Let's have a bit of straight talk.

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Okay, I've been reading lately. Studying. Not for school, but just to satisfy my own curiosity. I've always prided myself on being very moderate, fairly pro-government, and far more civilized than those militia guys out in the Michigan woodlands. The more I read, however, the angrier I get. The more I look around, the more furious I am. I'm sick of supporting our government. I'm sick of talking about economic theory and the good of immigrants and the duty of Americans to pay for foreign aid. The more I read, the more I understand the militias. I may not always agree, but they have a point. America sucks these days. There goes the neighborhood.

In my lifetime, I have taken part in two presidential elections, two for state, and two for congress. Each time, I was told that I shouldn't vote for third-party guys. One of the two big parties was gonna win anyway. So, yeah, even though Bush was kind of a dumb@$$, I voted for him, because even though Kerry was a good liberal type, we were in two wars and he didn't seem to have the stomach for either. I may have been wrong, or I may have been right, but more likely, it matters very little. In some alternate universe, Kerry won. And guess what? Nothing changed. There's a good chance we're still embroiled in two wars, there's a good chance we still had the debt and housing crises, which despite being blamed on Bush policies, were predicted at least as early as the mid-90s. There's a good chance that everything happened just as it always had.

The reason for this, of course, is that the President has very little power. So does Congress. They're in the business of getting elected. Time was, the person you were electing was in the community. Sam Adams was a Boston man, and well known in that city. George Washington was a well known pillar of the Virginian planting community. You voted for 'em, because you knew them, and if they screwed you over then next time they walked into the local pub you might get a chance to beat the crap out of them. However, instead of voting for someone because you know them, or because they've got good policies, then instead you're voting because they're the ones with the best TV spots. The one who can regurgitate their speechwriters ideas with the most wit and charm gets the vote. Those TV spots aren't paid for by you and me, or the candidate themselves. They're sponsored. And like a good dog, they'll have a go at the leg of their master. And there's not a damn thing we can do about it, since the two parties are the same, and so will any third that gets the resources to have a real shot. 'S human nature.

We blame corporations for looking out after their own interests. We blame the media for being biased (And they are). We blame Congress for being deadlocked. We blame the wealthy for looking after the wealthy. The old boys network has always been thus, whether it's called the nobility or the aristocracy or the plutocracy or the theocracy. When we get antsy, we talk about the Founding Fathers, a subject that universally puts us in an almost religious fervor. Let's talk about them, then.

It's widely touted that the whole reason behind the 2nd Amendment was to enable us hoi polloi to rise up against our oppressors. Huzzah! What a wonderful idea. Too bad it's complete bull%^&$. After all, those same Founding Fathers, authors and eternal guardians of the Constitution, passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, effectively banning anti-government rhetoric. Had Tom Jefferson not seen the political value of tearing it up to win the 1800 election, I wouldn't be writing this today. He was always my favorite. Those rat ^&%$*&%s Hamilton and Washington, in 1789, almost a decade prior, had decided that to pay our war debt, they'd tax moonshine and other domestically produced whiskeys. Not just the trade of whiskey, mind, but also the production. The trade was bad enough. So I want a drink, I grow the corn, I build the still, I put in the work, to have a personal drink, and here comes the taxman, who I'd just fought the most powerful nation on Earth and won in the hopes of never laying eyes on again, demanding 18-cents on the gallon (About 25%. Incidentally, twice the British tax rate of 12.5%, according to Ben Franklin) (The Whiskey Rebellion) Now, over in the East, the big distillers could just charge more, and they were charged less, but Mr. Moonshine out in the mountains, he couldn't charge himself more for his own whiskey. Hence, the Whiskey Rebellion, which Washington's government put down by force of arms. The right to overthrow the government? Not a chance. Know how the Libertarians are constantly going on about how the Government is ignoring the Constitution? It's signers were wiping their behinds with it almost as soon as they got into power.

So we have a system of two parties. The Commies are out, considering our traditional animosity towards the Marxist system (And it's traditional habit of failing miserably). The Libertarians and Constitution type parties have some points, but contain a relatively higher portion of racists and Alex Jones types who the media can exploit to keep their points from being heard. If you're outside of the two parties, you're disenfranchised. I vote every time, but I see little difference in our electoral system here and those fellas in Tehran. At least the Iranians are honest enough with themselves to know it's a sham. We've got one more party than these sham democracies. One more. Sure, in platforms we've got left and right. But in practice, they generally act the same except on such relatively minor, personal issues such as gay marriage.

