Alan FerrierAmerica isn’t the way it is because he’s president. He’s president because America is the way it is.
xs4me2But the vile and evil government in place reflects the around 30% of the registered voters that turned up to vote for the orange menace…
Ted LemonThat's kind of the point, though. When was the last time that Americans got the government the majority of us wanted?
The electoral system in the U.S. is intentionally configured to prevent a tyranny of the majority, but that winds up meaning that we have a tyranny of the minority instead.
That's a gross oversimplification, but the point is that we needn't take this personally. It's true, but it doesn't mean we are all bad people.
Question is, what do we do about it?
The 2 party system is broken. Few ultrarich can inject endless resources in supporting candidates. This should stop. The voting needs full voter representation instead of the silly ancient state representation. The ridiculous 2 party system is fully defective with the complete polarization as is ongoing.
Without full revision and realization that there is a big problem and collaboration is the only option, this will go nowhere but towards an uprising or tyranny.
Sure, it's great to fantasize about how things could be, but we have to be practical about how to get there from _here_ or it's just fanfic.
Then we simply wait until these fascists start prosecuting people opposing the regime they are building. It is happening now.
Next stop will be a choice between resistance and democratic opposition, hopefully stopping this madness at the midterms, or an authoritarian state with a mad king that wants to rule the world.
A full-blown civil war by those that won't take it anymore, in an option then, take your pick to what the future may hold.
Sorry, I must not have been clear. I agree that we need to change the electoral system. But we need to take practical steps to do that, not just talk about theories for how it could be better.
People in the U.S. are doing serious work on that. I don't think the situation is hopeless. But it's going to be a long trudge—the people now in power obvsly aren't going to do it.
If this all ends with neutralizing this madness by the midterms, not all will be lost. If the parties will be prepared to look beyond the train wreck that now is underway. Given the neoliberal capitalist system I wonder where this will go, I see no change coming in fact.. without very deep reform...
@xs4me2 @alanferrier Younger leadership wouldn’t hurt…
Can say that again indeed... and that goes for presidential candidates and members of the house and senate...
Aaron@xs4me2 @abhayakara @alanferrier
Root cause analysis: Rich people will always manipulate any disconnect in any government system. We need to fix the broken system. But we also need to be rid of rich people. It's probably too late to solve this crisis without guillotines. But we should take measures in the aftermath to prevent billionaires from existing again.
The reason they exist is the way our economic system is designed. For-profit corporations are wealth extraction machines. They are *designed* to harvest the exchange between workers and customers, collecting a non-government tax on every exchange and handing it off to the owner(s). They intrinsically concentrate wealth, to the detriment of the common people.
Cooperatives, by contrast, are democratically controlled and immediately make reparations to the community from which excess revenue was extracted, in the form of dividends back to the community. We need to make all companies cooperatives, by law, when we sort out the mess afterward.
@hosford42 @xs4me2 @alanferrier If you can get them to the guillotine, you can just as effectively take away their money and power. I get the tendency to think first of violence, but that’s how we keep getting here. Violence damages the growth medium of solidarity, even when the victim deserves it. Everything about the current situation is rooted in the belief that hurting people is how you make a better world.
@abhayakara @hosford42 @alanferrier
Robespierre tried that in the reign of terror, and was in the end the final victim.
The Soviets tried that in the October Revolution and many times after. The experiment failed.
The current problem is the end game of winner-takes-all neoliberal capitalism that rules the world. That model should change for a more social and democratic model where work and effort is rewarded, but also contributions to society are needed. Tax. There is no place for oligarchs.
I'm putting guillotines at the end, after all the other options. I just worry that the other options may fail us at this point because we let it slip so far before acting.
@hosford42 @xs4me2 @alanferrier The point is, if you let it slip that far, you can’t do the guillotine option either, so it’s moot. If anything, the guillotine option makes things worse, because it makes surrender unacceptable for them.