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Study Finds US Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Princeton University and Northwestern University have concluded, after extensive analysis of 1,779 policy issues, that the U.S. is in fact an oligarchy and not a democracy. What this means is that, although 'Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance,' 'majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts.' Their study (PDF), to be published in Perspectives on Politics, found that 'When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.'"
You lift the limits on campaign spending, declare that corporations have the right of political speech and are now surprised that the rich people have all the say?
I have no sympathy. In fact, many of you cheered it as a sign of greatness and freedom that America was doing this. Your allies, however, were fucking appalled. Let
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
It took a study to figure that out?
It's not that that was not clear years ago to people who actually follow politics
Does this give us a free pass to revolt now?
I do believe the founding fathers would like it that way.. if the government isn't right, take up arms, overthrow it, and put it back the right way.
And Cold Fjordistan. Your free to say any kind of shit there.
I honestly don't know.
That's a very hard thing for an American to think about.
Folks here do not have things that others do (99%) but we as a society say that they do?
I'd like to blame it on the Republicans but i cannot. The gridlock is to severe. It takes 2 to tango.
Heh. Don't blink.
Man, Slashdot take a long time to accept your post when it's port scanning your ip to see if you're using an open proxy...
...welcome our new US overlords!
Australia? hardly. We exported Rupert, remember.
Try our neighbours across the Tasman Sea.
Tune into http://www.whitehouse.gov/, just like any other idiot box channel be it http://abc.go.com/, http://www.nbc.com/, http://www.cbs.com/, http://www.cwtv.com/, http://www.fox.com/, suck up the corporate cool aide and be informed, of what you are meant to know, and about how you are meant to think and whom you have to vote for. All the channels with the same corporate message, all the talking heads reading off the same Teleprompter feed. The US no longer has a president, it just has another puppet, saying what it is told to say, pretending it thinks for itself, and working ever so hard at dumbing down the airwaves. Of course the rest of the world is looking at the office of the President of the United States and realising just how a empty suit really occupies that position.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Benjamin Franklin chose his words well.
"AMAZING: Via @hblodget via @DKThomp: The gain in wealth isn't about the 1%. It's about the top 1% of the 1%. pic.twitter.com/wBqHfpNGR9"
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bj8lUAoCEAAfsCu.png
source: https://twitter.com/GSElevator
In fact, all money in the entire world is actually embedded with a small rare earth magnets in the ink. This has a small but statistically significant impact on spending patterns in such a way as to cause all economic activity to be repelled from the earth's magnetic poles. This money reaches equilibrium near the equatorial climates where the additional energy required to reach escape velocity is much lower.
Wealthy people aren't actually any more hard working: they've just discovered this physical phenomena which is why they all live close to the equator! Whenever they observe significant patters of economic activity via increased trading volumes in the stock markets, they all climb in to their private jets with butterfly nets and catch the money suspended in the atmosphere. When they exhaust the supply of levitating money, this results in the "Flash Crashes" observed on Wall Street & attributed to high frequency trading.
All these people then take their money and use it to buy bigger airplanes and better quality butterfly nets. This is why the real wealth concentrates in the Top 1% of the Top 1% of the Top 1%: the Sporting Goods store which discovered that the cast of "Duck Dynasty" could sew magic butterfly nets from the beard hair on their chins.
It's not so much a conspiracy as it is a giant tragedy for their wives.
Even in our (Australia's) supposedly modern democracy, politicians can say anything at all to get elected and can't be held to it once they are. And once they're in they can hide behind things like parliamentary privelege and say anything they like without having to prove it's true.
There is NO true democracy anywhere in the world as far as I know.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
You Republicans are morons. This is not a Republic no matter how many lies your kind tells. If your kind was smart enough to understand history, you would know that the Seventeenth Amendment gave us the right to vote directly on senators. That makes us a Democracy no matter what you people claim.
Countries that describe themselves as democratic republics generally aren't very good at either.
Technically I believe the United States is a Constitutional Republic.
Danger: anecdote ahead...I listened to an NPR interview recently where it was stated there was significant fear during the Irish/Italian immigration waves that the immigrants were not capable of appreciating US' liberty, and would effectively dilute it. I now think that was accurate, and came to pass.
One cannot argue that in today's United States we have liberty - cutting down a tree requires a permit, even when there are no safety considerations. Growing various plants is illegal. Operating a hair-cutting business without the proper permits is illegal. The list goes on...
Republic? Long gone... One can debate, but I would nominate Wilson at the latest. FDR is the common scapegoat, but Wilson certainly set the stage. There may be earlier contestants, but this is not my area of expertise.
You think Australia is free? Hahahaha! As If!
We've got Bush 3.0 and some Tea Party rejects running the show down here, tearing everything positive and egalitarian down, selling off all of the public's assets, repealing racial discrimination laws, telling bald faced lies to the public and getting away with it because the media is complicit.
We're just a cheap copy of you guys now, the closest thing to freedom is in the Scandinavian countries I'd say.
Sun comes up in the morning, to the east of .... most people. Then sets later (evening). News at 11:00. In other news, We expect it to be light during the day followed by increasing darkness towards evening. Oh, and America is a Corporatocracy. Imagine that.
The original paper is an interesting approach to studying power balances.
The summary is puerile flamebait.
The actual conclusion of the paper is simply that the power in government is not concentrated in massive grassroots organizations or in direct electoral representation, but rather it is concentrated in the small-but-vocal interest groups and economically influential individuals. In other words, causes, no matter how big, don't really get power until they can pay enough to be taken seriously. That might mean lobbying, marketing, or awareness campaigns, but it still takes money to look like your cause has merit.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Sorry to play the cynic, but to foreign observers this has been evident for years.
Australia still has a few journalists left, or did last time I was there. The US would do well to ask the tough questions to their politicians, Oh sorry your viewers dont care, nevermind then carry on.
Is that it's time to start killing our way through politicians until we find some who are properly terrified of the general populace enough to actually simulate honesty and do their job with minimal graft and corruption.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?
Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation's paradigm that "all men are created equal"?
World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed it discredited the Progressives in the American people's eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans' lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people's backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad for examples to emulate.
In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country's needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. ("Congress shall make no law..." says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of "responsible parties." Hence the ruling class's perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry's elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government's plans, and to craft a "living" Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to "positive rights" -- meaning charters of government power.
The ruling class is keener to reform the American people's family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class's self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest -- often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.
At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in Wilson's words and explicit in our ruling class's actions is the dismissal, as the ways of outdated "fathers," of the answers that most Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American people's intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others' comprehension.
America's best and brightest believe themselves qualified and duty bound to direct the lives not only of Americans but of foreigners as well. George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural statement that America cannot be free until the whole world is free and hence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom was but an extrapolation of the sentiments of America's Progressive class, first articulated by such as Princeton's Woodrow Wilson and Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler. But while the early Progressives expected the rest of the wo
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I happened across a Dr. Phil episode on youtube about Amy's Baking Company (ABC) / Kitchen Nightmares. Dr. Phil was going on about the cyber-bullying (of the owner's of ABC). And he never really addressed the way that theABC owners treated their employees or their customers. At the end of the show Dr. Phil talked at length about how good their food was - and how everyone should eat there.
Well, first, there were some interesting psychological questions about whether the ABC owners had some form of borderline personality disorder - that Dr. Phil never even touched on.
Then there was the bigger issue of rish versus poor and powerful versus powerless. There's an awful lot of people in the world with abusive bosses and it's very common to try a new restaurant only to get overcharged for bad food. So it's understandable that there would be a lot of diffuse anger against the ABC owners. But Dr. Phil really didn't seem to get it. He just called it cyber-bullying.
Most Americans think that Australia and New Zealand are the same country.
Study finds water is wet, and the Pope wears a silly hat.
Switzerland is pretty close, they have referendums pretty frequently for major public policies.
Canada is Americas bitch, wholly owned subsidiary of America. Virtually every product on the shelf(less computers of late) is nearly twice the cost of the identical product in the USA; Lower pay and higher taxes... Take home for the same job at same dollar figure would be an approximate half than the USA... Where do most of our resources go? To the south, which we buy back our own products for more...
I'd give my left nut to be allowed into the USA(freedom to have the means and to defend yourself/property, climate, more affordable everything..) to stay(or Australia, tho imo their political system is worse still), but I'm not wealthy or rich enough to make that happen legally(Just settle for snowbirding for 5-6mo/winter)..
I could have told them this 30 years ago. And I don't even live in the States. Some people really need to get a real job.
We actually had a tough question asked by a journo of our Prime Minister today, who responded with anger that he was asked such a tough question...
I learnt an interesting political lesson on my Commodore 64 back in the day.
There was this political sim called "Tyrant" (ancient descendant of Tropico, or civilisation), and you played as the dictator of a communist state.
It was a pretty hard game, as most times the state would collapse and there'd be a revolution.
Eventually, after playing it long enough I managed to find the one way to prevent that state from ever collapsing and have it eternally make money.
Firstly, you had to invade all the surrounding countries and smash external threats.
Then you convert to a democracy and install elections.
Then you generate lots and lots of jobs for people in the secret police
Then you brainwash the populace with masses spent on election funding.
With the population happy and brainwashed, you could raise the tax rate through the roof and no-one would care... also thanks to the huge secret police force they would turn on each other instead of resist the ridiculous taxation and the root cause of said taxation (thanks to election brainwashing)
Does this sound familiar?
It was kinda fun for a buggy BASIC program.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
In Sydney we just arrested the State Premier for corruption over a bottle of wine. The system works. The Prime minister is not above the law in Australia. Something that the USA has never managed to sort out with their corrupt system. Nixon should have been jailed, but really the rot had started to set in long before then. The Greens in Australia are a credible threat to the Liberal and Labor parties. Unlike America, where there is no alternative political movement that can ever get into office. The minor parties in Australia actually get to set policy and ensure that the average person retains a speaking voice in our government.
Try the Scandinavian countries instead.
Wait... What's wrong with the EU?
freedom != democracy
Yes, we have elected a terrible government. However, there will be a massive voter backlash at the next election. Also, the government hasn't been able to pass all the legislation it wants because it is being blocked by minor parties in the senate. The fact is the majority of Australians voted for a shit government and that's what they're getting. They will however be stopped at the next election now that everyone realises just how terrible this government is. My sister is on $150k+ and even she hates the current government. The Liberal party is about to get smacked down for their arrogance and bad policy.
Wow! Bush 3.0? Will Australia invade Iraq to make money for Bush 3.0 and his family and friends who have investments in oil and weapons companies?