We're told that China's a police state. We're told that Iran and Congo are police states. A New York Times article from 2008 (U.S. Prison Population Dwarfs that of Other Nations)) claims that the United States incarcerates 2.3 million Americans, out of a population of around 313 million. That's 0.73%. In that same article and time frame, China, a evil totalitarian police state, incarcerated 1.6 million, of 2 billion, 0.0008%. An Al Jazeera article from 2012, (Why are so many Americans in prison?) puts the rate at 743 per 100000, 0.74%, virtually no change since Bush the tyrant. So rather than accuse other nations of being police states, let's look to ourselves. Tiananmen Square, meet Kent State. Tahrir Square, let me introduce you to LA 1994. Qaddafi's sending bombers after his own people? Let's discuss Blair Mountain. Our government loves to see people elsewhere, be they African, Arab, or Asian, speak their mind and get up, stand up, stand up for their rights. In the land of the free and home of the brave... not so much.

Meanwhile, on the economic front, we've got poverty. The lowest recorded rate of poverty was in 1973 at 11.1% (Why Can't We End Poverty in America). Under Reagan, the "We've got the war on poverty won" guy, NY Times shows 15.1%. After the tech boom, it dropped back to 11.3% in 2000. In 2012, it's holding steady... at 15%. (Record US Poverty Rate Holds as Inequality Grows). Now let's look at wages versus rents. In 1973, wages averaged at $12,000 per family (1973 Census Report). Wages per family in 2012 were about $43000 (SSA.gov). Yet where the consumer price index in 1973 was 42.6. In 2012, it was 229.6 (Inflation stats). In 40 years, the CPI went up 187 points. From 1913 to 1973? 33 points. Most of a century, several huge wars, the Dust Bowl, and the Great Depression, and a 33 point change.

Now, what's going on with civil liberties and the spooks, and some foreign policy? I mean, about an hour down the road is NSA. I know a lot of people who work there. Universally, they say that they look out for foreign threats and if they ever want to listen in on Americans, there are so many legal hoops they have to jump through, it's crazy. But it's happened. Remember the wiretap scandal? The question is, why do we need them? Why do we need the CIA? The CIA protects us from terrorism, sure. But we would never have had this problem in Iran if the CIA hadn't overthrown Mossadegh. If we didn't back up the Saud family and the Bahraini royals and Mubarak, we wouldn't we having a massive bowel movement at the thought of the Arab Spring. The Middle East would've been a much friendlier place, since oppression drives extremism, and we funded oppression. Instead of accepting that Latin Americans are free to make their own decision, went stomp all over Veracruz, back the Mexican government's assault on the EZLN, assassinate Che Guevara (who was a nasty guy, but at the same time, they choose their government), and pursue an economic policy with Cuba that does nothing to Castro but hurts your average Cuban. It's been said before, it's a cliche, but maybe we need to think about whether we've been the Evil Empire all along.

And we're docile. Our government workers call themselves public servants, but last I checked, we live in fear of these so-called servants. We're afraid of the media. We're afraid of the Arabs and North Koreans. We're afraid of the IRS, and the local cops. We're afraid that were gonna be fired and replaced with some guy from Honduras. Americans have spent the last half century living in fear. We wail and gnash our teeth when the market drops two points. We're afraid that if we ask why that guy from Honduras is more deserving of a job in the US than our kid, that we'll be called a racist. We're afraid that if we propose tariffs or some other measure to drag American companies back to America to employ American workers, we'll be called communists. We're afraid that if we ask why American sons and daughters are dying in Iraq, to rebuild their country when ours is a wreck, we'll be called anti-American or not considered patriotic. We're afraid to ask why the Fed, which is supposed to manage inflation, is clearly not doing so, we'll have a ton of economic jargon thrown at us, and made to look like a fool, which doesn't change the fact that the Fed dropped the ball. We're afraid to ask why the Government can't just print it's own damn money in the first place. But we take pride in our freedom of speech. I feel like in that way, being an Aspie is a blessing. "Wait, I may be breaking the unwritten rules, but I don't pick up on those in the first place!" Think about this. Does a kid raised in a Southern Baptist family in a religious town have the right to be gay? Sure. Is it a good idea? Probably not. In the same way, while on paper, we can speak freely, and in fact can do so all we want, we are inundated with so much fear of judgment, of media smearing, of being an outcast, that we have about the same chance of freely speaking and being heard as that gay kid has of being out, proud and accepted in West Nowhere, Kansas.

