In any event, I've come to the conclusion that the best way to influence the system is to have a lot of money to throw around. Then you can hire a guy to go make speeches for you and spread your message, you can buy scientists to publish research that supports your agenda, you can buy lawyers to silence dissent and block action, you can buy your way into meetings of the other elitely wealthy that really decide where investments flow, how the economy works, who wins and who loses.
We are the government, and if you choose not to help make it what you want, it gets made for you by people who don't appreciate your point of view.
Look no further than the "hell no" Republican tea-party caucus in the US Congress for a really visible example of people making the government the way they want it made while we sit on the sidelines.
You don't do it for the money, you do it because you believe the world can be better than it is. And if you do it right you can completely nullify the impact of people with a lot of money that try to force it to be different.
My grandfather told me that when the country was threatened by a Japanese invasion, the young men and women flocked to sign up to preserve their way of life. But when their way of life is threatened by their lack of participation in the governing of the country, they do nothing.
He was particularly disappointed with the youth of the 60's who would rather "drop out" than take their passion with them into public service and actually pull the US out of its sillyness in Vietnam.
Its a time horizon thing, one of the greatest strengths of Martin Luther King was that he could help people see that while it would take time, more than they wanted, they could achieve meaningful change. But if someone believes themselves to be helpless, they will live up to their own expectations of helplessness.
There is no meaningful difference between a process I cannot influence and a process which could theoretically be influenced if I could put more time and money into it than I actually have. Either way, it is best regarded as an immutable aspect of the universe, damage to be routed around if possible and accepted if not. If the system were amenable to change it would already have changed.
You can change local stuff pretty easily. If you want to scale up to state level, you need to be state level worthy. The guy who owns 100 hotels controls tens of thousands of jobs, and his voice should carry more weight, about some issues at least, than mine alone. It's up to me to get a few thousand friends to counter his voice.
Yes. The feds are heavily influenced by oil and finance people. but every person's life is heavily influenced by oil and finance. Are they unethical? At some level, sure. Do they understand the national system better than anyone else? yeah. yeah they do.
There is no magical oracle we can consult for the right answer. we stumble along in the dark trying out different stuff. an 80% right solution is better than nothing. Given the size, the system is pretty nimble. If something sucks, we change it. Sometimes it takes a while for the million voices to come into harmony and say things like everybody deserves equal rights.
I get where you're coming from. You feel like you have no say and no influence. That's largely true. You're a nobody. but your influence is not zero. You can affect local stuff greatly today. You can join with others for larger scale political change. Realistically, it's a pain in the ass and you probably have better things to do with your free time like laundry or coding or whatever. But people do it. you can to, if that's what floats your boat.
> There is no meaningful difference between a process I
> cannot influence and a process which could
> theoretically be influenced if I could put more
> time and money into it than I actually have.
That is what I love about the Tea Party (not their politics but that they decided to do something about what they felt). In just under 10 years they have become a strong voice in national politics. Many of their members were brought into office by people just like you, passionate about what is wrong (in their opinion) with the way things are done.
Tell all your friends you are running for city council. I dare you. Tell them what you stand for and why you should be a city council member instead of the people who are currently elected. Listen to what they want in their city and try to visualize a better world. If not you, who?
It doesn't really matter what I or anyone in my peer group thinks; as long as the war on drugs continues, none of us will ever run for office or have any visible role in politics. But it doesn't matter, because the tech industry offers most of us substantially more significant opportunities to change the world around us than anything we could accomplish if we wasted 10x as much time on the political process.
You're right that local politics is different; it is still mostly sort of democratic and amenable to change on the scale individuals and reasonably-sized groups can hope to achieve. But the scale of accomplishment available is correspondingly trivial, and the timescale is just as slow.
I don't see that the tea party accomplished much as a grassroots movement. It looked to me like the established political power structure successfully co-opted the grassroots tea party during the year after it emerged and has been continuing business as usual ever since, using the "tea party" brand to give their existing agenda populist legitimacy.
I am very much visualizing a better world and doing what I can to help create it; I'm just not wasting my time trying to accomplish that through some sclerotic, glacial, anti-transparent political process. I'm just working to create the organizations I want to participate in directly, helping build mutual aid networks, and supporting community values around resource-sharing and skill-sharing. Hackerspaces and co-housing and open source software, these are the kinds of projects where my efforts can actually accomplish something to help make the world a better place.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brendan-demelle/study-confirms...