Will Australia imprison 6 times the percentage of its people as the percentage imprisoned in European countries, partly to make money for those who run prisons under contract?
Who has Australia tortured? Who has Australia kidnapped and taken to other countries?
Is Australia holding people in prison without trial?
Is Australia spending taxpayer money to spy on the entire world?
I'm sympathetic about the degradation, but it isn't quite Bush 3.0.
Quote from a book about George W. Bush: "He was arguably the most disliked president in seven decades."
Democracy is an idea. Just that.
The US of A has NEVER been a Democracy, Our founding fathers knew that a Democracy was not the way to do proper government and framed what we are today called a Constitutional Republic. What we have now is a twisted mess of a government that is controlled by the money not the people that it was intended to be controlled by.
It is indeed a constitutional republic. It is also a representative democracy. Apparently you can be both.
So basically what I've been saying for a few years now. Welcome to Russia Americans. Have fun with that. That leaves Canada and Australia as the last bastions of freedom in the world.
I wish that were true. In some ways it is but not in other ways. I cannot really talk about that though. Sorry.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Will be forgotten in no time! The economical elite and their political laceys will get this article downplayed and kept away from the forefront.
If there would be any kind of debate on TV (yeah, right) they'll just schedule another rebroadcast of 'Dallas' on the other channel. That should do the trick;-)
You know, I think the surest way to keep politicians semi-honest is to have a multi-party system and its corollary, the minority government. Just in my own lifetime I've seen a prairie protest party (Social Credit by name, not nature) disappear, a major party on the right (Progressive Conservative) go from the largest parliamentary majority ever to extinction, a party that wants to break the country in two become the Official Opposition, another prairie protest party on the right (Reform) try to take national power, a socialist party (NDP) go from perennial third or fourth party status to being the Official Opposition, Canada's other major party, the Liberals, drop down to a poor third, the party on the right reconstitute itself, the Green Party get a member in parliament for the first time... And I'm simplifying. New parties are always bubbling up, and the three biggest parties go up and down and sometimes disappear.
Nothing keeps the rascals on their toes like fear of the electorate.
-Gareth
As an Australian I'd disagree. We have all the same shit happening here. In fact a state premier lost his job TODAY after getting caught out accepting lavish gifts (a $3000 bottle of wine) from an (allegedly corrupt) industry group without declaring it.
According to the Democracy Index which attempts to measure the state of democracy in 167 countries, Norway comes up on top as the most democratic country in the world, followed by Sweden, Iceland and Denmark. Australia is in 6th place and the US comes in at 21. North Korea is (no surprise here) at the bottom and Russia was recently downgraded to an authoritarian regime.
We're on the verge of totalitarianism in NZ, and have been for a few years. Call back when we get the current bunch of neoliberal rent-seeking thugs out on their behinds. Hopefully we won't just replace them with a kinder, gentler bunch of neoliberals who love the Deep State as much as the present crew.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
We can take our country back, but it will take a Constitutional Convention to remove corporations are people. Or we could just keep with the status quo of partisanship bickering to keep the stupid people busy.
Captcha: illusion
Nobody means literal democracy when they refer to it. They almost always mean the kind of thing we used to have in the USA.
Oligarchy- DUH.
Only good part is those of us who get to say "I told you so" over and over as more people wake up. (It loses it's fun by the time it gets popular.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
...where the goverments turn to McKinsey & co in exchange of a lot of Kroner to write up their economic policies? Hmmm...
The US structurally still remains a republic (not a democracy).
However - when people are too ignorant to cast an educated vote, the result can mirror one found with a structural oligarchy - but to imply then that the US is somehow thus structurally transformed to an oligarchy is wrong headed.
A consequence of truly free society is that you are free to give up your freedom to someone else - either explicitly or through complacency.
You can't fix stupid.
The elected portion has very little power and lacks the cohesion to actually agree to much.
You insensitve clod!
Did the study at least get THAT part right? I know the new /. missed it.
New Zealand free?!?! We're living in oligarch's wet dream here! Unions destroyed years ago, privatised public services, low tax rates, corporate media, sedated population, low wages, no tax on capital gains the list goes on and on. Australia has one huge advantage over NZ, you've still got strong unions. Therefore you've got: 1. better pay 2. employees who are at least exposed to how industrial relations are supposed to work. Over here people just take what they're given because they've been told for over 30 years that they're worthless and so people actually believe it.
...most of the voters don't give a F, and therefore don't vote.
Rectification of this abomination may eventually take those millions of guns that exist in American society for exactly that purpose, although I'd like to think that there is some other way. The Article V constitutional convention that is being proposed by certain states may be able to tackle this, dunno. But the gov't doesn't do what's good for the people, that can be seen in our unemployment stats and so forth.
Still, as a Swede talking, I don't feel like I live in a true democracy. We only have public votes once every 10 years or so, and the results of those are often discarded. I'm aching for a more direct democracy where the government only has the executive mandate. I don't know if the country would be run better, but at least we'd get a say.
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He wasn't "arrested", he QUIT. He should be arrested though since in addition to the actual corruption he just perjured himself in a courtroom.
remove corporations are people
No! There was a reason liberals fought so hard to make sure they were. I know you Republicans hate the idea of holding people accountable to contracts and requiring them to pay taxes, but those are the historical reasons for treating a group of people acting together as a person. Without that, our country would be destroyed by you conservatives. Employment contracts would no longer mean anything. It would result in the destruction of unions. Also without it, companies would pay no income tax. Of course since you conservatives don't give a damn about anyone besides yourself, I guess you don't care.
Carter was the last President; after him, it has been a complete sham. One reason he had it so bad is because he went up stream against a system that was near death.
You only have power in a corrupt system as long as you go with the flow; it's empty power but it is enough to still attract tools. Like a C or B movie villain's 2nd in command, the second he falls out of line all that power does nothing to stop a dramatic (and cliche) example from being made of them.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
It's not a republic any more? The US has a dynastic leader, akin to a royal or dictatorial family? Weird. Or, maybe, you just don't know what the word "republic" means. That would make more sense.
One cannot argue that in today's United States we have liberty - cutting down a tree requires a permit, even when there are no safety considerations. Growing various plants is illegal. Operating a hair-cutting business without the proper permits is illegal. The list goes on...
Is that because government is evil or because people in general are evil?
If people would only ever cut down the few trees they actually need, you'd still have the liberty. But there will always be people who think that if cutting a tree for your own house is okay, then cutting down all trees so everybody has to pay you for wood is equally okay.
Laws exists not for the vast majority that would not abuse freedoms, they exist to protect that vast majority from the minority that would.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
What the study actually found was that national policies agree more with the preferences making about $146000/year (90th percentile, about 33 million) than those making around $50000/year in income (50th percentile). Who is at the 90th percentile? Mostly people with graduate degrees, professionals, academics, and many of our politicians, including most of the people who set policy in the Democratic party and the authors of the study itself. It's well-off fiscal liberals, well-off fiscal conservatives, and everybody in between. That doesn't make us an "oligarchy", it makes us a nation in which somewhat smarter people both make more money and set more policies. Doesn't mean we have good government (many of those smarter people are still incredibly dumb), but it's probably better government than if we simply implemented the majority will for everything.
That's, of course, assuming that there is even a shred of truth to the study, given that it's so methodologically flawed. But if the results of the study are true, they merely show that we have representative government, in which people elect representatives who do the right thing, rather than the popular thing. That's how things are supposed to work.
Obviously, since your "Tea Party" outlawed gun ownership. Yeah.
Even in our (Australia's) supposedly modern democracy, politicians can say anything at all to get elected and can't be held to it once they are.
Is there any place where politicians held to what they say in their campaign or political parties are held to what's in their manifesto?
The other truth is... the American Revolution wasn't started by a bunch of serfs, it was started by rich land owners who didn't like their deal...
Like Cliven Bundy?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I resent that. Many former Republicans are not morons but when our party sold us out the to "Moral Majority" so Reagan and Bush1 could win their elections, we simultaneously lost all representation in the party and found our previous party being run by a bunch of fucking nutjobs. The best part about it? The fucking nutjobs brought a bunch of formerly Democrat voting Southern baptist nutjobs into the Republican party, so neither side has a snowball's chance in Hell of getting a normal, moderate, middle-of-the-road president elected with a congress that will support him.
Governence by illiterate nutjobs. And uhh yeah you, sorority girl, just in case you accidently wander into a voting booth one day there's some things you should know...
excuse me but the greens are NOT a credible threat. The way the minor parties manage to get wins in government is a true indictment on the system where the minority are actually holding the majority to ransom in order to get other legislation passed, the system in Australia is as fucked if not more so than the American one. the Greens are a bunch of arsehats that would bankrupt the country faster than even Rudd could manage. The only reason the greens get much of a showing is because of how truly aweful our current two main parties. The only other real contending party self exploded a few years ago whose catch phrase was "keep the bastards honest", sadly the days of a viable alternative party seem to have gone.
As usual. It implies that the views of 'average Americans' are abrogated by the economic elite. As the PDF clearly states on page 14 "It turns out, in fact, that the preferences of average citizens are positively and fairly highly correlated, across issues, with the preferences of the economic elites." It also turns out that the paper defines 'average American' as someone at the 50% income level, and 'economic elite' as someone at the 90% income level or above, which works out to $146,000. The paper than argues that this 'elite' population fairly represents the truly elite (the top 2%) based on 13 policy preference questions--which aren't listed in the paper--with a correlation of r=0.91 vs a correlation of r=0.69 for the 'average' population.
Sorry. There ain't nothing in this paper about the Koch brothers, Soros, Oprah, Bill Gates, or any of your other favorite elites. This is all about Joe the Plumber vs your mid-level Google executive.
So how does the paper define the views of the 'average American'? Well, on page 15, there's this "Some particular U.S. membership organizations--especially the AARP and labor unions--do tend to favor the same policies as average citizens. But other membership groups take stands that are unrelated (pro-life and pro-choice groups) or negatively related (gun owners) to what the average American wants." A footnote 40 then directs you to another paper by one of the same authors, presumably for the corroborating data.
Finally, on page 18, we encounter this: "Because of the impediments to majority rule that were deliberately built into the U.S. political system--federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism--together with further impediments due to anti-majoritarian congressional rules and procedures, the system has a substantial status quo bias. Thus when popular majorities favor the status quo, opposing a given policy change, they are likely to get their way; but when a majority--even a very large majority--of the public favors change, it is not likely to get what it wants."