Sorry about the novel. But that's what I see, and I couldn't figure out how to squeeze that into a paragraph-long discussion post. I felt I had to be detailed. The first step in fixing a problem is admitting there is one. So what happened, and what can we do about it?

This is one of the biggest disservices people do to one-another in this country. If you don't show up to vote, you wasted your vote. If you walk into a polling place and vote for someone at random, you wasted your vote. If you make a considered, reasoned decision to vote for someone even though they've probably got no chance of winning (which is another disservice we do to ourselves - more on that in a moment) you haven't wasted your vote, period.

And pre-election polling is going to be the undoing of this country, if it hasn't been already. Polls have way too much influence on how people actually vote, and they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Everyone likes to vote for the winner. No one likes to vote for someone who has no chance. But what if, just maybe, we could go to the polls just one time and not know in advance who was likely to win, or not. How might the guy with "no chance" do then?



To reword it, its not that they have no power, its that they must use their power to advance their goal of being re-elected instead of using it for the common good.


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The problem is that the two party system has caused politics to degenerate to the point where our representatives represent a) special interests and b) the ideology that people in their party are 'supposed' to have, rather than the interests of their constituents. That, plus population growth and the House being capped at 435 representatives (horrible idea) mean that no one knows anyone. Of course, its a given probably that in any large state, no one will know their senators, and in general no one knows the president personally, but these are hard things to overcome practically.



I don't know if its so much blaming corporations for looking out for their own interests. Its more the fact that they are empowered to look out for their own interests in ways that give them sooooo much more influence than everyone else.

As for congress being deadlocked, look at the polls. What's congress's nation-wide approval rating - 12%? With that kind of number, the place ought to be getting cleaned out by the voters every two years, if they could even stand to wait that long and not impeach people before then. But the problem is, I bet there's no single congressman or senator with an approval rating among their own constituents that even approaches 12% - everyone thinks their representatives are doing good jobs, but that everyone else's representatives are horrible - and they feel powerless to change other people's representatives, so they don't change their own - and no change happens. Even if I became enraged and decided to kick my representatives out of office at the next election, the best my vote can do is to alter 1/435th of Congress and 1/100th of the Senate. I don't know about you, but that makes me feel pretty powerless. I'm sure it makes many other people feel similarly.




The right to "overthrow" the government was always there in the Constitution itself - not in the 2nd amendment, but in the Constitutions own provisions for amending the Constitution. Don't like Congress? Have a constitutional convention, change the Constitution and appoint a dictator, or declare that the country shall be run by citizens committees, or by chimps making decisions with magic 8-balls. The only thing that the 2nd amendment might have provided for would be to overthrow the government in such case as the government refused to allow or to honor constitutional amendments.



Unlike a parliament based government, our government is not set up for parties to share power. There are some people in the Republican party who hate other people int he Republican party. Same for the democrats. But as you've noted, there's no points in American politics for 3rd place - not really even for 2nd place. To win, you need the most votes. So there's strength in numbers, an no room for a viable third party when everyone else wants to form large dominant parties precisely because they can then squash third parties and hopefully the 2nd party too.
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We're told that China's a police state. We're told that Iran and Congo are police states. A New York Times article from 2008 (U.S. Prison Population Dwarfs that of Other Nations)) claims that the United States incarcerates 2.3 million Americans, out of a population of around 313 million. That's 0.73%. In that same article and time frame, China, a evil totalitarian police state, incarcerated 1.6 million, of 2 billion, 0.0008%. An Al Jazeera article from 2012, (Why are so many Americans in prison?) puts the rate at 743 per 100000, 0.74%, virtually no change since Bush the tyrant. So rather than accuse other nations of being police states, let's look to ourselves. Tiananmen Square, meet Kent State. Tahrir Square, let me introduce you to LA 1994. Qaddafi's sending bombers after his own people? Let's discuss Blair Mountain. Our government loves to see people elsewhere, be they African, Arab, or Asian, speak their mind and get up, stand up, stand up for their rights. In the land of the free and home of the brave... not so much.[/quote]

We have too many people in prison due to unreasonable drug laws. But in these other countries you cite, crime is low because the consequences are often more severe than just mere prison - try stealing and losing a limb for your troubles, or your life (that'll keep ya out of prison!)