> A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/25/1189761/-Big-Tobacc...
> That a tea party themed PR campaign was proposed by Burson Marsteller back in 1992 is somewhat interesting, but certainly not surprising. And it in no way proves an operative connection between anyone.
> The other big find of the study is that the PR group Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), which back then, did work for big tobacco, split off and became Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks, which is now behind the Tea Party. But the fact is, CSE wasn't just funded by big tobacco. Like all these groups, they were funded by a whole host of big, right wing corporations. Here's just a partial list of CSE's corporate clients/supporters:
> The Tea Party idea may have been the brainchild of right wing corporate PR groups. But it was only possible with the help of the corporate television media. And not just Fox. Whoever pulled the trigger on Operation Tea Party has powerful friends. If Occupy Wall Street had had such friends, we'd probably be living in a different country by now.
One argues it was the brainchild of a PR group, the other argues the first group is wrong but powered by Right Wing Media.
Either way, the Tea Party but was astroturfed into existence by rich people.
"I" do not have access to billionaires who back my interests.
The problem is not getting elected but rather how the elections are structured. Pretending otherwise is simply perpetuating the system.
If you run for office in the US, you will form an organizing committee. And you will put in your organizing documents the things you believe should be true about the world that aren't (this would be your platform) and because that is a public document, it will be published by the State or Federal elections commission with all the other platforms out there.
And you will be surprised, perhaps pleasantly so, perhaps unpleasantly, that your "agenda" or platform may line up with what some billionaire thinks is the right thing as well, or maybe they just want to use you to steal votes from another player in the race (this is politics after all) and you will get donations to your committee from weird sounding names like "Higgly Piggly Partners, LLP" which are people who generally want to remain anonymous and want to help you get elected. Some of those people might be billionaires. You probably won't know but it is always good to ask what they hope to achieve by getting you elected.
And there were a number of people who ran as Republicans in California found that the Koch brothers donated money to help their elections. Did it make them tools of the Koch brothers? Maybe some of them but certainly not all of them. And if some billionaire donated to your election campaign would you suddenly do anything they said?
Look no further than the county clerk in Kentucky to see that once you're elected you are really really hard to fire, even if you don't do your job. There is nothing that says you have to do the bidding of your donors, the worst that will happen is they won't support your re-election efforts.
Politics is people. Its people collectively trying to achieve a goal, some for themselves, some for the group. Whether you are in a company or a government or on an island competing for a million dollars, politics is the process by which negotiation, decisions, and change is effected. It is perfectly legit to say that you don't understand how it works, but it is incorrect to say that you cannot participate. And sometimes participation can lead to understanding which can lead to great things. But you won't know unless you try.
If its okay with you, I'll go with the people with doctorates in the field over your opinion on the internet.
Out of curiosity, how many academic papers would it take saying you are wrong before you'd believe me?
> If you run for office in the US, you will form an organizing committee. And you will put in your organizing documents the things you believe should be true about the world that aren't (this would be your platform) and because that is a public document, it will be published by the State or Federal elections commission with all the other platforms out there.
You seem to be operating under the delusion that I don't understand how it works. I do. That is the problem.
> And you will be surprised, perhaps pleasantly so, perhaps unpleasantly, that your "agenda" or platform may line up with what some billionaire thinks is the right thing as well, or maybe they just want to use you to steal votes from another player in the race (this is politics after all) and you will get donations to your committee from weird sounding names like "Higgly Piggly Partners, LLP" which are people who generally want to remain anonymous and want to help you get elected. Some of those people might be billionaires. You probably won't know but it is always good to ask what they hope to achieve by getting you elected.
No, I won't be surprised.
There was a good guy I know that tried this sort of thing, no billionaire would back him. In the end, people like me and his millionaire brother did. It amounted to nothing because enough "other people" funneled money into the election to "anonymously" send out mailers that implied his brother was a "Chinese citizen" and his campaign was funded by money from China.
Similarly, a councilman with platform similar to what I'd like failed to get elected.
How you ask?
Well, first they slanted the system to prevent the guy from getting elected. There was a court case that found the voting method violated the population's civil rights. They then found a guy with the same name and a different middle initial to split the vote. He's been used as a proxy in such votes before. He'd have won except for the 4% of people who voted for the wrong guy. [ Remember, the proxy doesn't actually do anything other than get his name on the ballot. So his contributions are basically payment for services rendered. ]
I could go on about all the other things money has bought that I've seen first hand if you like. Shall I?