In other words, here's the real summary: "Elite academic researchers at elite universities have conducted a study in which they find that the constitutional system put in place by the founders of the republic to prevent mob rule is thwarting their elite progressive agenda by working as intended. Oh, and throwing a lot of money around and making noise tends to draw attention to your cause, particularly when it aligns with the majority view, which it does most of the time."
Nothing to see here. Move on.
Swedish elections occur every four years and every five years there are elections for the European Parliament.
.... you can get your news sources from all over the world. You're no longer limited to watching the same group of TV or radio stations or newspapers. There's NO reason for anyone with access to the internet to be uninformed.
At least for me - democracy is not about not having elites, it's about the elites having to fight each other for power, and share it, which creates the checks and balances needed for the state not to spiral out of control with a single authoritarian leader or party. Even though ordinary americans might not have much to say about the way america is run, they at least still (mostly) have their basic rights and press freedom - in stark contrast to the country that springs to mind when the word Oligarchy is mentioned... RT is going to have a field day with this.
Right wing nuts come in many flavors, some support guns, others don't.
I guess he misses ever second one then...
The US of A runs on The Golden Rule.
Compared to Megacorps Megabux Lobbying the average american has literally zero influence over policy.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
You lift the limits on campaign spending, declare that corporations have the right of political speech and are now surprised that the rich people have all the say?
Actually, the campaign spending limits are aimed squarely at the grass roots.
The McCain-Feingold act of 2002, for example, was passed in reaction to the massive volunteer efforts that took down Mike Roos from the California legislature in 1991 (and caused trouble for David Roberti in 1994), and Tom Foley from the House in 1994. It makes the equivalent value of volunteer work and supplies (such as paper, envelopes, and stamps) subject to the spending limits and reporting requirements, as if they were contributions, but provides no caps for campaign spending for such people as labor unions, media conglomerates, and billionaires such as George Soros.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ponder what you wish for. Take a closer look at what happens every time direct democracy is used somewhere in the world.
Essentially, with a switch to more direct democracy you are moving away from the rule of the political parties towards the rule of the media. I don't know about Sweden in detail, but I do know of a few countries in Europe where I would not be too surprised if direct democracy would pretty much mean the rule of Sun, Figaro, Bild and other sleazy tabloids of little value and big impact.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am feeling very privileged to live in a direct democracy, the country is very small and is called Switzerland. We do have 2 instruments to keep our Politicians behaving and represent the people:
1) Referendum: if we don't like what our policy makers have enacted, we can collect 50'000 signatures and the people have to vote on it
2) Initiative: Our policy makers don't want to take care of a certain topic? we, the poeple will vote on it after collecting 100'000 signatures.
It's not a perfect system and it might not work in larger countries on national level, because it is a somewhat slow process to find consensus. However, only the thought alone that politicians' decisions could be overthrown by the people helps keeping them thinking twice what to support and do.
Best
-S
Not just the USA. Pretty sure boring old Canada is as well. And Quebec, and Montreal, and my condo. Just the way it really is. Pane et Circem.
Mostly random stuff.
Nothing. Well, if you're a corporation. Then it's quite convenient that you only have to bribe one single entity instead of having to go to a few dozen local governments.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for,
I'm curious about what "organized interest groups" were "controlled for". Did that include things like the AARP and the NRA, the two largest public pressure groups in the country? How about the various organizations called The Tea Party?
When a lot of people at the grass roots level want to redirect the government, they often join together and form orgizations to lobby for their interests. These groups are generally what gets things done. If the study counts such organizations as "organized interest groups" and subtracts their policy impact from the impact of the "Average American", it's no wonder the latter's impact is measured as " minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant".
Also: What counts as the policy desires of the "Average American"? Are they averaging out people with opposing oppinions on government policy?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Would "Plutocracy" not be a more accurate summation of the proposed conclusion?
Yeah, but it strikes me more and more to be like the German Democratic Republic.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"In Sydney we just arrested the State Premier for corruption over a bottle of wine. The system works."
That's jumping to conclusions. Some obvious ways the system might fail, despite a State Premier getting arrested for receiving a bottle of wine:
* Other people might not get arrested for the same thing. Selective enforcement may be part of corruption. I don't know enough about Australian affairs to know this is the case.
* Taking bribes might not be the only, or even the most serious kind of corruption. I don't need to know much about Australia to know that this is definitively the case.
Corruption isn't just about bribes. Every time someone uses an entrusted position to the benefit of himself, or anyone other than the people who entrusted him with it, that is corruption. Corruption is the abuse of public trust for private gain. Most corruption isn't stopped by laws at all.
The way the minor parties manage to get wins in government is a true indictment on the system where the minority are actually holding the majority to ransom in order to get other legislation passed
That is an exaggeration. While a minority party can get some of their issues through by threatening to vote against the majority party they can never get the majority party to give up their key questions. If they do that they no longer have anything to haggle about.
Considering the actual result that means that a smaller group can get representation. The trade-off the majority party has to make ensures that you don't end up in a "tyranny of the majority"-situation.
Multi-party systems works very well, they have problems but they aren't as big as many claim.
Not only is the president immune from prosecution given the Nixon example, but none of the bank managers, presidents or CEO's were ever jailed for causing the last financial disaster. That if nothing else proves that the US is an Oligarchy.
You have two political states of being confused.
The first, and current, situation is a bad government (IYHO) democratically elected. You are free to get rid of them.
The second is a bad government not democratically elected. Your options to get rid of them are limited.
If the Australian government sucks, then blame the Australian voters.
This seems to be a rather natural result of a two-party, winner-takes-it-all system, or rather an electoral system that favors such systems.
I know this isn't going to be liked here, but I want to say it anyway:
One of the eternal prides of the American people is their freedom of speech. You are comparatively free to incite whatever kind of racial/ethnic/religious hatred, and the beautiful theory is that enough good speech will nullify the effects of bad speech.
I say (and have said before) this only works precisely because you don't live in a democracy, but in a system where the actual ruling class have the power do not let the government to be swayed by such popular sentiments and moreover control the sentiments by controlling media. I believe it is fair to say that historically having such freedoms in actual democracies very much tends to lead to genocides and otherwise really bad results.
I think he meant elections for specific question. I can only name three in recent history.
What side of the road to drive on, if we should use nuclear power and if we should join the EU.
In the first case the public vote against change only delayed the transition for about 5 years.
In the election about nuclear power there where three alternatives, all of them to get rid of nuclear. The difference was how fast and two of the alternatives didn't specify timespan.
Regarding the vote about if Sweden should join EU the result of the vote was actually followed but if I recall the political climate correctly it was more because the vote and the decision happened to coincide rather than the politicians following the result of the vote.
Calling the Figaro a sleazy tabloid ? Warble garble much ?
A cursory glance at the websites of your examples:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/
http://www.bild.de/
http://www.lefigaro.fr/
shows one of these is not like the others.
Is good enough and the issues you describe can be tackled with modern tools. Frankly is quite disappointing that we can make a secure money transfer transaction virtually anywhere in the world at any time, but we can't leverage the same technology to make our opinion count in our own backyard.
Ahhh America, Rome 2.0. Now I just wonder who will be our Marius to kickstart our whole no limitations on terms, and Augustus to finally rule on us as princeps and make the transition from republic to empire official...
I love to slaughter the english language.
Often discarded? The only one that I can think of where the politicians went the opposite of the public vote was to keep the left side traffic (people voted yes but the politicians decided to switch to the new world standard of right side traffic).
The last performed such vote was if we should change our currency to EUR, that vote was lost and we still haven't changed to EUR. You are correct in that by law the politicians in Sweden are not obliged to obey the outcome of such a vote, but since such actions can be suicide on the next election day they usually follow the vote.
You can have a meaningful election. In almost all cases there are more than two boxes to check. For a change do not check the first two. Changing America can be quite simple, the first step is to get out of the current gridlock by introducing more parties and actual politics. I america the entire political spectrum is concentrated in two parties. For example the Tea Party, that is not a party they are Republicans! Why?! I don't agree with them, fine but they could do the first step and found an actual party that would fracture the political spectrum. But alas, the average American is to narrow minded fore more than two parties.
I vote third party too, but you need to be aware of Duverger's law. Unless this country changes its voting system, there will always be two (and only two) viable political parties.
Note that this does *not* mean that these two parties will always be the same (e.g. there are no Whigs anymore); rather, it means that if a third party begins to attract a significant portion of the votes it will fracture one or both of the two main parties. After a short period of metastability, the system will stabilize with two main parties once again.
The two-party model is pretty much unique to anglo-saxon dominated countries that use first-past-the-post voting models afaict. Many other countries use equal representation and thus have coalition governments consisting of many parties.
He is talking about public referendums and not the elections.
Perhaps it's time for a constitutional amendment.
In times of past, when it took weeks and months to communicate between far away places (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles) it made sense to structure the political organization of this country as a railroad organization. Today, it does not.
What we need to do is simple: We need to define, in simple print, that corporate fictions are not in fact citizens, and as such, do not have political freedoms or civil rights as such.
The concept if a corporate fiction as a person is a bit ridiculous anyway. A corporation can engage in activities that kill people (against the law) but they cannot be imprisoned. Finding General Motors (say) criminally liable for something that they have done corporately is a joke. They are already immune from such prosecution and bringing criminal charges that stick against board members or management is a very difficult thing.
If corporate entities cannot participate in the democratic process; there is no proxy for voting in a general election. We should formalize this and extend it so that corporate fictions simply cannot make political contributions of any size whatsoever. If management has strong political feelings, let the members make a personal contribution in their own name and not from corporate funds. If a CEO wants to contribute millions to a political candidate, well, they're paid enough to write the check. If a corporation feels strongly about a political issue, they can encourage (but not require) that their employees write their own checks to whatever political cause is extant. A vote, and a political contribution, should only be permitted to come from someone who can be demonstrated to be a living, breathing person and not some vacuous entity dreamed up by invisible attorneys.
This moves us back to the "one man, one vote" ideal our forefathers envisioned. Right now, we're moving ever closer to merchantilism and "One Dollar, One Vote" -- which, in my humble opinion, is not a good thing at all.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Yes the public referendums are not mandatory for the politicians to obey in Sweden, that is not the same as "results are often discarded". If we look at the large referendums done since 1922 I can think of only one who was disregarded and that was to keep the left side traffic. In some eyes the nuclear referendum was also discarded but in reality it was followed, that we now 30 years later changed our minds a bit is not the same as discaring the result of the referendum.