Poverty will always be there for many of the reasons you've already cites. Communism / Socialism are out, so there will always be the "haves" and the "have nots" in this country. As for the rest, take a healthy dose of the wealthy looking out for the wealthy and corporations looking out for corporations and no one looking out for everyone else, and its self-evident why there's more and more wealth concentrated at the top and more and more impovershed people.

The election system is geared more toward popularity than real merit.

I've heard of another election scheme called Range Voting or Score Voting that seems a lot better. It's comparable to how people find the best person in most Olympic competition. The judges don't cast a vote for one person, they score all of them.

http://rangevoting.org/

Anyway, I've voted 3rd party since 2000. Last time I wrote in Gary Johnson and I don't regret it.

What about the Green Party, or the Justice Party?

I don't see either getting elected any time soon because America will only elect right wingers right now.

I'm really coming around to that way of thinking. Voting like you really think, rather than the lesser of two evils. Of course, how can one vote in an educated way? Just like a reality TV show, the media, both left and right, presents a limited picture. Soundbites, statements taken out of context, things that make their candidate look good and everyone else, their opponent or third party, look like a lunatic. Even the internet, which was supposed to free us from the traditional media, has descended (or continued to be, depending on how you look at it) an infantile shouting match. The foundation of a successful republic is an informed populace. But we aren't being informed, and our voice doesn't seem to matter. We're Helen Keller with a ballot.

There's also the fact that depending on where you are, or where you work, has too much influence. I like in a heavily Republican town. People straight ask me what party I am, and if I say Democrat, I get a lecture straight from Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. I go to school in a heavily Democrat town. They ask me, and if I'm a Republican, I get branded as every skewed, false label Rachel Maddow has ever thrown out there. If I say no, I get needled until I have to share. Since when has it been anyone else's right to know how I vote? I'm reminded about the opening of the pilot to the Newsroom, where the debate moderator just wouldn't let off until Jeff Daniels revealed his political view. I'm putting this out there willingly, I'm not complaining, but no one has a right to know.



I really wish I had still been registered Republican in 2011-2012. I really dug Jon Huntsman. He seemed brilliant, a beacon of reason and intelligence in the Republican clown car. I might also suggest that we come up with some sort of primary reform, just for that situation. But yeah, he was doomed from the get go, not just by polling towards the end there, but by every single talking head on TV declaring him to be a guaranteed loser. Just like the constant reminders that "Maryland is a strong blue state" or "Texas has always gone red". Oh, and this idea of "As goes New Hampshire...", so once the New Hampshire primaries are in, everyone knows who they're backing. The Election should be off limits for the News from the first ballots opening to when the last close. Of course that ain't gonna happen.



Yeah, I didn't phrase that as best I could have. Thank you kindly.



Yeah. It was huge for me that I was in the back row when Obama spoke at the Baltimore Convention Center in '08. That's the closest I've come to a political candidate. The problem is that they're so removed from us. Even those videos of them shaking people's hands... there's a barrier between them. I'm not saying he should be at the crowd's mercy, but there's a metaphor there. One thing we can do is find a way that we can write our congressmen. I've wrote the Obama (You'd better damn well follow through, let me ask your plans) campaign. No response. I wrote the O'Malley (Stop raising taxes on everything, you ratfink) campaign. I've written Mikulski and Cardin. No response from anyone. Not even a computer-generate "Thanks, we're aware you exist, beloved voter." Any wonder we feel cut off? I'm from a largely unincorporated community. My town, all of the surrounding towns, even the biggest town in central MD, Columbia, have no local elections. There's almost zero awareness about the county elections. It's like everything that could possibly be done to disenfranchise us has been. There's a lot we could do, on the local level, to inspire voters. Nobody's doing it. I'm increasingly a bigger fan of massively increased state power. The more local, the better.



