I am very excited about this blog entry about a paper by Jonathan Taplin, about the profound significance of what is happening in California.

Here is how the document starts, just to give you a taste of what it is about:

“Something important is happening in California. A profound experiment in Federalism, led by a Republican Governor and a Democratic legislature is taking shape and it is the first break with an American political culture that has been centralizing power in Washington since 1932. In four years the state has passed laws on auto emissions, CO2 levels, stem cell research, personal data privacy and appliance energy standards all of which have clashed with the neoconservative agenda of the Bush administration. As the governor pointed out, the power and size of the California economy has allowed the state to create defacto national standards that the corporate sector has been forced to follow. And although both the auto, oil and banking industries have joined with the Bush administration to sue for relief from the California standards, to date the courts have not struck down any of the state laws. Now California is poised to go farther in its quest for independence from a Federal government many feel is headed towards the rocky shoals of fiscal shipwreck.”

But what is the meaning of these developments?

Jonathan Taplin argues the following:

“I believe that this coming age of reform will bring about a positive transformation of American society as we grapple with the meaning of “the end of scarcity”.The old guard of the defense and extraction Industrialists who have done so well with two of their own running the country (Bush-Oil; Cheney-Defense contracts) will work extremely hard to hold on to power and they have a commanding old style media megaphone run by interested parties to put out their story (the war is going well, the economy is great, etc.). But the Industrialist model of Big Media is failing in the age of the Internet and so the voices of digital democracy will be heard. The task is to redefine the notion of national security and purpose around two basic principles. The first is that in the networked society, U.S. influence will flow from our global economic and cultural power as opposed to our military power. The second is that as the sources of leadership innovation and change in this new world come from decentralized, networked, bottom-up forces of the Digitalists, the American political structure will have to adapt to a devolutionary notion of power. States and Cities will become the important sources of leadership and the Federal Government will start shrinking.”