roundtable: Re: Local vs. Federal

roundtable: Re: Local vs. Federal

Re: Local vs. Federal

Rick Crawford (crawford@cs.ucdavis.edu)
Fri, 17 Mar 1995 13:06:07 -0800 

Date: Fri, 17 Mar 1995 13:06:07 -0800
From: crawford@cs.ucdavis.edu (Rick Crawford)
Message-Id: <9503172106.AA03613@ivy.cs.ucdavis.edu>
To: roundtable@cni.org
Subject: Re: Local vs. Federal


  > "Local autonomy" is one of those double-edged swords isn't it?
  > Ultimately, local/regional autonomy seems to promise the greatest
  > democracy and self-sufficiency.  But when power and money is 
  > centralized at the Federal level, then localism becomes a sham -- a
  > way to defund public programs, diffuse the public constituency, and
  > force worthwhile projects to fight each other for crumbs.

At least in the US (and probably as a general principle), the issue of
local vs. federal power should be viewed in the context of "agency 
capture" by monied private interests.  To put it bluntly, it's a lot 
cheaper to buy a state govt. than the federal govt.  Despite the fact 
that a state Rep. may represent more voters than a federal Rep, there 
are 435-odd US federal Reps, so you have to buy more of them to roll 
your own laws. (But yes, some special interests do have that kind of 
money ... the polluters' lobby is now the proud owner of a brand new 
Congress.)

Another critical point is that it's relatively cheap and easy to
dominate local media via threat of pulling advertiser dollars.
But the larger the media company, the more it costs to "rent"
their integrity.

In sum, we're talking about scale effects of political economy as the
size of the playing field varies.

Just as concentrations of media power seldom persist at the scale,
e.g.  of a city block, it's our job to ensure that the democratization
of communications power represented by the nets is not allowed to
coalesce into fiefdoms controlled by a few media magnates.

-rick


Rick Crawford
<crawford@cs.ucdavis.edu>

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