[einhverfr]

What is even more scary is that we have been in freefall in this regard mostly since at least Nixon signed the Banking Secrecy Act.

This was followed by Carter signing FISA....

Regan followed, signing among other things legislation to allow the military to enforce drug laws domestically as an exemption to Posse Comitatus. This meant that the military was involved in surveillance at both Ruby Ridge and Waco, and also directly provided military equipment and in some cases personnel to these operations (in addition to Navy SEALs raiding crack houses in some cities).

Then came Clinton and things got worse again with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and some other laws.

Then came GWB, no further comment required.

And now we have Obama.

Whoever we elect screws us. That's the truth.

[VLM]

The purpose of elections is to give the populace the false idea that they have a choice. If they could actually change anything, they'd be outlawed.

[rangibaby]

Although people often bemoan political apathy as if it were a grave social ill, it seems to me that this is just as it should be. Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power? In Soviet-era Russia, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists: paying attention to them, whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement, making them feel as if they mattered. Why should Americans want to act any differently with regard to the Republicans and the Democrats? For love of donkeys and elephants?

EXCERPT FROM

Orlov, Dmitry. “Reinventing Collapse.” New Society Publishers, 2011-04-06. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.

[einhverfr]

I used to disagree with you and Mr Orlov, but there is a point where apathy is the correct response because it frees up energy to build a better future through other means.

[raintrees]

George Carlin had it right yet again...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxsQ7jJJcEA

[einhverfr]

What you can use elections for is to extort policies from elected officials. The problem is that means being willing to vote for the greater evil if you don't get the things the country needs and our country is unwilling to enter into that mentality.

[VLM]

I think you're missing the point that the actual important policies are not up for debate and are agreed to by both sides before the two winners are picked for us to vote on. All the electorate gets to decide on is meaningless stuff. Both candidates will always want the elimination of privacy, destruction of the middle class, complete subservience to wall street, etc. The electorate gets to decide on unimportant stuff like the skin color of the winner... it doesn't really matter because either winner will implement the same policies, although perhaps with slightly different PR campaigns.

A fundamental impedance mismatch is the public wants/needs policies. However they're only allowed to vote on two hand picked two sides of the same coin "leaders", not the actual policies. The "winner" is the candidate who tells the best lies about policies, which will of course be forgotten after inauguration, and both are going to do the same thing anyway so it doesn't matter very much which wins.

[einhverfr]

That's why voting is the final act of a series of political actions, and merely should be cast as an up/down "keep this guy" vote without looking too close at the alternatives.

We have to take over the conversation and stop listening to the challenger. The challenger doesn't exist. It is up/down on the incumbent.

[VLM]

I fail to see the point of that. By definition, both the incumbent and the challenger were hired by the same political action committee to achieve the same outcome by using different PR techniques.

Your suggestion is that the general public should slightly modify how they select which lie is told to them. The result will be they'll be lied to slightly differently, and no change in actual outcome.

With enough money, and it'll take a lot of money, the public could purchase their own candidates... That would be interesting, although unlikely. And there's an awful lot of intentional divide and conquer PR work already in place to prevent it.

Once wealth inequality and income inequality exceed a certain level the system spirals out of control until it crashes and reboots. In that scenario the most sensible way to limit total overall human suffering is to floor the accelerator and encourage the process, rather than hold it back, so it crashes quicker and we get back to normalcy sooner. Given that background, a lot of current events suddenly make more sense. Look at federal reserve policy, or pretty much anything in contemporary politics.

[rst]

The funny thing is that FISA was originally intended to curb the intelligence abuses that had come to light earlier in the '70s, in which phones were tapped, and international telegrams seized en masse, with no legal authority whatever. It doesn't seem to have been effective in that regard even before it was effectively gutted by the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, but it's still not quite of a piece with the stuff that came later.