That was actually an incomplete thought, lol. What I was thinking was that we blame these corporations, but we keep happily chugging along for them. We blame the media, but we still tune in religiously. We blame Congress from our armchairs, and vote for the same guy. There are millions more of us than there are them. Millions. And we're increasingly fed up. If the blacks can march on Washington, why can't we? If the South can rise, right or wrong, why can't we? If the Founding Fathers could beat the greatest army on Earth, why the bloody hell can't we? If someone does try to rouse the rabble, he's shushed. "SSSHHHH, you're making a scene." The only ones who do are Don Quixotes like Ron Paul or lunatics/hucksters like Alex Jones or Rush Limbaugh.



That's exactly how I feel. I vote every couple of years, and hope for the best, and sit back and watch more and more of my town being boarded up and turning more and more into a ghost town. I vote, and hope. Nothing I can do about it. At least those guys in the militias, right or wrong, are doing something. Maybe we oughta give them a voice, racist as they sometimes are. I may not agree with them, but I'll defend to the death their right to say it. But that makes it worse. People speak up, they're shouted down by someone who disagrees and thinks they should be silenced. The individual has no power anymore. Just the corporation.



I didn't mean specifically the 2nd Amendment, but that's the current debate. Time and again, however, the right to redesign government has been superceded by the simple fact that the guys doing the amending are the ones who benefit by not amending, and they have more and bigger guns.



I agree. I wonder how the Founders overlooked that. There is such animosity between the parties, and absolutely no compromise. How is it that we tolerate people who are more loyal to their party than they are the people?



We have too many people in prison due to unreasonable drug laws. But in these other countries you cite, crime is low because the consequences are often more severe than just mere prison - try stealing and losing a limb for your troubles, or your life (that'll keep ya out of prison!)[/quote]

Haha, yeah. I'm not saying China is paradise. What I'm saying is that we're supposed to be better than they are. We send people to prison with third strike laws and drug laws that specifically target poor folks. We overlook prison rapes, prison shanking, prison gangs. It's just part of the system. But it's not just the prisons. It's the fact that time and again, the National Guard and the Army have been used to break strikes, or student protests. Kent State was an accident. But at Blair Mountain, private planes commissioned by the Sheriff dropped bombs on American miners who were sick and tired of dying and getting fiscally screwed. Their positions were spotted by Army bombers, at the command of an Army general. That's my problem. Yeah, we have unjust laws, but it's also the extent that the government goes to to put us down when we get uppity. Martial law in the streets of LA. The Draft Riots and American ships firing on Manhattan?

We're never gonna be perfect, and I wasn't idealizing the Congo. What I was arguing was that we are supposed to be better. And the government may not kill a man for believing wrong. So much shouldn't have happened the way it did. We need to get our own house in order before we start cleaning up others.



I agree. But what about inflation? What about skyrocketing rents? What about four dollar gas? What about the fact that poverty has gone up massively, wages haven't changed that much, and everything else is grossly more expensive? What's the Treasury doing? Why are we letting an independent bank run our currency? Why have we permitted manufacturing to die and deciding that Wall Street is God? Why are we systematically allowing every route the working man has upward vanish? Poverty will always be there, but our policies make poverty way easier to fall into.

I just wanted to address two points in your OP.

I agree our liberties are being eroded in the USA. And the prison-industrial complex and kangaroo courts are scary. But in some of those other countries, they don't even bother with courts and prisons. Dissidents are flat out executed. You'd have to check their execution rates, if such things even exist. And I'm not talking about execution of prisoners...I'm talking about people not even taken prisoner but killed outright in the first place.

As far as taxes, yes, they suck. But in regards to the idea of fighting a revolution and then levying taxes as being hypocritical, in order to support a new government and a standing army to prevent reconquest by the British, such taxes were necessary. What would the point of all that bloodshed be if the new republic couldn't function?

It was always "no taxation without representation". The colonists were pissed (rightly so) that taxes were being levied upon then - taxes that were generally far more excessive than taxes being levied back home in the British Isles. So it was never so much that they refused to be taxes, its just that they wanted a say in establishing said taxes.

