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Re:Who gets to own the West? by Frost1x on Saturday June 22, 2019 @08:39AM (#20249289)
We'd need Senate and House representatives that represent the bulk of citizens in the US and not those catering to the ultra wealthy's whims.

For that, people would have to vote out a lot of existing politicians, pick fresh faces, and cycle them out regularly enough to make it difficult for a few private interests to buy them out. For some states there are incentives to keep the status quo because it helps them (Kentucky and Mitch McConnell in recent news come to mind), so those cases would be difficult to convince to dump out their representative because they provide just enough support to their states to appease residents.

Overall, there just doesn't seem to be momentum of voters to achieve this and every attempt I've seen has failed. Some of this is likely due to the orchestration/organization problem: it's a lot easier for a few thousand billionaires to converge on shared ideas than hundreds of millions of non-billionaries.

Instead, people shake their heads and go with the flow while complaining about the state of affairs and ongoing trends that hurt their interests and growth. The end result is the continued snowball of wealth inequality we see. I often wonder if we've passed a critical point of recovery within our governmental system to fix this issue but I certainly hope not.

Re:Who gets to own the West? by comicjk on Saturday June 22, 2019 @11:21AM (#20250069)
Cycling the legislators doesn't help at all - it's easy to make a farm team of lackies, already "bought" before they're even elected. They can even be picked according to ideology, so you don't have to pay them a dime.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/re-engineering-politician...

I don't know the solution to this problem, but it's not legislative turnover!

Re:Who gets to own the West? by maxxxxx on Saturday June 22, 2019 @11:49AM (#20250205)
Agreed. There is this call for term limits but think it would have the opposite effect of what people want. If politics is not a long term career then politicians need to be either independently wealthy or keep a foot in the industry they worked in. That way it's pretty much guaranteed that they will be beholden to that industry and aren't independent.
Re:Who gets to own the West? by hanniabu on Saturday June 22, 2019 @08:46AM (#20249321)
Mitch McConnell should just start putting corporate logo patches on his suits.
Re:Who gets to own the West? by Mountain_Skies on Saturday June 22, 2019 @08:51AM (#20249346)
I don't disagree but that should be extended to each and every member of Congress.
Re:Who gets to own the West? by closeparen on Saturday June 22, 2019 @01:59PM (#20250853)
We’re a majority-homeowner country. Property rights are immensely popular.