We just completed our one-hundred-thirteenth peaceful transition of power at the will of the people. The entrenched powers-that-be are only entrenched because we, as an electorate, keep voting for them. If everybody showed up to the polls, they'd be out in two years— but hey, why bother?
Even quite corrupt democracies are more open to be changed by popular vote than the US, were not being bought and paid for beforehand means you don't have the means to successfully stand for election.
Hell, even countries where political candidates regularly get murdered stand more chance of peaceful democratic change.
The US political system is a effectively a convoluted equivalent of having a ballot with only one name on it. Only in this case it's a dollar sign. I would be very surprised if this could be overturned by peaceful means, but it will most certainly require extra-parliamentary action, because US democracy has been sold.
You're half right. Technically we tax payers only lease our elected officials, they aren't our property (that became illegal a few years ago)
What's really funny is how people keep paying into a system they don't like and never do anything about it. According to popular practice, everyone thinks that Facebook and Twitter statuses will create change in Congress. Somebody should write a FAQ about that.
Gerrymandering is a huge problem. Voter suppression is a huge problem. Electoral fraud may be a huge problem. But these things have not succeeded in destroying our democracy, yet — the person who wins the election becomes the person in power, every time. Our system is working, we're just losing.
So don't get involved if you like, sit back and be cynical if it makes you feel better(?), but don't pretend you're not part of the problem.
That is a joke, isn't it?
"Why does this computer hate me?!" "The people who built it must be stupid."
It's not world changing in any way at ALL to say some entity or organization is corrupt. Find me an organization that hasn't being called corrupt.
Do you remember in 2011, when OPERA had some experimental results that suggested neutrinos were moving fast than light? I was in the reddit comment thread covering this story at the time. I made the point that there's no way this is actually happening, and that they were just releasing these results to get 3rd party analysis into what was happening.
By the next morning I had a flood of downvotes and comments about how naive stubborn thinkers like me are rejecting science and ruining the world, and that if only I'd open my eyes to the possibility of something new, even if it shook the foundations of my beliefs, then we could make progress as a species. ect. ect. ect.
Turned out it was a measurement error and they were just releasing results to the public to get 3rd party analysis.
Awwwww.
Yes, the Tea Party started out as a grassroots thing, but it was quickly co-opted by the existing power structure and its message lost.
We're all so predictably unparticipatory that spending a hundred million dollars to move the needle a few tenths of a percent one way or the other makes good political sense. If everybody showed up to vote, that would simply not be true. That's the point I've been making this whole time.
There isn't a choice. It is why I vote libertarian. But the root problems are deeper than that, mainly that you have individual citizens voting for too many people they have no empathy or commonality with, and that politics is a profession rather than civil service.
Not exactly. There are two things that win elections: Money and votes. And money only because it can be used to buy votes.
When the major parties agree on an issue it's because that issue has a stable equilibrium: Either the parties both side with the electorate or the monied interests because the number of vote-equivalent dollars gained in changing positions is not greater than the number actual votes lost by doing so (or vice versa). So you don't see many politicians seriously advocating legalizing murder or drastically slashing the defense budget, respectively.
But all you have to do to get them to change is to make the number of votes they lose by siding with corporations on a particular issue greater than the amount of money they get by doing so. You don't even have to get the parties to split -- most of the issues they're split on are intentionally wedge issues or detail-free hogwash like "small government" or the vague notion that rich people should pay more taxes. You can actually get them both to start siding with the interests of the people on a particular issue, you just have to make more noise than what the opposing interests are paying in dollars. It has happened before. The establishment of the EPA, the breakup of AT&T, the defeat of SOPA, it's a pretty long list.
But it only happens if we make it happen. We have to make them understand that if they don't do what we want, they lose more votes than the money they're being paid can buy them back. Getting 100,000+ voters to sign a petition that brings the issue to the attention of lawmakers may not be sufficient to achieve that on its own, but it ain't a bad start.
Out of 435 house representatives, each election every two years, only a dozen or two seats will change party. At best. That often throws the balance in congress towards one party or the other, but the vast majority of congressmen can be corrupt as fuck and never worry about losing their seat because they are in "red" or "blue" districts.
If you don't live in one of the few turbulent districts with political discourse, nothing will change and the congressman has no care for his / her constituents because they can't be displaced, and the constituents are brainwashed into an us vs them mentality and local culture of blaming everything on the "other guy" even when their rep is actively voting against them.
But you can get the result you want through the primaries. Run your candidate against the incumbent in the primary and keep emphasizing your specific issues and publicizing the incumbent's corrupt stance on them -- even if you don't always win, you may be able to get the incumbent to change positions.
If you're not already aware, I would encourage you to check out Lawrence Lessig and the Rootstrikers organization which is aiming to reduce the influence that money currently has on elections.
Question: Can you recommend any particular organizations that are employing your above strategy of targeting primaries of contested districts to defeat soulless "bought and paid" incumbents?
This is known as Duverger's Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
There are a number of meaningful counterexamples, perhaps most notably in the UK, where Lib Dems have received a significant number of seats since 1974.
These discussions tend to obscure the degree of differences within a given party in the US. (ie, Zell Miller and Dennis Kucinich once shared a party. Though Kucinich was given an "F" by the NRA on gun issues, Zell was later elected to the NRA's board of governors. Kucinich was also a strict vegan, while Zell once threatened to shoot Chris Matthews. You could run similar comparisons by bringing in other Dems, you could do the same on the other side of the aisle. ie, not many Republicans would consider marrying one of the Kennedys or praise Obama's post-hurricane support, but a couple would.)
Any two-party system with a diverse electorate will eventually have to allow substantial variation in candidates and viewpoints, or it will be inevitably reduced to regionalism and obscurity.
A many-party system will eventually force smaller parties into large coalitions to attempt any governance at all.
In short, a two party system and a many-party system are not substantially different in the number of political viewpoints they entertain, nor in the types of compromises required between those factions to result in political action.
In addition to that, gerrymandering just pushes the real campaign into the primaries for those seats. If your representative's party has a hard lock on your district's seat, do what the Tea Party has been doing and primary the incumbent. And fewer people vote in the primaries, so each vote you can shift from one candidate to another counts for more there.
As former Presidents Steve Forbes, Nelson Rockefeller, Ross Perot, Donald Trump, John (Heinz) Kerry, and Mitt Romney clearly demonstrate, money is all that matters in politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Abramoff
Just one example from the link:
> Abramoff and his law firm were paid at least $6.7 million by the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) from 1995 to 2001, which made manufacture goods with the "Made in the USA" label but is not subject to U.S. labor and minimum wage laws.
What’s good about that one is it went on for years and all the politicians knew about it.
I think you are trying to make the point that money bought the all politicians. While that is somewhat true in some cases it isn't the full story.
I suspect if you dig deeper what you will find is that no one cared enough to fix the problem.
I'd note in particular that the bill designed to stop the abuses in CNMI was passed unanimously in the Senate, but then blocked by Tom DeLay in the house[1]. While is it easy to say that DeLay blocked the bill because of money, the truth is that DeLay is quite happy to block any bill that involves new labor laws.
Abramoff found someone who's politics already aligned with what he wanted to happen and then made sure that person saw it as something important enough to do something about it.
I'm not at all sure that is political corruption at all.
(ie, Money is important, but it isn't the only thing)
99.9% of federal employees are not elected. That's the true entrenched power - the permanent bureaucracy. They'll be there regardless of who gets elected.