After listening to Chris Hodge's perfectly rational discussion on "when have we had enough, and what to do about it", I definitely agree we need to do something very soon.
The following is based on an earlier post titled "How to fix America". I've copied (and updated) it here because this is a "core fix" - one that, when implemented, helps to fix the other problems.
The Election process
I don't vote. Why not? Because I have no interest in picking one of the puppets the powerful allow through the gates and onto the stage, and letting myself be fooled into thinking this is democracy.
Sure, every now and then a truly good candidate steps up only to be marginalized by our information supply. Witness the fate of Ron Paul, who would have truly represented the interests of the American people, but we got the lackey instead.
Our problem of finding and electing people who would truly represent and lead up is an easy one to solve nowadays, given the existence of the Internet and America's abundant supply of very capable programmers.
We can remove money from the election process by using the Internet effectively.
We've been duped into thinking the richest people are also the wisest. They've never been able to see past their 5-year-plan noses, and they are in control of our long term future? Nyet! How foolish have we been! And now we're on the brink of some escalation of their war. How much longer do you think it will be before you yourself actually feel the impact, and perhaps the horror, of war? Whoa, you say, no war here! War only happens over there and on our TV.
Maybe a shooting war isn't the first war to be launched on us. Maybe it will be electronic, or maybe financial. In fact, if we consider the greatest heist of all time, the Wall Street Bailout, as an act of war upon us, that would be true.
But there are all kinds of war. There's war that employs terrorism, there's war that is traditional, with soldiers, tanks and planes, there's war with mercenaries such as Blackwater, and there's covert war with assassins and drones, and there's information war fought with propaganda.
Which of these wars affect you today, and which are likely to affect you tomorrow? How long will it go on?
In war, the real horror comes from the daily grind of it all. People are tolerant at first, then progressively less so, and eventually many will get to the point of not being able to stand it anymore. Remember the "war to end all wars"? That war helped to prove that there is no such thing as a war to end all wars, except perhaps the last one in which everyone dies.
An Internet based election process can work. I've got a design in my own mind for one, and this is one type of computer program that I truly wish someone else could destroy with something so much better. Regardless of the winner, the result will be the removal of money and turning our attention to putting people who truly represent us in office.
Look back over history and note some of the great people that shaped what's good about our world. Where are they today? Would you for even one second think to compare Bush to, say, George Washington or the great thinker Thomas Paine, in his day? Where are people of this caliber and mold today?
Why is this so damn important? The wars we're engaged in today are much bigger - and far more intractable - then we realize. Heck, we didn't even realize that at the beginning it was an invasion of the Middle East. It wasn't all about Afghanistan or Iraq in the first place, it was about the Middle East as a whole. Only from this point of view does the big picture of what actually happened come together. It also, in my view, what I call evil that made it happen.
It's the weapons at their disposal and their inclination to use them. Given the climate of fear and hatred they have fostered on our world, the direction is very clear: they will use those weapons, and unless we stop them, it's only a matter of time.
Who do we stop? Our information supply has to move to the Internet, with (here's our election process at work) elected overseers who insure the net remains open and
"neutral" and insures everyone (such as me) will have an equal presence. Give us this and our best people will rise to the surface. Bill Moyers, who unfortunately is soon to retire, is a perfect example of someone we can trust to represent us. Try to find someone even remotely like Bill Moyers in Congress - if you need more proof that we need to dump them all, there you have it.
A key feature of a replacement voting system would be how it develops the list of issues in the 1st place. Today we're told what the issues are by the "news" and "pollsters" et al, meaning the issues that are important to them, or framed by them. Instead we need to start with asking people what THEY think the issues are, and then work from that list.
Once we know what the issues that people actually care about, and they aren't spun, but laid bare, then we can match these issues to candidate positions, and eventually cull from the list of candidates those whose positions on the issues most closely match our own, or the majority of us, anyway.
A perfect example of an issue that has been spun until it looks like something else is the economy. Nowhere in the "news" are we told that the real root problems for our economy are that war, the debt it's cost us, and Wall Street's biggest theft of all time. Those 3 factors are our economic problem, but the spinsters have it framed differently, that's it's this or that or some other thing.
Bill
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