe they were better off (re healthcare) before ObamaCare? I know my family was.
You want to try living in the UK. Even when you vote for the winning government, Tories, they don’t implement their manifesto. So what is the point in voting?
Not much different in the US. The Republicans lie to their voters about being conservative (liberal in other countries) and the Democrats lie to everyone else about being centrist.
No so. The US democrats are generally conservative-centrist by other western standards. Sat germany France , UK or Australia. Theres a small number of ‘progressives’ in the Dems who are more aligned with the standard left wing parties in Europe.
The far right Europeans ( maybe under 20%) are aligned with most of the GOP
What she means is communism.
The brilliant economist Thomas Sowell had this to say about “activism”:
“Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.”
A bit like jury duty, but for legislation.
If this is the comparison then clearly this ‘expert’ doesn’t understand legal systems either.
The Jury system is to allow crimes to be judged before a jury of their peers. It is intended to show that the law is applied evenly and fairly as a trial.
What our expert is forgetting is that the Jury are not investigating the case, or applying the law once a verdict is decided. They are observing as unbiased and making decisions based on the evidence provided to them.
Your Nation May Vary but the actual Judge then passes sentence.
So all we really have is a group of observers being provided source info by subject matter experts.
So, if we shift this model sideways to this ‘Experts’ idea, a ‘jury’ of randomly selected people would be asked to approve laws made by someone else. No disrespect but you can’t ask Bob from down the road to create laws – it is not his skill set. He is a cabinet maker. All Bob can do is say “I guess that makes sense…”
So our ‘Expert’ basically wants some elite group of experts – which she casually doesn’t mention – to create laws and then unskilled and possibly uninterested random strangers will rubber stamp them.
Yeah. Scratch a Green and get dictators under your fingernails.
It’s the old story: when you’re losing the game either take the ball and go home or change the rules in your favor. The alarmists want to outlaw any democratic form of dissent regarding their climate panic-mongering, so they want the rules changed regarding who can say what, particularly when their arguments are regularly refuted.
Winston Churchill also said that 5 minutes talking with an average voter was enough to put you off democracy. And so I agree that this suggestion has some merit as suggested by another person. At elections, at least 95% of the voters are ignorant of most of the issues so they have no knowledge to guide their voting. A good example is why the UK Conservative Party is currently the government when it is NOT a conservative party but a centre-left bunch that are virtually the same as the Labour Party. Therefore most people vote hoping that somebody else knows more than they do but then swamping them with ignorance votes. But if the size of the electorate was reduced to say 20 in each area, those 20 would know that their vote can actually achieve something and would seek to be well-informed. The flaw is still that the MPs we elect are still going to be morons….