Your Liberal bias is showing quite strongly there.
The sky is up, water is wet, and it usually gets dark at night...
It would be nice to see some practical proposals that could be implemented to remedy this.
What is Democracy? A bunch of slave-owners in ancient Greece were discussing decisions in forums. This is it.
Cannot we do any better?
Cannot we discuss and make decisions via modern systems? Do we really need corrupted representatives? A semi-god president?
I mean a democracy is still much better than a tyranny. Yet, it is not perfect obviously to put it mildly.
Really? Democracy, the end of history?
I do know of a few countries in Europe where I would not be too surprised if direct democracy would pretty much mean the rule of Sun, Figaro, Bild and other sleazy tabloids of little value and big impact.
Give it a generation or two. Thanks to Internet people are getting more and more wary of bad journalism.
You learn critical thinking pretty quick if the alternative is to stare at goatse every day.
With all the benefits they'll have when they leave office, and all the contacts, the only ones on their behinds will be us.
... that you actually need a study to come to this conclusion.
Anyone that has had any real American history education knows this. Back in the 80's when I was in college that was taught to us in the American history classes, it was intentionally built that way. Just like how the founding fathers did not do all that Independence stuff out of the goodness of their heart, all of there were filthy wealthy and were trying like hell to protect their wealth.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
No country that behaves in the way the United States does, could be branded a democracy. Most people have have studied the facts, would go as far as branding America a terrorist state, on account of its Criminal foreign policy. Countries that believe in democracy, do not impose their will on other countries. Countries that believe in democracy, do not undermine the democratically elected governments of other countries, particularly when their own system can hardly be described as democratic. Countries that have a democratic government, do not maintain hundreds of military basis in other people's countries. Countries that are democratic, do not use military or economic blackmail to impose their will on other peoples. Countries that are democratic, do not support dictators, coups, or undermine the government of other nations - particularly when they set such a bad example themselves. Countries that are democratic, do not torture people or hold people indefinitely without trial. Countries that are democratic, do not spy on their population, massively expanded Stasi style.
Quite obviously, given the dominance of American politics by powerful interest groups, there is no hope of being able to implement any kind of democracy in the United States, under the present constitutional system. If I was an American, I'd be desperate to escape from that nightmare. I'm just glad that I don't live there. Geographically, it is a wonderful land, with some great people, but I have never been in any other culture that is so universally ignorant, badly educated, and completely detached from reality as the United States is. Workers there have very limited rights, and corporations have comprehensive rights. It is not a good place to be an ordinary {non-super rich} worker.
Do you really think Citizens United magically transformed the U.S.? Really?
The House of Representatives has been frozen in size since 1910.
Since 1913:
- The IRS has eminent domain over your wallet.
- Your state, as such, is essentially voiceless in DC, now that Senators represent their parties.
- The federal government just borrows it forward to inflate the stock market and bind future generations in debt.
Blame Progressivism? Darn right I do.
Folks, it's time for a http://conventionofstates.com/
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I've got scruples.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
In Norway the political parties have all the power.
The voters are only allowed to choose between a few prepared lists, one for each party. Not really as democratic as it seems.
Especially when the two major parties decide that in a few cases they will unite and just pass into law whatever they want regardles what the people want.
Well if Canada is rated as a country with democracy then we have plenty of them in Europe. Ok not such much in the UK. Anyway, democracy is not something which stays with a country when it is established. It has to be defended all the time. Otherwise it disappears quickly.
It was pretty explicitly designed to prevent popular democracy. The founding fathers knew if the hoi polloi actually got control they'd get right to the jackassery- like the fucking Volstead act, (Seriously, wtf?)
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The Russians, Chinese, North Koreans and the Iranians should be funding NGOs to agitate the population and overthrow the oligarchs. The Mall in DC would be an ideal place for a US version of the Maidan.
Fair is fair no? The US has been playing that game for a while in other countries, the latest example being the Ukraine.
The US was founded as a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy.
I can't believe we're still making this mistake...
Once again, they concur with the hoboroadie.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Given the choice, hung - any day of the week.
Oh, you meant hanged. Nevermind.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Another important frame: Pro Life! Abortion is bad, because it undermines the power of the father in the family. When a teenager becomes pregnant, it's her own fault, and she should live with the consequences. She didn't listen to her father, who is the moral authority and who decides what's good and what't wrong. When an adult woman decides to have an abortion because she wants to work on her career, she undermines this strict-father-morale as well. A career is not for women - they should stay at home and raise the children. Pro Life is not about life, it's about male dominance. Pro Life is not about the life of that baby - they don't care about that baby that probably would have little value to them. Pro Life is not about life, because it's OK to physically attack and occasionally kill people who work at abortion clinics. Casualties of war!
This doesn't seem right. I'm not familiar with pro-life rhetoric being about abortion undermining patriarchal power in the family, usually it seems to be a general attack on women, often no different than opposition to contraception. Usually it seems to be about undermining female sexuality by increasing pregnancy risk, which may affect patriarchal authority coincidentally but not specifically. The other angle seems to be a more general cultural conservatism that sees non-reproductive sexuality as a general contributor to moral decline -- with pregnancy as a non-risk (through contraception and abortion), there's no reason for marriage as a necessity for sexuality since there is no pregnancy.
I think it's even been argued that contraception and abortion actually contribute to male promiscuity since they also free men from the responsibility burden of pregnancy. It wouldn't surprise me if this doesn't tie into some radical feminist critiques of contraception/abortion as having an inherently patriarchal nature, since it eliminates any male responsibility for their sexuality and reduces women's value to that of merely a transactional sexual partner at best When the classist and gender discriminatory nature of economic relations is taken into account, women are further reduced to near-prostitute status, being obligated by both economy and lack of male sexual accountability. Of course I'm not advocating this as being true, but it's not hard to tie it together with this kind of rhetoric.
For example, the Bush family. Here is an entire multi-generational family that has never enjoyed any sort of commercial success that would lead to great wealth and yet they are all obviously very wealthy despite having done nothing but serve in federal government. Or...another example, the Kennedy family. These people are not fine examples of our best, brightest, or bravest and and yet they obviously have their hands on the levers of power and influence as well as wealth.
Harper is trying his hardest to bring the ugliest parts of the US to Canada.
What's so hilarious is that to most of the commenters here, the Koch Brothers exemplify the absolute evil in the system whilst (and simultaneously) George Soros is merely 'doing the right thing' and 'helping people speak truth to power'.
One party is clearly the party of business, and business wields a lot of money. Hell, one whole tv network is dedicated to pushing their views.
The other party has draped themselves in the flag of victimhood, somehow managing to portray themselves as the oppressed when they a) are the majority, b) spent 57%(!) more in the last presidential election. They have a much smaller media network overtly supporting them, but 8-9/10 of general journalists sympathize and vote with this party.
In my view, BOTH parties are corrupt, nepotistic heads of the same beast. The idea that you support one side or the other is a Hobson's choice that keeps us running around the wheel, generating funds.
Next time someone from "the other party" pisses you off, think for a second if they weren't prompted to it by rabble rousers on their side SPECIFICALLY to make you angry. Ask any stage magician or pickpocket: controlling your attention is 90% of the trick.
-Styopa
The US has a dynastic leader, akin to a royal or dictatorial family?
John Adams. John Quincy Adams.
Bush. Bush II.
The Clintons (cue the Simpsons theme song).
Yeah, we don't have traditional dynastic rule, as in a continuous series of descendants one after the other, but we certainly have a form of dynastic rule.
To avoid rule of the tabloid, you need to support free speech, and that means limiting the damages for slander, libel, etc. It seems counterintuitive, but with high damages, only the highly profitable scandal-press can afford to publish whatever they wish, may it be truth or not. It creates a monopoly in informing.
There should be a system in which we can directly pay contribution to fine an entity for same (or even proportionally lower) amount you contributed, regardless of reason why, no sophistry included. Right now, they just make money on controversy, there is no way to lose for bad behavior.
The one reason progressive socialism seems to work in the Scandinavian countries is this: homogeneity. When your neighbor has fallen on hard times, the benefits they're receiving doesn't matter to you because you're both genetically the same tribe. When there are different 'tribes' involved, it all falls apart very quickly (and exploited by cynical politicians currying the racism buried deep in every human hind brain).
Wary of bad journalism? Newspapers are more and more like blogs, a collection of garbage, tits and opinion. If anything, the internet tells them that bad journalism is what journalism should be like.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We have something in place that's way more efficient when it comes to keep tabloids in check: If they're found guilty of libel or slander, they're required by law to print a counterstatement on the same page in the same print in a wording that the party they wronged accepts.
And trust me, few tabloids want "we are lying cunts, the court proved it" as their headlines. They get very, very careful what they write in heavy bold print.
I just don't think that lowering the bar for slander would make it better. If anything, I would not tie it to money, I'd tie it to something that is far, far more important to news sources: their credibility. I think the system where you have to do your counterstatements in the same way you did the original slander is a pretty good one. Not perfect by any stretch, but at least it takes care of the libel problem.
It does unfortunately nothing against biased news by omission.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"...because the politicians do, as you say, simply have to FRAME a proposal in language which RESONATES with the worldview of the people being targeted..."
Sadly, you do not know the US of A.
The politicians inside the United States of America do not need to frame any proposal to the people, all the need to do to get anything done is to use their influence to rally a portion of semi-elites to his or her cause, and through the butterfly effect , it is done.
Case in point - United States attacking Iraq
When George Bush decides to attack Iraq, he did not need to get the approval from the Americans. All he did was to rally the world community (elites from different countries) to his cause, and when he got the support, off goes the Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
I was from China, and I still remember how hard the Chinese Communist Party had to rally their own people to support their decision to send troops into Korea to fight the Korean war.
In contrast to what George Bush did - the Chinese government, under Mao, almost tapped into all the resources it could muster, to get the people into the mood.
In a way, at least back in the time of the Korean War, the Communist government which rule China was more attuned to their own people, than George Bush, to the Americans.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
In a country with 400 million people, how can "the preferences of the average American" have anything but "a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy", regardless of organization? With that many people, it's impossible for everyone to have an impact on public policy that is both equal to everyone else's AND significant.
They're not?
The US is a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy.
This is of course not surprising in any way for us outside of the USA. I mean, you have legalized bribery, i.e. fundraising. I cannot see any practical difference what so ever for the people between the American legalized bribery system and the similar but 'illegal' systems in all shitcountries of the world which haven't cleaned up bribery of politicians and officials.
