Comment by RajT88
7 days ago
I would actually suggest this is symptomatic of the real problem: money in politics.
Elected officials (and some appointed, like SCOTUS) keep changing laws and precedents to allow more and more money in politics. They can't quit all that dark money - without a lot of funding, you don't get elected. Usually the best funded candidate wins.
There was an anonymous oped from a congressman some years back which bemoaned the reality - that 60% of their time was dedicated to meeting with donors for reelection campaigns instead of working on real problems.
> that 60% of their time was dedicated to meeting with donors for reelection campaigns instead of working on real problems.
This is the same story told by Tom Morello, guitarist of Rage Against the Machine (at the end of the early life section): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Morello#Early_life
Key line: "He had to compromise his entire being every day."
Part of the reason money has such a big influence on elections is that first-past-the-post election system you have over there in the US. When voters have to make a binary choice between two participants, low-information campaigns like hit-pieces are able to make a big difference and are cheap to communicate en-masse. When voters have a actual choice between four parties on the left and four parties on the right, hit-pieces will only make a voter switch from, say, one left-wing party to another. So since the return-on-investment on political advertising is much lower, much less money will be spent on it and there will be less of it. And what will be there will be of higher quality.
If any of what you just said was true in practice, Australia would be a gleaming example of how democracies with strong civil society organisations can be run.
Instead, Australia is best described as pigs at the slops trough.
A nation that seems to only want to vote for leaders who have a public humiliation kink.
When one party will violate every norm and law to the greatest extent that they can get away with it, it's pretty much impossible to compete with them. I want good things for people. I can't compete with fascists because they will cheat and lie and employ violence. My positive intent is almost impossible to out thwart their dirty deeds if they are willing to break laws / change laws and I won't.
It amazes me that so many people blame the politicians and not the people who elected them.
Well we can’t recall the voters, so there is no point in addressing them. They are a problem because in the US there used to be an FCC rule that said “if you call yourself a news program, you must tell the truth,” and that was overridden by the Supreme Court during Reagan’s term.
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Blaming voters for being stupid is not widely accepted yet.
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There's only one party and it's color is green. Donors know red or blue doesn't matter, so they give to both.
That's just an unreal characterization that plays into the hands of the "red" team. One side has put up presidents and congressional leadership that worked (mostly, I'm not saying they're perfect) within the traditional framework of the system. The other has put up a president who literally does not understand the meaning of the word "no," expects that everyone will let him do pretty much anything he wants, and a congress that agrees with him. Notably, that side was different in 2000, 1988, 1980, etc. -- not perfect by any stretch, but not this.
The difference matters.
Do you want another authoritarian, corrupt, cult of personality leader like Trump? Proclaiming "both sides" and ignoring nuance like you're doing is how no one gets held accountable for the real harms that are taking place. Please stop holding water for the MAGAs/GOP.
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Assuming you're from the USA, your two main parties are exactly like that. The appearances have changed, but Obama drone-assassinating random children on the other side of the world was not much better than what Trump is doing.
Not defending Trump, to be clear, just saying US imperialism and fascism has much deeper roots and that removing Trump is not going to fix any issues the rest of the world has with the USA.
USA government is corrupt, true. Current admin is balls-out corrupt in ways that have a French legislator calling out that impeachment would have happened there. It's shockingly out in the open corrupt, and that's saying a lot because most of the people ripping us off want to be somewhat quiet about it and not draw attention.
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Can you point to an objective assessment of Obama's drone policy?
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It was not better, it was less. US imperialism has deep roots, yes, but a large chunk of the world who would tolerate a moderate level of it, don't tolerate this level.
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Yes yes yes. Dark money. Nepotism. Corrupt courts. Gerrymandering .... anything to deflect from the fact that so many voters still put thier mark beside the biggest idiot. And i mean that literally. American voters like tall people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heights_of_presidents_and_pres...
They're all problems and they all contribute to the reality of our government being unable to actually do anything beyond tax cuts.
* People elect morons because we have been slowly destroying our education system since the 50's and we can barely turn out anyone who can think worth a shit. That's by design, as local elections overwhelmingly swing Republican, and Republicans on balance gain from an ignorant electorate.
* Additionally, we are now bombarded with "information" from wake to sleep every single day, and beyond the actual problems which are already stressful enough, we also have a whole bunch of made up culture war nonsense that mainstream and alternative media loves to discuss, both to fill airtime and because researching and covering nonsense is far less work, less legally actionable, and garners more attention overall. Information overload affects people too and makes them more likely to choose easy/quick things.
* Dark money is also a HUGE issue because it permits capital to influence elections like never before. It's no coincidence all of this shit got turbocharged after Citizens United.
* Gerrymandering is also a huge, huge issue wherein Democrat votes are simply disregarded or packed into single districts, which helps local elections shift further right constantly.
* The courts are also hideously corrupt. The Supreme Court is utterly failing to reign in the Trump administration on everything short of wiping their asses with the constitution, and that's not shocking considering how many of them were appointed by Trump and confirmed by the inept Congress.
And then any time Democrats do manage to acquire something resembling power, they have so many fires to put out that they can barely get us back to an even keel before another "outsider" dumbass comes in and starts screwing it up again.
American government was actually perfectly able to "Do things" right up until 2008. Republicans and Democrats quite literally worked together in Congress in broad cliques that normally crossed party boundaries, and did this all the time. When Clinton's admin was trying to save money on the budget, the fights in Congress frequently crossed party lines and were outright bipartisan, about actual merits (claimed or real) of the programs they were cutting or vouching for. You had Republicans rightly blasting certain Democrats for saying stupid things about the SSC shoulder to shoulder with other democrats.
Then in 2008 Mitch McConnel said, literally to reporters, "I will make Obama a one term president" and declared their job was to not let the government do anything.
And just like that, it became Republican Party Doctrine that you do not cross the party line or else you get fired. This was absolutely supported and highly praised by their constituents! As Democrat politicians continued to work their assess off crossing the aisle, finding any way to keep the country functioning as half of the government declared strike (the irony).
But for some reason we aren't allowed to say this. Republicans directly say their plan and strategy and malice to the camera and we get punished for showing their voters exactly what they vote for.
Democrats are still trying to make deals, because half of them are literally just republicans with a (D), but if you ever ever ever ever cross the aisle as a Republican, even to fix a problem your base has spent decades screaming about, you get primaried.
Republican voters have done this. The republican party has chosen to do this. They own this.
People aren’t electing “morons” out of ignorance. They are electing people that hate the same people they hate. You are blaming ignorance where it is active malice.
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Politics is an arm's race. This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but Democrats do all the same things Republicans do. Arguably they differ in how they do it, and how much. Democrats gerrymander, and as well traffic in conspiracy theories for example (the latter they do less than Republicans, but they still do it).
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