And it wasn't just that. The Moonshiners were being charged a higher rate than the eastern distillers, and they were charged for the production of personal moonshine, rather than being taxed exclusively for the trade of it. On top of that, the rate charged was astronomically high, and there were other products that they could have taxed to spread it a bit thinner. And the tax rate in Britain, during the years leading up to the revolution, was actually higher than the tax rate imposed on the Colonists. Ben Franklin estimated that the rate levied by the British in Pennsylvania was 12.5%, while Brits were paying around 20%. It wasn't especially about the taxes. It was about the callous decision-making process that gave the colonies no autonomy. Parliament gave us no respect, and that's what Hamilton was doing to the western moonshiners.

Last edited by fueledbycoffee on 13 Apr 2013, 10:18 am, edited 1 time in total.

I completely agree with you. Media (TV, radio, internet) plays far too important a role in deciding who wins elections, and "The Media" (i.e. "news" organizations) especially. Campaign staffs are centered around controlling what gets said about their candidate and what gets said about the other candidate. And the major parties do everything they can to exclude third parties from media coverage. Meanwhile media outlets, in its never ending battle for ratings / circulation and advertising dollars wants to scoop the election, so changes in one poll to the next are translated into one candidate or the other having "momentum" and the next thing you know, the media has told us who will win before we've even voted - and a lot of their ability to do that comes from how campaigns are financed. As soon as we're told someone loses momentum, the finances of their campaign often do lose momentum as contributors and supporters flee to the current hot candidate. This is especially bad during presidential primaries, where worthy candidates run out of money and have to withdraw, and they're often running out of money simply due to a lack of public perception, thanks to the media, that they have any real chance to win. Its a very messed-up situation. Meanwhile, the Internet is little better. Social media can be easily manipulated, and all the influence it seems to have seems to be centered around whatever's "trending" on Facebook and Twitter. Political discussions online are the realm of the "anonymous coward" - the poster emboldened to saying almost anything, often in a very nasty way, since he/she knows there will never be any real consequences to saying it - after all, who will know its them? And so online politics is a very nasty affair.



Agree again. This is a harder problem to solve but its sad that people living in some areas seemingly practically HAVE to vote one way, or the other. I live in a relatively (but not overwhelmingly so) Democratic area. Back in the 90's, during the Clinton / Lewinsky scandal, we had a relative visit us from a very Republican area. I was just shocked and blown away by how different her outlook was than everyone else I knew with regard to that scandal. It wasn't like she was from another state, it was like she came to us from a different galaxy, it was that different. In any case, there are some good reasons in some cases for political allegiance to be based on geography - i.e. if an area is heavily reliant on one industry and one party supports that industry more than the other, it makes sense. But a lot of times it seems based on religious ideas about one party or the other and the area of the country being more or less heavily religious. Religion should play no part in politics, but WAY too many people, in my opinion, vote based on if they think the candidate prays the same way that they do.



The presidential primaries are the worst example of American Democracy run amok. Its like everything I said above about media, polling, and momentum, only 1000 times worse because the primaries are staggered chronologically by state. Its the whole "momentum" thing on steroids. Tiny states like Iowa and New Hampshire practically determine the outcome because they vote first (and don't think the candidates who win those tiny early primaries that offer insignificant delegate counts but the chance to establish "momentum" aren't crowing every chance they get about that "momentum") and larger states like California often are not even holding primaries until most or all of the candidates are mathematically eliminated. It would be so much better if there was simply one "Super Tuesday" where every state held their primaries on the same day, everyone voted at once, and there was no momentum. But it will never happen - these tiny early-voting states cherish the disproportionate role that they play in all this and will never willingly relinquish it.



I've written my congressmen and senators once or twice. I've received responses every time. But in all cases it was obviously always computer-generated or it was obviously a staff member writing one or two small paragraphs in response to me, along with several larger paragraphs of what was obviously their candidate's standard verbiage on whatever subject I wrote to them about. I understand that candidates cannot personally respond or even read every letter, but I also think that at best, in most cases they read only a handful and their impression of what their constituents are writing to them about are at best reports prepared by their staff who do read the letters, offering a very high-level view of it, at most. So if you're the one guy who writes to your congressman and says something really profound, that they might actually listen to if they actually knew about it, chances are almost 100% that your message gets lost in the shuffle and never makes it intact to the congressperson.