I don't suspect many Americans know this but, for example, in the Scandinavian countries it is illegal to give money or goods in any way, shape or form, to either politicans or officials. Illegal. Companies cannot buy politicans. People or funds cannot buy politicians. They have a salary. Payed for by the people. Who they work for. That's it.
Please, can someone from the USA tell me how a system built on legalized bribery be considered a democracy? I really want to understand your rationale for such a system.
[begin sarcasm]You mean having 1 voice in ~310,000,000 is negligible? Inconceivable![end sarcasm]
May I suggest AC acquire and use a dictionary. From the OED=>"republic (noun): a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch." Sounds like the United States. There is also Article IV, Section 1, of the constitution which reads in part, "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government"; so, if this guarantee has not been met, the first step is to "petition the Government for a redress of grievances" instead of throwing around insults; unless, of course, AC doesn't actually believe what AC wrote.
Seems entirely accurate to me. Now, how do we get BACK to true democracy??
Anyone in Canada could have told you that the US is an oligarchy. This is exactly what we've seen since at least the Reagan administration. The US is *NOT* a democracy - sorry to burst your bubble but it's the truth. The US has the appearance of a democracy but it is absolutely *NOT* a democracy.
- A Canadian
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
The largest pressure group is AIPAC.
The problem is that many "grass roots" organizations get their funding from big anonymous donors. Or not so anonymous. AARP and NRA charge membership dues, some of which does go to a lobbying arm, but many of the Tea Party folks don't even know where the money is coming from. My in-laws went on a Tea Party rally to Washington thing. Someone else paid for a charter bus to take them there and they had at least 3-4 catered meals along the way. When I inquired about how they were paying for it, my mother-in-law did not know. They basically had their trip subsidized by an unknown person or group in order to get more bodies into DC for photo optics.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Beyond the local school board, is there anyone out there who actually thinks their vote counts for anything? Anyone?
Vote in anybody you want. Vote in your fucking dog. Money IS political power - the only kind that matters. If you think anything else, I'm pretty sure I've got a bridge to sell you.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
In Sydney we just arrested the State Premier for corruption over a bottle of wine. The system works. The Prime minister is not above the law in Australia. Something that the USA has never managed to sort out with their corrupt system. Nixon should have been jailed, but really the rot had started to set in long before then. The Greens in Australia are a credible threat to the Liberal and Labor parties. Unlike America, where there is no alternative political movement that can ever get into office. The minor parties in Australia actually get to set policy and ensure that the average person retains a speaking voice in our government.
That's not fair. The office of president is a completely different thing altogether and Nixon did ultimately resign when he realized that the alternative was to possibly be removed from office and maybe go to jail. Very important Congressmen have been jailed over corruption. The US legal system is incompetent at times and that's a fair charge, but it's not really corrupt. Bill Clinton was actually impeached ("impeach" does not mean "removed from office") while President over lying under oath in a court case, but when tried before the Senate he was not removed from office. The court case just happened to involve him cheating on his wife and Clinton's handlers were geniuses in that they were able to spin it as him being on trial for infidelity to Hillary when in fact he was on trial for lying under oath about cheating on Hillary. Vice-President Spiro Agnew was probably facing imprisonment (it had nothing to do with Nixon's issues as it was a tax avoidance case) when he got a plea bargain to resign from the vice-presidency and face some lesser charges. If you want to argue that US presidents get a free pass for misconduct, you probably have a point, but as I don't know enough about Australian Prime Ministers to be able to comment on their lives, I can't say whether an Aussie PM would get special treatment or not if caught breaking the law.
I agree with you, but I think we really need something other than first-past-the-post to make it really work right. It's great that we have these parties bubbling around as you say, but it'd better if the composition of parliament looked a little more like what popular support says it should. It's a bit weird to have parties with, say, 25% popular support have less than 10% of the house, for example. Still, everytime I get annoyed with our system, I watch the Daily Show or Colbert Report and get reminded how good we actually have it.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
It's kinda funny that the people who rage about the Citizens United decision can't grasp that when Democrats and Republicans work so diligently together their goal is to protect incumbents. It should have been called the McCain-Feingold Incumbent Protection Act.
I would think that actually, US voters have a considerable amount of power. The systems to exercise that power are in place. BUT it takes effort to exercise that power. The effort required means:
paying attention to what is going on
understanding what is going on (including sifting through the bullshit)
acting for change when required
A look at the media (in so far as _it_ can be trusted), suggests that the public fails spectacularly at the first two. People have lives and pursue a greedy algorithm that is good for the immediate circumstances of those lives ... and that doesn't usually involve paying much attention to what government is doing.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Were toast.
Our enemy's will figure it long before we ever do.
Much like Russia down without firing a single shot.
"Democracy? Hypocrisy!" - (Aristotle, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles)
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Democracy is pretty much a fictional concept. Ever since it was "invented" by the ancient Greeks, the policy was always decided by the wealthy and powerful - either directly (through corruption, paid stooges, usurping the power, etc.) or indirectly (by convincing the masses to vote them into offices). Guess who has the best chances and means to get voted into office - it isn't going to be an average poor guy from the street.
It did happen in the past and some big policy changes happened because of it (e.g. abolition of slavery, gay rights, women rights), but those are pretty much statistical flukes. Also these things happened only once they were seen as beneficial to the rich part of the society, because the social norms have changed and it was damaging to stick to the "old" rules, not because someone got democratically elected into office to make these policy changes.
American citizens don't want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Much like the NSA "leaks" this comes as such a shocking surprise.
And re-read that the US is NOT a democracy. It never has been. It's democratically run, but it is a constitutional republic. Big difference.
Those of us that are AWAKE have known this for years. That is the New World Order, and the Oligarchy is spreading and seizing more control and power.
On a side note, the United States is supposed to be a REPUBLIC not a Democracy.
99.9% of the people have nothing important, relevant, or interesting to contribute to society. Shut up, go watch your Jerry Springer shows, and let those who can take care of things. It's not your capital or investments that are risk, it's ours. At least you can take solace in knowing that you have little to lose.
Hope is the currency of fools
Perhaps we should move to a different voting system:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
In politics, sortition (also known as allotment or the drawing of lots) is the selection of decision makers by lottery. The decision-makers are chosen as a random sample from a larger pool of candidates.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Considering every president, except Van Buren, is/was related to evil king john; is anyone surprised?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
lose != loose
no you have a power behind the throne, and a millionaire puppet that's changed every 4-8 years
the power behind the throne would be big capital
Because guns are the most important things in the universe? Who gives a shit? Weaponry is barbarism and only necessary when civilisation breaks down.
The Chinese are always, and have been, very concern to what is happening in China.
Even me, a Chinese, who ran away from China when I was very young, and ended up in America and stayed in America for a few decades, still in my spare time, check out what is going on in China.
The "nationalistic" phenomenon for the Chinese people ebbs and flows - it happened back in WW2, when the Japanese invaded China, it happened again during the Korean war, and for a while, in between the Korean war until recently, most Chinese prefer to focus their attention towards themselves.
At first it was for survival, as China under the tutelage of Mao, landed itself in a seemingly endless episodes of man-made disasters. Famines that took away the lives of millions happened. Cannibalism happened, cultural revolution happened, intellectuals were driven to madness and/or suicide happened, and so on...
When Deng took over in the late 1970's, economically speaking China became better. The Chinese people turned towards making money.
That lasted for almost 40 years, and the economy of China has started to flatline, people are getting laid off (and young university graduates couldn't find jobs).
To allay the pent-up anger, the CCP, under the Xi-Li pair, opted for the "nationalistic" approach.
And that coincides with the provocations from Japan. With more and more provocations from Japan, the fuel for the fire of nationalism multiplied.
You gotta understand that the Chinese people, until today, can *NOT* forgive what the Japanese did to them, back in the WW2. That is because, unlike the Germans who issued public apologies to their victims (particularly Jews and Gypsies), the Japanese refused to apologize for the carnage they had done in China.
That bad blood in between the Japanese and Chinese is now exposed in the open.
The CCP of course, ain't stupid. They fully utilize the follies from Japan to add fuel to the nationalism fervor.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Until the general population is prepared to lobby their congress critters in government they will never exert any real power.
I think many peoples ideas about democracy now don't extend beyond which party to vote for, if they even vote. Perhaps if more people actually cared enough to lobby about bills that are being introduced, to be put into law, then the situation may be different. Those who do, are running things and cementing their interests. They certainly don't miss the opportunity to lobby.
Even Franklin spoke to the flaws in the American Constitution that would not save America from despotism when it was being passed. The only question now is whether the American people are too afraid of their own government to actually effect change in the country anymore, and Franklins fears have manifested.
Corruption is the cancer that eats away at the body of democracy, it's institutions like failing organs, until the host dies.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Currently, there are a group of people in government that have their paws on every major event in the U.S. Every major legislation, especially the kind that 'sound good' but have something they try to slide in under the radar. Those people include the following.
Notice that these are a mixture of Republicans and Democrats.
President Obama
Vice president Biden
Speaker of the House John Boehner
Minorty leader Nancy Pelosi
Sen. Diane Feinstein
Sen. John McCain
Sen. Harry Reid
Sen. Lindsey Graham
Fmr. Sec. Hilary Clinton
Atty General. Eric Holder
George Soros
Michael Bloomberg
Other's entering the circle include.
Gov. Chris Christi
Mitt Romney
And their are many more, but those people have their paws in EVERYTHING. If you doubt it, then print the list out and keep it on your refrigerator, then look at every piece of new major legislation or political event, and see who's name is tied to it. Here are a few acts that you need to look at.
"The Patriot Act"
"Affordable Care Act"
"The Safe Act"
"Citizens United"
"Right To Work"
and there are many more.
Some clarification needed: Above poster refers to "Referendums", which are often considered "guiding but non-binding" with "Public voting". W/E they are binding or guiding is known beforehand and afair I remember the last time the results were actually disregarded was when we got to decided start driving on the right side of the road ("No" "won" with a significant margin) considering that other questions has been "Prohibition against alcohol (1922), Pensions (1957), Nuclear (1980) - which is kind of questionable because I think in the end they realized that all alternatives except "build more" were understood, Joining EU (1994) and "Switch to €" (2003), all of which were executed more or less in accordance to the votes. Imo a fairly good track record.
Further more I'd suggest that my fellow Swede is confused, government already only has executive mandate, legislative power lies with the parliament (which are not the government, the government is appointed by the Prime minister, which is leader of the party which can muster most support, which can be lost at any time, from seats in the parliament through either being the majority party or through making deals with other parties).