> Politics is people. Its people collectively trying to achieve a goal, some for themselves, some for the group. Whether you are in a company or a government or on an island competing for a million dollars, politics is the process by which negotiation, decisions, and change is effected. It is perfectly legit to say that you don't understand how it works, but it is incorrect to say that you cannot participate. And sometimes participation can lead to understanding which can lead to great things. But you won't know unless you try.
No, Politics is money and the ability to buy people to do your dirty work for you.
No one is going to give me $3+ million to lie to people to win a single congressional seat. However, they are perfectly happy to do that for people who hold the sort of views. How much do you think the opposition raised? Less than a million.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/04/04/th...
But hey, money doesn't matter. The ability to hand a man a large chunk of money to run as a candidate whose sole job is to put his name on the ballot to confuse people [he didn't actually use any of his campaign funds to campaign, fyi].
But hey, prove me wrong. Go right ahead. Go find some nice district where there are some large incumbent players and run for city council against their interests. See how far that gets you. [ Hint: They'll hire a guy with a single character difference in the name, fund half a dozen candidates with larger treasuries than you. ]
Hell, I'll even tell you what happened to the last guy so you know what to expect.
It isn't easy, and it takes a while to learn all the tricks that you have to be aware of, but anything worth doing is like that right? I hope you won't give up trying, learned helplessness is a terrible terrible place to be.
I listed two instances and offered to go on.
I don't see a value in posting my life story on HN given I prefer to be mostly just left alone.
> It isn't easy, and it takes a while to learn all the tricks that you have to be aware of, but anything worth doing is like that right?
The problem isn't "tricks", the problem is anyone who actually stands up to anyone worth standing up to doesn't have enough money.
The only real route to "success" I have is to make $5-10 million and being willing to spend half on being elected. No one is willing to spend that money on the congressional level.
That doesn't put food on the table or keep the lights on. Going into politics is very very high on the maslov hierarchy.
But I'm sure my landlord will nod approvingly when I say "Oh, I'm not going to pay rent this month, I'm in politics you see. Changing the world. Don't got time for rent."
http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPPS%2FPPS...
> Our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.
That's a mythology we are told to pacify us. It has no factual connection to reality.
You're arguing the authority of traditional religious doctrine to people who've already left the faith, that strategy will not work. Try another strategy. Or consider you could be wrong, and join us.
Trust me, if she can make it all the way to Congress on passion alone, anyone can.
> That's a mythology we are told to pacify us.
> It has no factual connection to reality.
There is a folk story, I think it is originally Chinese about a worker told to move a large boulder out of the road. He says "Can't you see, no man could move that rock it is too large!" and another man steps up and says "I'll move it." The second man picks up a rock hammer and walks to the boulder and taps it until a piece breaks off in his hand. He carries that to the side of the road and then goes back to the boulder. The next day the rock is gone.
The moral of course it that what you clearly cannot do in an instant, you can often do over time. That is the power you wield. And it might take you 5 years of hanging out with the local party bigwigs, then another few years of local public service, before you make it up to the big leagues, but if you care you can do that. We take high school students and train them to be Neurosurgeons in 15 years, but nobody expects that they can say "Hey I want to be a neurosurgeon!" and instantly become one, why is it so surprising that you can't just decide you want to be president or governor without any training at all?
You'll discover how much relationship-building goes on, and how that leads to bigger and better opportunities to make a change in the world.
Guess what, it isn't easy, but it's absolutely doable. (Not for those who call it all a myth, of course.)
It's as if the only way of bringing effective change (for some definition of such) along any social economic dimension (read: ways resource allocation) dimension is running for office. Its laughable to think, pandering to the status quo will improve the situation.
Sure, what we have now may be what is currently running on the OS of collective human behaviors with a high resource load, but it doesn't really stand in the way of people trying to think/experiment and bootstrap other methods grounded in the realities most people have face everyday, as compared to a more fortunate few.
As things get worse for some of us, it can also the best motivation for one to pursue other ways of being.
Well then again, maybe if the US Treasury sells a couple trillion T-backs to the Federal reserve and a couple more rounds of QE will solve all the problems the world faces, again!