Broken Democracy

Election day on a workday
election day not a national holiday
that tells you the score right there

So much dysfunction in government. People always say “throw the bums out”, but even when we do, we just get new bums. Maybe it’s not just bad leadership, maybe the system itself is broken or has been corrupted. We can all think of a million things that need to be changed, but what are the
Game Changing Ideas,
the changes that would have effects all up and down the line. These are my suggestions.

1-Get money out of politics.
As long as money is what it takes to get elected, and lots of it, we have government by auction to the highest bidder, and you can see that result in every government policy and decision. Depending on their budget, small companies buy mayors and city councils, larger businesses get to buy senators and congressmen and get special tax exemptions passed in Congress (hidden in the fine print of 800 page omnibus bills).
Even if corporate personhood ended, the rich would still be able to buy politicians.
The only solution; no private money in elections.

2 Real Choice
Right now it’s a choice of tweedledee or tweedledum, the lesser of two evils, no real choice. Whether you’re passionate about Ron Paul, Ralph Nader or Rick Santorum, good luck. Third parties have just about zero chance of getting elected. So how do any new voices or new ideas have even the remotest chance?
At the minimum, we at least need to have Instant Runoff Voting, which means you rate your choices in order of preference, for example Nader 1, Obama 2, Mr. x 3, Santorum 1, Romney 2, Mr. x 3. If nobody gets a clear majority in the first round, then the 3rd place candidate is dropped and people who listed, for example, Nader as their first choice would have their votes applied to their 2nd choice.

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These first 2 points I believe will make just as much sense to Republicans as to Democrats. The next 2 may be a little more problematic, although i think every Republican will agree with the idea that vote counts should be honest and the system above reproach, even if they think that is the case now.

3 Honest Vote Counts—–Electronic Voting Machines=Stolen Elections
I find the evidence conclusive that elections have been hacked.
Here’s one link, if you google, you can find many more
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7926958774822130737#

and just because Obama won, or was allowed to win, don’t be too sure that 2008 was an honest vote count in all the elections across the nation.

4 Stop Disenfranchising Voters
Florida 2000, a systematic campaign to remove voters from the rolls
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5321794022770412541
2004 Lack of polling places in Democratic districts
http://harpers.org/archive/2005/08/0080696

and deeper than that, the “War on Drugs” has basically been a war on left wing politics, putting people, (especially poor dark skinned people, who tend to be Democrats), in prison as a way to take away their vote (and make a hefty profit off them), and scaring others out of politics.
https://www.google.com/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=The+New+Jim+Crow

5 End Protection for Criminal Businessmen
A corporation is a legal fiction which was designed to allow people to take business risks without fear of losing their personal assets. It was not supposed to be a licence to commit crime, but that’s what it is today.

So often we hear this corporation did this or that corporation did that, Monsanto, halliburton, PGE, Exxon, etc. The truth is, the decisions were made and carried out by specific people, and if those decisions and actions were criminal, including criminal negligence, then those specific people, especially the top executives, need to be brought to criminal court and put at risk of losing everything and going to jail.

Instead, the “corporation” gets fined, takes it off their taxes, and the perpetrators go off to their mansions with their golden parachutes, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars.

I get so frustrated with progressives, the left, whatever label you like, when they buy into this idea that a legal fiction, a “corporation”, was responsible for whatever the latest crime is, when in fact, it’s people. Right now the incentives are for bad behaviour, not good; screw things up for short term, private profit, then ride off into the sunset with bags of money, leave the mess behind.

Unless personal accountability is built into the system, don’t expect good citizenry from those in business.

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read this book
http://www.fixingelections.com/

These are just the basics, and of course there are a lot more important changes that need to be made, but i truly believe that if these were adopted we would see real, fundamental change and a much more equitable and livable America.

Of course the deeper issues are issues of ethics and world view, how one looks at the world, the frame that effects all our ideas and beliefs, and the deepest changes are on that level, but that’s for another post. although you can see some here http://jaydancingbear.com/writings/Politics.htm

I also want to say that , to me,
the most important issue of the day is the Environment,
Global Warming, GMOs, pollution, toxic waste, threat of nuclear disaster, etc.,
because if the environment is screwed, if we’re getting cancer from pollution,
and have to move because the climate has forced us to, everything else is affected.
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A corporation is a legal fiction. There are only people; owners, shareholders, CEOs, workers.
In 1933 60 families owned most of America. How many own it today?

In 1933 Ferdinand Lundberg wrote a book, based on a great deal of research, called
America’s 60 Families
http://www.google.com/search?aq=0&oq=america’s+60&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=america’s+60+families
in which he detailed how a small number of super rich people owned America. Some of the names may have changed, but America is still owned and operated by perhaps 1000 people.

-Through the legal fiction of “corporation”, their control is disguised.
-Through the legal bribery of “campaign contributions”, they buy and sell politicians to get the laws and policies that benefit the super rich at the expense of everybody else.
-They own the media, so the only message heard mainstream is “capitalism and competition’

All the people complaining about corporations miss the point that
there is no such physical thing as a corporation, only people, and
there is a ruling aristocracy in America that has names and faces.
Please, never say corporations again. Talk about the ruling class, the feudal lords who rule America as their person fiefdom. Name the names who own specific companies.

and what, exactly, am i suggesting? Certainly not physical violence, but
publicly naming and shaming the specific people responsible
for whatever the specific issue may be.
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Is America a one party state, the CORPORATE CAPITALIST PARTY?
Are the Democratic and Republican parties like the left and right wings of this party, the Wage Slavery party, with the Democratic party representing a kinder, gentler version, while the Republicans are more hard nosed.