The most pressing issue is that we lack a constitutional court capable of ruling against the government (the government *is* the supreme court) which means that atm we are forced to turn to EU courts to have questionable/illegal laws overturned.
...we're likely to break the cycle by spawning an eternal Tyranny instead of a sustainable Democracy
The only way a tyranny can last is when the people let them.
Unless they can find a way to turn the "subjects" into borg-like things (which obeys their master 100% of the time), human beings, being a rebellious lot, can not, and will not be suppressed forever.
Rebellions (plural) will happen.
While the tyrannical regime might be able to crush most of the rebellious attempts, there will always be that final rebellion which will crush the ruling junta.
Thus, the cycle continues ...
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If a corporation wants the rights of an individual let them but then tax them as an individual and at that tax rate structure rather than the more generous corporate tax rate.
the American Dream(TM) lie is well understood .... The idea that anyone can make it if they work hard. Well, maybe they can if they get really lucky, but for the majority they won't get rich in their lifetime. Not to say that they will have bad lives or anything
It has nothing to do with luck. It has everything to do with one's point of view and how far one is willing to go to achieve that dream.
The American Dream does happen, and it happened to me. Of course, there aren't many people like me, but to say that it is a lie is to deny the reality.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If money equals speech then doesn't that mean I'm entitled to money? I though I was entitled to equal representation?
Because pacifism won the war. :)
... it wants its news flash back.
Except it's a democracy. It is structured as a republic, but operates under assumed democratic principles. If it wasn't doing this, then we wouldn't have democratic universal suffrage. If it was literally structured to only allow as of the year 2014 white people with a networth of a million dollars to vote, we may be better called a Republic Plutocracy. Instead we're a structured Republic Democracy operating as a practical Republic Plutocracy.
Looks like US had exported all democracy it had. :)
The true measure of a country is its wealth distribution. The average person's life is better as the wealth distribution increases and vice versa. There are numerous ways to accomplish this but certainly a system where the wealthy can alter the laws to suit themselves is not a valid method.
Really, not GDP or HDI? By your reasoning it's better to live in Slovenia than Canada, the US, or UK.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality#Gini_coefficient.2C_after_taxes_and_transfers
There are at least a couple of ways of looking at this. An oligarchy might be part of the natural evolution of an industrialized, technology-based society. Have you noticed that there's an abundance of indifference towards world events and politics in most first world nations? Maybe this is what happens when you have it good for too long - certain large swaths of society become content and stop caring. It's jarring whenever you hear people complain about corporations and politicians all day, but when you look into their overall behavior everything they do feeds the machine. They buy happy meals, use smartphones, stand in line for days to watch their movies, buy their music, drink their soda - the money you spend pays for the world you live in. You can't kick, scream and yell about privacy violations while you're updating your Facebook status, it doesn't work that way. And if you do any of these things, you shouldn't be complaining about an oligarchy - our society is a reflection of us.
If you don't like it, don't support it. You can be certain that every organization that makes something you buy has lobbyists that may be lobbying for things you don't approve of. Or maybe you do approve of what they're lobbying. Just don't complain because no one is listening.
"but it still takes money to look like your cause has merit."
In other word, individual people voice do not count, but rich people individual voice do. Which means a lot of individual have to band to even *match* on rich guy power, and that band cannot in all probability concentrate on many cause, but there are more rich guy and itnerrest group. Which easily lead to..... the US being an oligarchy. So, the summary is not so much a flamebait.
The US was never considered to be a democracy.
The US is a republic.
...Now on the other side of the coin some poor people have worked very hard and haven't realized any long term gain
Very few people in this planet will admit to themselves that they are fucking lazy.
Most like to think that they "work hard" - but in actuality they are not.
I have been in the States for a few decades, and I have been hearing people telling me how "hard" they have worked. Their notion of "hard work" mainly consist of a 9-5 office career.
But if you ask people who actually toil in back-breaking jobs they will laugh at that notion.
Similarly, most of the poor who perceive themselves as "hard worker" often than not, are working stiffs. They are, by and large, a meat and bone version of robots.
Those who strike it rich are not robots. They do work hard, but their "hard work" is in searching for niches that everybody else has ignored.
And that's how (most of) the rich, became rich.
More than that, in Cold Fjordistan, everything is true, especially the lies.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
The transition was from a flawed, but still readily identifiable constitutional republic (not a democracy), to a corporate oligarchy.
This has never been a democracy, and furthermore, the constitution insists that the federal government guarantee each state a republican form of government, as in, a republic -- not a democracy. That's in article 4, section 4.
This is why representatives decide the actual matters, and voters don't, in the basic design.
Of course, now even the representatives don't decide -- nor judges -- if the legislation deals in any significant way with business interests. The only way the old system still operates even remotely the way it was designed to is when the issue(s) at hand a purely social ones. Even then, the bill of rights seems to be at the very bottom of any legislator's or judge's list of concerns.
Can't see any of this changing, though. The public is too uninformed, and short of completely revamping the school curriculums, they're going to remain that way.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I recommend antibiotics.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Add to that significant limits on campaign finance contributions. Last time I checked the max donation for any corporation, union or individual was the same at $2000 per year.
If you think about it, there's no control for expenses there, so it's not a very effective definition (I'm always kind of a amazed at the mindset in the US that tries to simplify things by drawing a numeric line in the sand, as if there were no other issues. And people put up with it. We need better schools.
I define "rich" as: wealthy enough to be living in a manner comfortable in every material way to the individual or family, and able to survive indefinitely in that state, or in an increasingly wealthy state without relying on income from, or charity of, others. Regardless of if one actually chooses to exist in that state, or not.
Not trying to force that definition on anyone else, but that's how I see it personally.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
And here we see the fascist anagama continuing his campaign of lies against me.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I think you are feeling very confused: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
You actually live in something *better* than a direct democracy.
A direct democracy enjoys no constitutional guarantees of rights. It's strictly majority rule.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
that allowed individuals to contribute directly to *all* candidates, with no overall cap on contributions?
There are under 700 people that hit the max last time around, do you seriously think that decision will benefit the grass roots? Sounds to me like it's aimed squarely at giving the oligarchs more influence.
Our form of government is a Representative Republic. Has NEVER been a democracy.
There are lots of groups (the NRA, for instance) that have support from a large number of lower-class people. Individually they can't give much money, but there are enough of them that by pooling their resources they get a decent amount of influence.
The problem is that there are relatively few issues that get people vehemently riled-up, enough that they actually contribute time and money to the cause. Also, it's easier to attract people with extreme views.
The upshot is that most middle-of-the-road citizens don't feel strongly enough about things to contribute money for political attention, and therefore are not actually represented in government.
For the inept and sheep please read the following from the Constitution of the United States of America, Article IV Section 4:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.
Where does it say democracy?
I've always thought of Australia as the Texas of the South Pacific. I see that this continues to be true...
Cheers,
-l
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Not only is the president immune from prosecution given the Nixon example
Not to dispute the rest of your quote, but Nixon wasn't immune from prosecution. He resigned and President Ford pardoned him.
I guess that is a fine/moot distinction, but the President (and governors) are allowed to pardon people so.... that's just the system.
"50 men have controlled America, and that's a high figure."
— Joseph Kennedy, 1936
If more people knew what a Constitutional Republic was, we'd be in much better shape as a country.
In the early stages of our country there were two parties.
The Federalists, and Anti-Federalists.
When the North won the Civil War; and told states they could not succeed, it was a clear death for the Anti-Federalists.
Surely the fine folks at Princeton know that the USA was founded a constitutional republic and not a democracy. Though I know that our educational system in this country sucks I would think that anyone capable of studying or teaching at an ivy league institution would know the fundamental difference.....
You have a right to speech, but you have to make your own speech. Just like you have to make your own money. Entitlements are not rights.
Constitutionally Correct
A lot of bitching here about politics and the political system.
In my view, the problem is cultural, not political.
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
What is the evidence for that? In reality, more women identify as pro-life than pro-choice. See section "Gender agreement" in
http://www.gallup.com/poll/118...
This is an outright lie on your part. Abortionist assassination is widely condemned among pro-lifers. And have a sense of scale: there have been 8 activist-caused abortion worker deaths over 40 years in the US. This in a country where 14100 people are murdered per year, which means that 8 people are killed every 5 hours.
The US was never intended to be a Democracy. The word doesn't appear a single time in the Constitution. Democracy is "mob rule" where the minority is powerless and not protected by any law, because any law can be changed by simple majority. That is Democracy and our Founding Fathers wanted to protect the minority from mob rule.
It certainly doesn't prove anything like that. It's not a crime to screw up, make huge mistakes, and bankrupt your own bank. There would be no way to "jail" the CEOs because errors (no matter how severe) are not crimes. This demonstrates nothing about whether the US is an oligarchy or not.
Once you're south of Christchurch, employers realise they have the advantage of a large pool of job seekers. My employer, a multimillioniare, will actually say "Then get a job somewhere else!" if you complain about the low (minimum wage) rate of pay, the poor conditions (all of our equipment is at one stage or another of failure and we have to work around it if we can, and if we can't we cop the blame for the failure), the unpaid overtime, the hours we work but the boss chops off our time sheets so he can make his budgets and get his promotion. Almost a third of the staff have to work for less than minimum wage - we're paid for a set amount of time, but are required to work an extra 10 or 15 minutes unpaid each day. Even our contract forbids us from holding a second job to make ends meet, because we're unavailable for any extra work that may come up.
There was an article on the NZ Herald website the other day that claimed the dole is 0.4 of minimum wage (relative to a 40 hour week). Well, at our workplace we work for less than 0.325 of minimum wage, and we are not allowed to find another job. Quite literally - if we start looking for a job, we can be fired because we're not available for work at whatever time.
Welcome to the lower half of the South Island, where once you're employed for minimum wage you owe the company your fealty, because you are stealing profits directly from the owner's pocket. He's in business to make money, remember - it's not like you're working to make money.
Why haven't I done anything about it, like tip off the Labour Department? Because this government will release confidential information to slam anybody who criticises the wealthy and influential. If I do that and such a thing happened, I'd probably never work again in this country.
Denmark has been run by a lunatic asylum for atleast a decade now, first 8 years of the raving rightwing kleptomaniac party + Xenophobic Hitlerworshippers party coalition, and lately a couple of years of Clueless Helle's Leftwing Flying Circus.
