PublicMarkup.org -- In the next America, citizens will be able to review and comment upon legislation as it makes its way through Congress

Call it America 2.0, The American Update, The Next America --

Whatever term you choose, the idea is the same: America's operating system was written centuries ago for another world, and the continual updates and patches to this ancient software have provided our citizens today with heaping mounds of legislative spaghetti code -- a convoluted, inefficient, and easily hacked system that no longer achieves the purposes its authors intended.

You can't rely on the officials who consider this system their personal wealth expansion program to do anything to change it. The only route to our badly-needed America OS upgrade is through those outside the aristocracy. Each one of us is the door.

We can develop a culture that scorns deceit and bloodshed. We can learn to ask more of ourselves intellectually, to require ourselves to do the homework necessary to elect capable and conscientious leaders into office. We can raise our children to understand that when people enter power for their own aggrandizement, the deaths and suffering of millions can be the result, as we've so recently seen yet again.

And we can develop concepts such as Public Markup.

From the Public Markup website:

After preparing and drafting a comprehensive piece of legislation, Sunlight decided that public input and scrutiny would refine the bill and improve its chances of garnering lawmakers' support. Rather than immediately looking for legislators who might sponsor the bill, Sunlight, therefore, created PublicMarkup.org as a place to post the bill, and to allow you to comment on and suggest edits to the substance of the legislation.

This project is not intended to be the ultimate technical solution to the challenge of drafting legislation online, but an experiment in online collaboration. By collecting legislation, summaries, resources and commentary in a single linkable location, PublicMarkup.org provides a simple, blog-like framework for soliciting feedback on this legislation.

The idea isn't perfect. But it's one step in the right direction. And it completely bypasses the most chillingly effective hackers, phishers and scammers of our American operating system -- the lobbyists.

In an article today in the Austin American-Statesman, lobbyist and former president of The American League of Lobbyists Paul Miller was asked his opinion about Public Markup.

"I don't think the way you advocate is to put everything online and say, 'All right American people, weigh in on that,' because then what's next?" Miller asked. "Are we going to let the American people decide our defense policy, our trade policy, our immigration policy?"

Imagine that: the American people, deciding our defense policy, our trade policy, and our immigration policy. The American people -- average people like you and me -- having an influence on the laws that affect our everyday lives and that shape the future of our children.

Paul Miller doesn't want to understand that kind of America, because in that America his wealth conduit has been cut off.

But that's the kind of America we're going to need to create, ultimately, an America in which all facts are laid bare, in which a culture of aggressive self-information presides, an America in which lobbyists like Jack Abramoff, and sham public servants like George Bush and Tom DeLay stand no chance of rising to power.

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