I think this is mostly a case of it being very difficult to change a system from inside that system. Hate corporations? I do. But want to stop doing things you do that support them? Not so easy - the every day essentials of life are provided by corporations, and only by corporations. Food, fuel, gas, income. I cannot live without them, and if I want them in most cases I do not have viable alternative sources. So yeah, if everyone en masse stopped buying things from corporations, we could destroy these corporations, but not without destroying ourselves. Same for media - I need (or at least I want) news. I have no good alternatives. Even Congress, where we really could do something, in some sense, we're screwed. Each of us has so little influence, as I mentioned in my last post, but even worse than that is the whole two party system- I mean, who's on the ballot for us to vote for? Usually Mr. Bad, and Mr. Worse. Great choice, huh? (and usually, the third party guys who have no chance to win are no better, to be honest) No wonder we never change anything. The candidates we're picking from have "differences" usually, but in all the ways that really matter, such as the candidates themselves basically being in favor of every important aspect of the status quo, they're no different from each other, and so we really have no choice at all. We're just rubber-stamping our approval of maintaining the status quo. And from the candidate's standpoint, why not? These guys crave power. If they lose the election, they're powerless. If they win, they owe their power to the status quo, and have no motivation to change anything.



Yup, exactly. See above - those in power owe their power to the framework that gave them that power to begin with. They have a vested interest in not changing it.



Interestingly, there have been times where we've had very viable third parties. But never a way for multiple parties to really share power. One party wins, and the others lose, and that's it. And not at all unpredictably, we've firmly devolved into a two-party system. Maybe the founders just wanted to do something different than what they had in Britain. Who knows? If they had been smart, they'd probably have banned political parties. On the other hand, parties can be useful. I've heard it argued that during the civil war, the Confederate government was often ineffective because they didn't have formal political parties, making it difficult to line up political support for initiatives that would have been necessary to the success of their cause. I just think that at the end of the day, a parliamentary system can help to avoid dominance by one or two parties - but only *can* - from what I know of British politics, for instance, its basically two parties that have dominated. But in other parliamentary countries, like Israel, I see a lot more fluidity with more parties having a real voice.



I think this is just influence - a lot of it being exercised in a very short-sighted way. There are people with influence, especially on Wall Street, who would quite literally kill the goose that laid the golden egg if given the chance - and only for their own, short-term selfish reasons. Its a "Let them eat cake!" world that we live in. There are people out there who would not bat an eye at screwing over the lives of a thousand people or a million people if it meant that they could go from being a billionaire to a multi-billionaire. You could parade the dying and the starving right past the front door of their mansion and their only reaction would be to call the paid-off police to haul off the people they didn't want to see. How much wealth has been transferred from the government (i.e. you and me) to the military / industrial complex as a result of our recent wars, using the blood and lives of our young people as the catalyst? These guys don't care who dies for their gain, and as long as the media doesn't show dead bodies arriving back at Dover AFB or people getting maimed on TV, so no one appreciates the true cost, they're happy - and they're the same guys controlling the media so that it won't broadcast it, and the government, so that the media's cameras can't get in to see these things even if the media wanted to broadcast it. And our system gives these people soooooo much influence that its very difficult to keep them from running amok. So the people with real power, they can easily afford to pay for $4 gas and will happily do so, especially if they're personally profiting off that $4 gas. Worse, even if they're not personally profiting off of it, they'll happily accept it, and even encourage it, simply for the fact that $4 gas makes it more difficult for the poor and the middle class to ever rise up from one class to the other. To be rich, and wealthy, and powerful, you need more money than everyone else. If everyone else gets as much money as you, you're wealth is meaningless and you've gone from being rich and powerful to merely average. So its in the interests of the wealthy to supress the economic status of everyone else. No wonder those who control the media and the message in this country want us to think that capitalism is so wonderful, because if we had other systems where the wealth is shared, the wealthy can't be wealthy any more.