Can't honestly claim democracy works here with a straight face, but at least we still have Democrazy to enjoy while national assets are being auctioned off to the lowest bidder to pay for 8 years of US sponsored financial wanking.
you are an idiot
the Funding Fathers would have wanted.
From Lincoln's letter to Horace Greeley, Aug. 22, 1862: "If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it..." Although Lincoln did believe: "...my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free." it was obviously not his main motivation in the Civil war.
Not one finger of the nation will be lifted to fix it.
`Software patents are a near perfect example of what this paper is talking about. Few, if any, programmers want them. These are "the people" who best understand the issue and are most strongly (and detrimentally) effected by it.
The elites at the top of the corporate hierarchy have another view on the matter, and are able to press their POV through lobbying Congress, printing articles, hobnobbing with justices and paying for lawyers, which has created a ton of case law favoring their position.
Established players, the billionaire set, want them to use as a club against any upstarts who presume to enter the market their class's permission; without the financial backing of the elites - the investor class, the "angel investors" or the name brand investment capital groups.
Software patents are nothing more than a modern ofrm of feudalism, where the rich create the laws which protect and legitimize their power positions.
I am afraid that SCOTUS is not giving any signals that it's going to really decide the issue broadly. All signs are for a narrow ruling, which would leave the current system intact.
But this issue is EXACTLY what the paper is talking about. Decissions that are 1) bad for society broadly 2) bad for the average working person 3) hold an outsized benefit for the elites and also works to consolidate and legitimate their power and wealth.
So its not even an abstract thing in our own little world, It's completely in-your-face, a straight up fuck you.
Well the Conservatives are trying to fix things with the "Fair Elections Act", a law so bad for Canada that even the Conservative Senators are against it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
then why the recent decision ... that allowed individuals to contribute directly to *all* candidates, with no overall cap on contributions?
Because it'a a SUPREME COURT decision. We have three branches of government and only two are elected.
The supremes are appointed, for life (subject only to impeachment for high crimes, like the president). They have no re-election issues and can vote their mind without affecting their own tenure.
The court has repeatedly struck down campaign spending restrictions, because they're limits, not just on free speech, but on the POLITICAL speech that is the reason it is an enumerated right in the first place.
But it takes a while for a law to produce enough damage to give someone standing to challenge it, and to bring it to the supremes, and then they rule narrowly. Then, once a piece is struck down, Congress just turns around and does another version of it to evade the details of that decision, and the cycle starts over.
There are under 700 people that hit the max last time around, do you seriously think that decision will benefit the grass roots? Sounds to me like it's aimed squarely at giving the oligarchs more influence.
Of course it's the rich are the first who are bit and who have the resources to bring the suit. That's part of why the limits end up off the rich (like Soros) first, while they're still hobbling everybody else.
It isn't just the limits themselves that are an issue. There's all the reporting requirements, publication requirements, time limits, and maze of details that make compliance hard.
It's hard for candidates: They need a substantial political machine right off the bat. Getting dinged for campaign finance violations is costly, may involve jail time, DOES involve court time, and produces publicity that tarnishes the candidate's image and hurts his chances in future elections. This gives the professional politicians, especially incumbents with the machine in place, a massive advantage over any grass-roots upstarts trying to replace them.
And it can bring on reprisals against donors - including carreer-killing or physical retaliation. Who contributed to what political campaigns is public record and searchable online. This is an invitation to people with opposing views to exert social pressure or take revenge. (Within the last couple weeks we saw the CEO of Netscape forced to resign by just such pressure, as a result of the McCain-Feingold reporting of a past political contribution to a "politically-incorrect" campaign.)
It's the exact opposite of a secret ballot, which is secret to prevent such reprisals so the vote can be cast in safety. Why should financial support be any different? Why would publishing the amount and beneficiary of each contributor's political contributions be any less of a bias on the political system than publishing the way each voter voted?
Further, risking a job is far more of a hardship for a little guy living hand-to-mouth than a rich executive with millions in the bank and a golden parachute. So it's another force to suppress grass-roots opinion in favor of those who are independently wealthy or well-off.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How is this possible? First for all Canada's head of the government is the Prime minister which is the leader of the party with the most seats in the legislature instead of being a separate elected "president". What this means is that a government can be toppled early if they have the most seats but no majority in the house and the other parties decide to gang up and vote down the budget or some other "confidence" motion. This will trigger an early election.
Citizens in a riding (district for you americans) can also organize a recall referendum to force a "by-election" in that one riding/district where the sitting member has to contest for his/her seat in a special election. If the ruling party were to be forced to fight too many by-elections and lost too many seats to the opposition parties, a general election could be triggered early by a non-confidence vote.
Unfortunately, since the leader of the cabinet and the leaders in the house are separate people in the US system and because losing the majority in a house does not trigger an election, the people really have no way to topple a government they disagree with without a violent uprising.
You cannot force a reset of the house or senate through a lost vote on the budget in the US whereas in countries like Canada, if the government loses a key vote, it is considered as having lost the confidence of the people and a new election has to be called.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
The multi party system does not work really well at all, the last 2 governments are the clearest demonstration of that that we have had in a long long time. It is a hotbed of corruption, pork barrelling and pollies playing to popularity rather than doing what is best for the people. They don't care what damage they cause as the system encourages them to make deals for the here and now in order to get their way and secure their popularity. the system combined with mass media has made it a joke which is little more than a popularity contest.
excuse me but the liberals are aweful too, currently we have NO VIABLE PARTIES. They all play the popularity game or push their own personal agendas rather than that of the people and it is a result of a completely broken system that we have now. Yes I despise the previous government more than any I can think of in the past 40 odd years I have been on this planet, but the liberals currently would run a close second on my most hated list.
With the advent of the internet, voting could be done online, and most people could do it at home (and those who cannot afford or do not own a computer could use public computers set up at their local town hall where they vote now).
Voting IS done online. Currently not enabled everywhere. But's that already a possibility for swiss people abroad, and some comune start to enable it locally too.
The president can be the candidate with the purely majority vote.
Due to Duverger's Law, when there's a single voting round for a single key position (or for a single exclusive composition of a group), system will inevitably degenerate into a bi-partisan mess (see USA), because voting for a less popular 3rd party ends up being "throwing your vote away". And that sucks because usually the two finalist end up being always opposing each other while not doing much useful actually (again see USA).
One solution is to introduce 2-rounds voting (as in France): this dissociates the "trying to support an interesting 3rd party" and "voting against the bigger evil candidate" into 2 separate rounds. You don't "waste a vote" by casting for a 3rd party, you'll have plenty of opportunity to vote for the lesser evil on the next round.
Meanwhile, here in switzerland, the top of the executive is held by a *group of 7 persons* (with "president" being a simply honorific title for protocol purpose passed around in a circle each year). It's a group of person of mixed partisanship.
Currently, that's the only indirect voting system in switzerland (citizen vote for parliament, which is of proprotionnal composition, and the parliament functions as a "electoral college" by electing a similarily proportionned group of 7). But there's no major problems into introducing direct election. (People directly vote for parties and presidential candidate. Group proportion is based on party votes, and then places are populated by candidates based on popularity within party).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
There are reasons why the Founding Fathers rejected direct democracy.
First, they wouldn't see how a direct democracy (i.e.: where everybody decides and vote about everything) could scale on a larger scale than classical Greek city-states and small communities. (Where the dozen, maybe hunderd of decision-making citizen simply gather and discuss together).
Their solution back then was instead to keep the Greek city-state model (have a small bunch of people gather together) except that each one of the gathering people is representative of whole regions/populations/etc. (instead of managing to gather every single person of the huge population in a town's central plazza).
Thus was birthed representative democracy.
It might have sounded good back then, but you see the effect now: the representatives tend to prefer representing whomever pays them the best. Power is back in the hand of the elite and big corporation, only with a thick political layer inbetween.
Well technology marshes on, since founding father, communication technologies have simply been on a constant growth. A rather explosive growth.
Thus later on, you can see whole countries like Switzerland that function on a direct democracy. They have moved on from "Landsgemeinde" (the Hlevetic equivalent of greek city-state gathering in the central place) to direct voting accross the whole country, both in election booth and with voting-by-post.
So even if switzerland is bigger than a greek city-state (currently more than 7m people), thanks to the modernization that existed back then (post & phone & railroad) it has since then been able to coordinate country-wide votation and election very regularily (every few months).
The process is completely open and any one can watch and check.
Now Switzerland is still smaller than other European country or even huge continent-sized countris (like USA, Russia or China, for exemple). But, guess what, technology is STILL marching on and has come up with things like internet and cryptology.
(These are already put into production in some parts of Switzerland. Mainly for expatriate and in a few small commune).
And with these technologies, direct democracy can even scale up to larger populations.
The fear of your founding father about democracy being not practical on anything but smaller greek city-state is simply deprecated by technology.
Other fears against direct democracy usually include that people are stupid and might react stupidly due to mass panic, or because they are selfish and only think about quick personnal profit. Imagine if one would vote about a law for definitely supressing any tax however. People will never vote for tax! The state will go bankrupt!
Politicans know better, let's have them take the actual decision, and have only people voting for politician based on approximate general tendency of them.
Well you've seen the result in TFA's study: Politicians do know better, they specially know better how to earn more money by abiding to the highest paying oligarch.
Meanwhile, direct democracies like Switzerland DO VOTE about taxes, and guess what, big surprise: THEY HAVE VOTED FOR TAX INCREASES, SEVERAL TIME.
Thinking that "sheple don't know, politicians know better" is a horribly condescending paternalistic approach.
Yes, voting blunder can sometime happen (see votation about Minarets, about life-sentences or, more recently, the problems between EU and Switzerland regarding migration freedoms). But they can be mitigiated. At the heart, the main problem is information, if "people don't know" perhaps, instead of deciding for them, you might try to inform them so they make an enlightened decision? Modern communication mean can do help a lot here. Mass media like Press, Radio, TV have been around for decades. Internet is newer and offers even more possibilities for communication (including for minorities which might lack the budget to do it on Mass Media).
Also, patience and time help. People new to Swiss po
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The study did two things.
The first a set of independent bivariate analyses, measuring the connection between the preferences of median americans vs. political decisions, the preferences of wealthy americans vs. political decisions and the preferences of lobby organizations vs. political decisions. Like others before them, they found that all of these had strong positive correlations, with wealthy americans having more influence than the preferences of median americans, but not by that much:
Median americans: 0.64 +- 0.08
Wealthy americans: 0.81 +- 0.08
Interest groups: 0.59 +- 0.09
That's consistent with the picture you were painting. But as you know, correlation does not mean causation. So the authors went a step further and did a multivariate analysis of all these at the same time. This is the new thing about this study. What they found was that the preferences of median americans have no explanatory power for political decisions - they correlate with them simply because the median american often agrees with rich americans, who have the real influence.
