Jefferson proposed incorporating the New England town meeting, the incubator of the American Revolution, into the constitutional structure of the American republic. Jefferson called for incorporating grassroots citizens into the process of legislation and governance at every level. By organizing the people into these grassroots legislative bodies, people will have more power and thus more incentive to be informed. Big money interests will be less able to manipulate centralized legislatures and bureaucracies. We need to raise the cry for economic democracy as well.
Market forces can be every bit as arbitrary, impersonal, and destructive as bureaucracies.
Capitalism doesn't work for the vast majority or the environment. That's as much as the rest of the world combined. But it is going to go up. The military's present mission is to have the capacity to fight two Gulf Wars at once, on opposite sides of the world, without allies. So, with the Republican Congress in there now, look for new military spending authorizations that will jack up military spending past Bush's last projections.