Are they like the slaveholders of the pre Civil War South, where some of the slaveholders starved their slaves and didn’t give them enough time to rest, while others saw the wisdom in taking better care of their slaves, however both shared the unquestioning assumption that the slaves existed for the benefit of the owners, that the slaves’ purpose in life was to be slaves.

Let’s look at our “free” elections
1) a winner take all system, which means that you only have to get part of the electorate to believe your lies, rather than having to moderate policies, as in a parlimentary, proportional representation system. The two party system discourages and silences any voices too far off the mainstream. Third parties are rendered a joke, because they have no chance of winning, thus people will not vote for them, thus, they have no chance of winning.

2) Money and advertising, in effect, buy elections. The rich are allowed to buy as many Newspapers, TV and radio stations as they want. The media then, in effect, chooses the candidates, by giving free advertising in the form of “news” to some, while totally ignoring others. This preserves the illusion of “freedom of choice”, while making a mockery of it.

An additional benefit of this is that once you own the media you can lie to and brain wash the populace, Fox “news” being a good example.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6737097743434902428
Of course the deeper brainwashing is not just the lies and propaganda that media mouthpieces like Fox put out, the deeper brainwashing is the whole mindset of materialism, selfishness, war with nature, competition instead of cooperation, and all the rest of the sick, perverted and self destructive modes of living that society tries to program us for.

3) People who disagree are put either in prison or under the threat of prison. The way to do this is by making the lifestyle of the left and the working classes, especially the darker skinned people, illegal.

One way that this is done is by making pleasurable drugs illegal, while encouraging expensive addictions to toxic medical drugs with horrible side effects, actually prescribing them through the power of the “health care” system.

You get to lock up a bunch of people, take away their right to vote, and make money off them while they are in prison. Also, even for the ones you don’t lock up (is it 80 million americans who use drugs? 100 million?), people afraid of jail are less likely to be politically active. They will keep their heads down and shut up.

4) And, if wages stay low, and people have to work a lot of hours, they won’t have time to educate and concern themselves with politics.

5) Let’s not forget an educational system that features one teacher for 35 students, and fails to teach even the basic elements of personal finance and time management, in a world where those are such vital skills, and that teaches students to learn what the test will ask and to avoid creative thinking.

6) However, when too many people start to wake up, usually because they are suffering, then elections are switched to computers, which can then easily be hacked, if you can call it hacking when the company that makes the machines and wrote the programs does the “hacking”.

The two videos below are about how the elections are stolen
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7926958774822130737

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5321794022770412541

all this under the banner of free and fair elections.

To sum up, THE FIX IS IN

Case in point; Republicans under Reagan and Bush institute lawlessness, the invitation to theft and fraud known as deregulation, and give away trillions in tax cuts to the wealthy. The system falls apart, the Republicans (Tweedledee) lose credibility, so the ruling elites bring in the Democrats (Tweedledum) to give away Trillions to the people who caused the problem, under the rationale that they have to, in order to save the little people.

addendum: A case can be made that President Obama is the perfect person to continue the cause of Corporate Welfare. He looks like change, he sounds like change, but fundamentally, he represents business as usual, albeit a kinder, gentler version.

i think that President Obama is a smart, well intentioned man, whose weakness is that he is prone to conventional thinking. I think that, given the brainwashing and propaganda the American people have received for so long, he is probably the best we could have hoped for, given that essentially, when it comes to elections, our choices are made for us by the ruling elites through the mechanism of the Corporate media.

His weakness is that he still thinks inside the box; closer to the edges, but still inside the box. My hope is that at some point he will wake up and see that we need to go outside the box, and that he will be allowed to live to do that.

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Think of yourself as a scientist. Take a step back from your beliefs, and just see if the facts fit the theory. This doesn’t mean that the theory i outline above is true, i’m not sure it is myself, and the truth is, I hope I’m wrong, but does it seem like it explains what is going on. You draw your own conclusions, come up with your own theories.

What can you do?
I believe that it is each person’s responsibility in life to because the best people we can be. The first thing is to wake up yourself.

Avoid the temptation to buy, buy, buy. Your time is your most valuable resource. Use it to become the best person you can be. Take care of your body, mind and spirit, and actions will come naturally, as the fruit of your higher state of awareness. Martin Luther King said that the arc of history is towards justice. For all the problems, there has been a lot of progress. Time is on the side of Truth, and it happens through each person waking up, one by one.
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UNDERSTANDING LEFT AND RIGHT

The left does a very accurate job of describing how the political and economic structures of this country and many others are set up to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, how people are victims of oppression. It ignores personal responsibility. Many people are just as much victims of themselves, of their own arrogance and ignorance, and too often make the worst of a bad situation.

The Right, on the other hand, totally preaches personal responsibility, yet seems totally oblivious to the fact that if employers are paying low and landlords are charging high, people are screwed, and that this is no accident, instead it is the deliberate result of what amounts to a conspiracy.

The left says we all need to take care of each other, but ignores that we need to do a good job of taking care of ourselves. The Right says people deserve what they get, and every man is responsible for himself.

Personal responsibility-social responsibility. Two halves=one whole.