Median americans: 0.03 +- 0.08 (i.e. zero within the error bars)
Wealthy americans: 0.76 +- 0.09
Interest groups: 0.56 +- 0.09
If you only know the preferences of the rich, you can predict political decisions moderately well. If you add the preferences of the most important interest groups, the predictions improve substantially. But if you add the preferences of median americans, the predictions do not improve at all.
As a simplified illustration of such a situation, consider a totalitarian regime with a dictator and a street-sweeper, with the dictator making every decision. If the dictator and street-sweeper happen to agree 75% of the time, it might look like the street-sweeper actually had a lot of influence if you look at him in isolation. But if you analyse him together with the dictator, you discover that the opinion of the street-sweeper does not actually influence the results at all - the dictator's opinion is all that matters.
The article used these findings to evaluate several leading models for how american democracy works:
1. Majoritarian electoral democracy (i..e how the system is supposed to work)
2. Economic elite domination (plutocrachy/oligarchy)
3. Majoritarian pluralism (lobby groups decide, but taken together these are representative of the will of the people)
4. Biased pluralism (lobby groups decide, and represent only a small subset of the population (oligarchy))
They found that hypothesis 1 and 3 were incompatible with the data, while 2 and 4 were supported. So the summary wasn't all that bad.
As a final note: The resolution of their data was quite poor when it comes to wealth, so they could not determine how much of the apparent influence of the 90% quantile individuals come simply from correlation with 99% quantile individuals. It would be interesting to see a follow-up study with higher resolution. It might well turn out that the 90%-99% quantiles have as little influence as the 50% quantile. But at the moment there isn't enough data available to investigate that.
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey / where wealth accumulates, and men decay
Oliver Goldsmith, "The deserted village", 1770. Also, "Ill fares the land" is the title of a book by Tony Judt that many of us western people would do very, very well to read.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
The U.S. was never a democracy. It is a REPUBLIC, oligarchic attributes not-withstanding.
But then, it's always been that way.
Oligarchy is the defacto political system for all human cultures, regardless of outward appearances, size or age. Here's the book produced from that study -- http://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald-Brown/dp/007008209X
Old news. And it ain't gonna change either. Power may shift from one group to another from time to time, but the fact is, the majority of the human population is only interested in getting by, not in taking responsibility. It is the few who take it who get to rule. Even an inherited kingdom has puppeteers and cuckoldry. Different systems of rule only change the vectors and means by which the ambitious take charge.
it took a study to give "that" legitimacy.
So to solve a problem, we need to first admit that it exists, right? How about a petition:
http://wh.gov/lwjn6
--- wad
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It claims that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.
Imelda maintains that there are only 500 people in the world. When she had the wealth of a nation in her pocket she used to be one of them. Now? Not so much. But her point is well taken and probably true in a way. I wonder what percentage of the world's wealth is held by the world's 500 richest people?
The wealth canyon in the US has been deepening since trickle down began thirty-five years ago. And the situation is slated to get worse not better. Dr Krugman had a great thumbsucker on this sad sit. a month or two back.
The recent SCOTUS decision on personal contributions corrupts the corruption. Special interests own Congress. (left and right) There remains vanishingly small political will to act in the public interest at any level in the political hierarchy. This has always been true in most of the world. Sad to see the rot ramp up in the Good Old US of A.
Our job creators created jobs alright. In China and for... robots. And themselves, of course, with princely paychecks. Got to make it into that elite 500 somehow.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
"United States political and finance industry leadership has recently been dominated by people associated with Harvard and Yale."
Explains why did study was conducted by Princeton. Those Ivy leagues are like competing children, which most of this country's political system has become: an bunch of ranting, whining children with access to a lot of cash and dreams.
Scandinavian countries, excluding Finland, are Constitutional monarchies. UK should be too. Different in most monarchies are the way the democracy for the people is implanted. It goes from 0 to 99% democracy where the monarch have abosulte power to only have power according protocol to sign the democratic made laws. Only he have not the power to refuse a law !!??!! UK with his House of Lords, which are appointed, is not that high on the ladder too.
The UK is a constitutional monarchy. The sovereign does not have any effective power.
The power to refuse to sign an act of parliament is a nominal one and is never used.
The oligarchy is a two-party duopoly that pools and shares money to execute their agenda. (eg. Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee).
"It's a big club, and you ain't in it." -- George Carlin
Sometimes too much knowledge gets in the way of 'common sense'. This system of democracy is a farce. We have the trappings of a democracy, but it is intermingled with totalitarian executive policies. For instance, our courts routinely convict innocent people for long prison sentences, while we employ and deploy criminals to act on the nation's behalf domestically and around the world. The Oligarachs prop up and support criminal regimes around the world while trying to convince the people of the USA that they live in a democracy. Lie!!! This is really a totalitarian caste system which is described as a democracy. We, therefore live in a DINO: democracy in name only!!! All real power is in the hands of a few people; the very rich and evil minions of the devil.
P.S.: The United States of America was in fact governmentally stuctured to be a 'republic'. Every state and peoples were supposed to have a voice in the administrtion of our government. However, general hatred and economic selfishness caused many to continue and embrace the 'caste system' policies of Europe and the Far East. Old habits never die. And, the devil rules this world.
The devil is an ominous foe. Do not underestimate the power of the diabolical spirits in the earth. You offered that "Ignorance is the one and only true enemy. Trying to convince the ignorant is a losing strategy, teaching the next generation is the only correct first step". I disagree with your true but incomplete assessment. Neutralizing the devil's strangle-hold on the minds of men (and women) is the primary step towards bringing decency to this life. If even a few of us will 'humble ourselves before the Almighty God' peace in all its forms will come to the earth. Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom! Let us all who love the Lord pray for wisdom. Let us pray for power over Satan. The angels of the Lord wait for the sounds of our voices crying out in sincere prayer to our God of life and of love. They lay in wait to smite the wicked; those who made war against the Spirit of the Lord in the early days of the new faith.
The new faith of Judeo Christianity was suppressed by Constantine and his fathers before him. Constantine ushered in the age of the Antichrist into the earth. While the real faith was being crushed by murdering the saints of the Lord a false faith was being fashioned out of the pagan religions of that time. Because of those events, today we live in a world full of pagan religious philosophies that separate humankind from the God of their creation. A false Christianity presents itself as the world's religion invoking Peter while doing the deeds of Satan. The devil always knew that the Spirit of Christ would be his undoing, and therefore possessed his human minions to crush the Christian's religious fervor for the Lord.
There is not much that we can do against Satan who rules over humankind unless we make the emphatic decision to love God and our Lord with all of our hearts, minds and souls. The devil is well rooted in all of the institutions of men which make significant change impossible without the power of the Spirit of the Creator God! To all who love peace and righteousness, our salvation is not in the world but in the glory of God. "Moreover, God is the source of all good things. He actually shares his glory with us. When we receive his plentiful gifts with gratitude, when we use them to enhance his honor, when we acknowledge him as the source of all goodness, then we are glorifying him", as stated in http://www.thehighcalling.org/reflection/what-gods-glory. #GodIsLove.
The electorial process in the USA is rigged so that most people cannot vote or do not vote. The Oligrarchs biggest nightmare is for fair and honest elections to take hold in the U. S. This is as much a false democracy as the Christianity practiced by most people is a false and pagan religion.
If my knowledge of the Constitution is accurate, you can also choose to persuade a certain number of stubborn states to help you ratify that.
Isn't the U.N. also a sort of oligarchy? The only branch with actual considerable power is the Security Council, with its enforcement powers, but the permanent members can veto anything, and apparently are, well, permanently instated, giving them a fair portion of the power also.
Teaching the next generation assumes the oligarchy doesn't possess control of the education system... yes? What the next generation has learned over the past generation (in large part in our schools) via commercialization, mass propaganda, outright lies (in the part because of the first amendment rights and "personhood" granted to corporations) in advertising and various industry special interest organizations, etc., how does a society at large convince the next generation that what they are being taught is crap? Their minds are generally too inexperienced and immature to realize what they are told and taught is mere propaganda? A good analogy is the old Jesuit pledge regarding religion; "give us your children for the first 10 years of life and we'll give you a lifelong believer (in god)." Misperceptions in early development is extremely difficult to change later in life.
Please, please PLEASE get this straight; The United States of America is not now, nor ever has been, nor was EVER INTENDED to be a "democracy" ;.
The USA is designed as, intended to be, and WAS a CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC.
Quit referring to it as a democracy! It never was or was meant to be one.
How does one teach the next generation differently when as you rightly asserted that the "system" is controlled by the oligarchy? America is possessed by "power"; from top down. Even the powerless desire power all the while knowing they'll never have it. What I'm proposing is the possession of power has become all consuming in America. Rather than being possessed by what philosophers might consider "higher" values such as fairness, altruism, justice, etc. America is consumed with power on all levels. That drive for power is manifested in one of the basic tenets of capitalism. That being self-interest. Ultimately self-interest will undermine social cohesion via scapegoating, animosity, class warfare, crime, etc. All characteristics of a decaying culture. The decline has already began and the power consolidation on the part of the oligarchy is a natural consequence for a group that perceives the inevitable.
Sorry to have to tell ya, democracies bigger than a few hundred have to evolve into representative democracies, and if they are really to survive they need to move to representative republics. At best.
All you can hope for is that the oligarchy believes as you do, and if they don't they are hopefully held in check by a Constitution. Of course, they know that, so they work to modify the rules in their favor. Freedom is a transitory state, like childhood, and you should enjoy it while you can.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
California has this too. One of the best ones was one that gets rid of Gerrymandering. The process was quite open and the rules rather strict as to how the districts could be drawn. It also included input from the public. As such, it helps the moderates. As a result, the republican party lost big time because they could no longer cherry pick their districts. Things would be quite different on a national scale if this were to take place in other states.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Causing a financial disaster is not a crime. I agree that they probably did bad things to get that kind of power, but the financial disaster was just a symptom of a far greater problem - the guys driving are blind.
http://whorulesamerica.net
Sociologist Bill Domhoff has been working on American power structures for decades, really good stuff.
> Nixon should have been jailed
Obama makes Nixon look like a boy scout.
At least Nixon got a lot done.