Congratulations! You have caught on to the nature of Altruism. Altruism sucks s**t through a straw paid for by the tax payers under the threat of the gun, the whip, the sword and the dungeon held by the goverrnment.

ruveyn

I am not opposed to altruism. What I'm saying is that we don't have the right kind of altruism. We don't have a system anymore that permits people to succeed. If that tax money went to building up schools in Mingo County or in Cherry Hill, or giving good jobs that paid well to Baltimore, who hasn't had a major underclass employer since Beth Steel closed down, I would have no problem with it. Some of it does, on rare occasions. A lot more goes to fomenting revolutions in Iran or opening a school in Angola. If we were doing fine, altruism is a good thing. But we must govern our own without being nice to others. I'm dirt poor atm. If I had money, I'd have no problem giving some to the homeless. But I've got to provide for myself first. I just wish our politicians realized that.

If you guys are going to talk about politics and the media, you really should investigate the whole "access" game, if you're not already familiar with it. The gist of it is that political reporters need access to sources in order to get better stories than their competition, but because the stories they're writing concern the very people that they rely upon to provide that access, they can never hit too hard, lest their access be cut off. It basically neuters the political media, as they're beholden to the very people they're supposed to be investigating, and is a major cause of the misinformation problem in this country today.

As to voting, I'm strongly in favor of something called instant runoff voting, that would allow people to vote for a range of candidates in order of preference, so that people could vote for their first choice 3rd party without feeling like they're enabling an odious candidate by not supporting his opponent. Needless to say, the major parties are not enthusiastic.

I am firmly of the view that the United States is headed for another paradigm shift. It is overdue, the last real one having been the neo-conservative shift in the 1980's. We have seen the harvest reaped from what neo-conservatism has sown, and people are increasingly angry about it.

The capacity for crony capitalists and their bought-and-paid-for members of legislatures to deceive the public is not limitless.

The trick is to ensure that the paradigm shift does not swing so wildly that it overcompensates.

Well, here's hoping. Honestly, I think a sort of abandonment of the whole modern idea of capitalism is necessary. By that, I don't mean the whole "Personal property is the root of evil", but the abandonment of finance capitalism. Bankers produce nothing, and profit increasingly more. They profit if the country is doing well and if their bank is doing well. They profit if they run a company into the ground or drive a nation to bankruptcy. We have met the enemy, and he is Gordon Gekko.

If that's what you mean, then abso-%$^&ing-lutely.

Although I would suggest it was in motion long before the 80's.

There's that potential for overcompenstation. "Abandonment of the whole idea of capitalism," is a radical, chaotic notion.

And don't forget where those bank profits go. I hold bank shares in my equity portfolio. I own mutual funds that hold bank shares. I am morally certain that my pension plan holds them. The profits from banks are returned to shareholders in the form of dividends, and the vast majority of those shareholders are pension funds and mutual funds. My income security in retirement is dependent--in part--on the profitability of the companies and trusts in which I have invested.

Government has means to curb corporate excess. Untying corporate involvement in the political process is the first step, after which, revisiting securities regulation and capitalization requirements comes next. But a wholesale abandonment of "the whole idea of capitalism" is an example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

How do you untie corporate involvement in the political process? So long as one class, and only one class, holds all the money, the government will be tied to that money and only that one class will have the say. Even if Citizens United was overturned, you'd have the fact that a company can, and will, bribe officials, elected or appointed, to decide in their favor, through retirement funds in the Caymans, a promise of a job or support after their term is up, etc.

I am not saying throw out capitalism completely. I've been working on an idea... small business capitalism. Capitalism with a focus not on stocks and companies, but one a family farm or ranch, or a small shop. Local capitalism, in a sense. You ever watch Deadwood, or read about some of these old Boomtowns? It's fantastic. It may not have been perfect, but it was an insular community where a man's wealth was, more or less, what he built. I doubt we'll ever get to that, but that was the economic model, the capitalism, that drove this country before the banks took over.

I understand your desire to retire, and your focus on stocks. However, I can't argue in favor of that, for the same reason: self-interest. I have never worked, and possibly will never work in a job that provides me with enough disposable income to throw it into what is essentially gambling. I have always been dependent on the existence of social security and medicare, as has just about everyone in my extended and immediate family. And now, to boost stocks, for the bottom line, people are seriously debating axing those programs. It is not the worker that wants them gone. It is the company. And since the economy is the government, the company will likely get what it wants within my lifetime. That is what I am fighting against. Not capitalism itself, but the bank focused national capitalism that we have now. The capitalism where a nation's economic success is measured in stocks and GDP rather than the wages and lifestyle of it's citizens.