> Any thoughts on where this energy should go?
Voting, and making sure everyone you know votes too.
Voting, and making sure everyone you know votes too.
I'm not advocating for "not voting", I'm advocating for not letting yourself getting paralyzed by the idea that you are represented already anyway. You are only represented in the most superficial of ways. Start acting instead. Make JP Morgan feel your anger. Make people see your anger to JP Morgan.
You don't have to keep taking the hits. Acting helps psychologically and emotionally and on the best of days even might change things.
Lots of actions available besides the political process where you can still remain firmly on the right side of the law but cause discomfort to the other party. Don't break the law.
- If you had a JP Morgan account. Cancel it.
- Evaluate if they did something illegal, organise a group and go to court over it.
- If you live close to a JP Morgan office, go there and do something. Try to not attract police, as they have more important things to do, but as a rule, the people that work there should have an unusual day. Something as simple as distributing leaflets can for example be really effective to get the office productivity down, especially when maintained.
- Push politicians (maybe on a local level) to apply pressure where they can.
Overall: Don't be nice and agreeable. Be MOAR: mad, organised, angry and relentless.
1. https://www.axios.com/joe-biden-cabinet-vice-president-picks...
Yeah. We blame people and organizations all the time for things that they were legally permitted to do but were selfish, short-sighted, or stupid.
Frankly, JP Morgan should try to be more like Shake Shack (not that Shake Shack was perfect, but at least they recognized and corrected their error: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/business/shake-shack-retu...)
By removing from power the corrupt officials who colluded with JPM and other large corporations to steal stimulus money from small businesses?
JPM benefited from corruption of the political process. Corruption is enabled by minority rule. Minority rule is enabled by citizen apathy, like when people start saying that “voting isn’t acting!”.
By voting en masse, we as citizens get to 1) hold corrupt officials accountable, and 2) strengthen the democratic process by making it more representative, and therefore less vulnerable to corruption in the future.
As a side note: in my experience, people who say things like “voting is not acting, you need to do more!” are not reliable voters, and not reliable activists either. On the other hand, the most proactive voters tend to already know what else they can do. Electoral activism leads to broader activism.
TLDR: start by taking voting seriously.
Well, sorry if I take the above personally, but here is another datapoint. I almost literally said the above in the post you quoted. I have voted in every election I legally could do so. I have run as a candidate in a number of elections. I have even organised groups to running for elections. I did broader activism and have organised a number of activist lawsuits. After a run in with the police I had to tune things down a bit for my family.
> Electoral activism leads to broader activism.
It does both, really. It is a rung on the ladder, a lot of activists start there. But it can also have the effect of soaking up a lot energy from existing activists, with very little real consequences. There is a balance. Political activism, civil activism and judicial activism also have a space and can have a better trade-off between energy invested and concrete consequences.
Bluntly, I think that this is a polyannaish idea. The best pop culture representation of how US politics works is the Simpsons one where Kang and Kodos ran for President. The choice presented to the American public is rarely a choice between a corrupt politician and a non-corrupt one. It's much more typically typically down to deciding which corrupt, power-hungry individual spews the platitudes, half-truths and lies that you think sound the nicest.
Yes, we should still vote. But voting is not a panacea. The real province of democracy is grassroots organizing. It's probably never enough, but the US Constitution and 200 years of supreme court decisions around it have (tacitly, if not explicitly) made it so that that's the only piece of real political leverage available to those of us who don't have enough money to purchase actual political influence.
2008? 2012? Can't say that I've heard (m)any corruption allegations against Obama.
2016? I mean, I don't think a single charge of corruption or malfeasance ever turned out to be true for Hillary Clinton, has it?
Unless you mean "corrupt" in the sense of "non-pure" and, yeah, 99.9$ people who have enough money to be politicians are distinctly "non-pure". Now if you want to get the money out of politics, it'll need consistent Democrat gains at every level down to local council for the next 20 years to move SCOTUS left and undo all the dark money idiocies of the Roberts' court.
The solution is not voting directly, although voting is part of the solution.
The solution is to form and fund a political action body, equivalent to the NRA or MADD or NAACP; define its remit broadly enough to cover all important aspects of the problem but narrowly enough it can draw members from across the political spectrum and won't be impossible to satisfy; recruit lots and lots of members; hire some competent lobbyists; issue candidate endorsements at every election and THEN vote.
Opposing corruption isn't only a Silicon Valley concern, but it's always struck me that the Silicon Valley community could have a lot of political power if there was a collective will to grasp it: SV regularly gambles tens of millions of dollars on uncertain returns, and the median SV worker has much more disposable income than the median NRA member.
Or do you mean voting in my non-battleground state for US president (D for the past 30 years), or perhaps senator (D for the past 20 years)? What effect, exactly, are we hoping for?
‘Voting for financial policy change‘ is like ‘participating in a moment of silence for those we’ve lost to the pandemic‘. The act is something a reasonable person should do because they are a member of society but it is not a solution to that particular problem.
You can also donate your time and money to battleground campaigns elsewhere in the US if you are a citizen.
There are also plenty of ways to get more people to vote, including in battleground states.
If you care, there are plenty of things you can do.
The system is broken because at the moment in most districts you just can’t compete against who has the money.
This behavior will not change because of a single election for a handful of seats 6 months away.
There was talk of a constitutional convention back in 2016 and I think it's time to think about how regular folks can recapture the direction of the nation.
So how is voting for either party going to help a problem that both parties equally passed?
> So how is voting for either party going to help a problem that both parties equally passed?
I think that's misunderstanding politics. Broad bipartisan support doesn't mean both parties were happy with each and every provision, it means that they found the overall compromise acceptable enough to vote for (given the circumstances).
For instance: IIRC, the Democrats actually wanted to add a permanent, general paid sick-leave benefit to one of these relief bills, but after Republican objections they compromised and settled for a temporary COVID-specific benefit to achieve "broad bipartisan support" for the overall bill. That doesn't mean they changed their position, and if more people had voted for Democrats in the last election, the outcome would have been different.
For every $1 going to a good cause, our politicians add $2 of pork in order to find a “compromise”
That's pretty obviously false unless you consider only 0.17% to 0.6% of federal government spending to be "going to a good cause." [1] [2]
[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2007/12/pork-barrel-spending/: "In 2005, CAGW identified 13,997 projects costing $27.3 billion that met its definition of pork spending; as in 2006, that was about 1.1 percent of total spending."
[2] https://www.cagw.org/reporting/pig-book: "The cost of earmarks in FY 2019 is $15.3 billion..." https://www.thebalance.com/fy-2019-federal-budget-summary-of...: "The budget office estimates the federal government will spend $4.536 trillion in FY 2019." That works out to 0.337% of the federal budget.
For those that claim it was dangerous, take that up with Nancy Pelosi the speaker who has refused calls to allow remote voting and video conferences so congress can work. She has refused this because she doesn’t want committees to do anything and she doesn’t want votes recorded. It makes a mockery of any suggestions of oversight. Your beef really is with her not Massie.