Tribalism Sucks

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Unless you wear a MAGA hat to bed, you know our government is headed in the wrong direction.  Unless you’re crazy, you know our government is corrupt.  Unless you’re a genuinely rotten person, you want much, much more peace, prosperity, security, and doggone it…freedom, for both yourself, and all your fellow citizens.

But unless you’re in the less-than-10% (typically more like 3-4%) who ever vote for third party or independent candidates, you chose this complicated, legalistic/ rule-fraught, unfair, dysfunctional and globally violent corruption. All of it.

I don’t mean to be an insulting knowitall, but this is very simple in a nation with elections:

Bernie

Either you use your power of peaceful revolution to oppose what’s not working and replace it with new guards for our future security, or you’re actually supporting the bad guys. If you’re not actively firing the bad guys with your vote, you’re as much as hiring them; either by direct choice, or in vapid inaction.

Now you may not disagree with that last paragraph. That may be while you’re still reading.

But there’s also simple logic in determining just who the bad guys really are.

And that is likely where 90% of voters will disagree.

Our constitutions were written in large part to prevent politicians from granting “to any citizen, or class of citizens, privileges or immunities, which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens.” (Indiana Constitution Article I Section 23)

This applies to everything political; from fair trade, housing and corporate laws to …ballot access.

Yet everyone with a living brain cell knows that our political scheme is all about special deals for special people.  Politically favored corporations get special rules that ensure protected profits without fear of competition.  Politically favored people get special legal/tax exemptions, or Get Out Of Jail Free cards.cropped-liberty

I contend that a fundamental part of the problem is the recent, self-appointed, tribal, monopolistic and genuinely stupid “Two Party System.”

Since WWII, and mostly since the 1970s, and varying state-to-state …ONLY Democrats and Republicans can be on election-related commissions, and have special election status that grants them more money, more ballot access, and more power in government.

Not only have these private clubs granted themselves special powers, but they have also imposed special hurdles and handicaps on any group or individual who’d challenge them.

Most of us understand that if there was by law only one manufacturer of coffee, or shoes, or cars, that costs and quality would be horrendous.  Most of us could imagine that even with two options, there’d soon be so much collusion and price-fixing to squeeze out any other competition that, in effect, there’d really be only one option with two faces.  Many of us disdain the rapidly clotting mergers of media, pharmaceutical and healthcare empires just the way many thought it right to bust up the old monopolies in telephone and power service.

And all of us benefit from the profusion of choices in food, clothing, electronics and other, relatively lightly-regulated industries.

So what’s up with the “Two Party System?”

Not only is it not ordained by constitutions, the Bible or physics, it’s actually anti-constitutional, by both state and federal constitutions.

You’ve got to be blind and deaf to miss the collusion and corruption of this monstrosity. You’d have to be either part of their crony crime ring, or crazy, to actually like this almost-universally-detested tribal ruling class.

TheEnemyBut you’d be a rare and precious person to actually vote against it.

I’ll just say it. If you vote for any part, any candidate of the Two Party System, you’re at least sustaining the problem.  Even the best (D) and (R) candidates represent the false hope of fixing a tribal system that doesn’t want to be fixed, and is well-organized against anybody who’d try.

More to the point – if you never vote for any alternatives to the status quo power structure, you ARE the problem. 

All the issues of incumbency – entrenchment of power and money, influence of monied connections, corruption – that goes double for political parties.  While politicians eventually die, their power structures too-often live on…and on…and on.

It’d be simple and easy to fix it all.  But you’d have to:

1. Understand the problem, and

2. Change your choices.  YOUR choices.

Come one, my fellows and friends. We’ve all but ended institutional slavery. We’ve extended the vote to every citizen (both living and dead, along with non-citizens, too…but that’s another story).

Nearly everybody says, “I don’t vote for the party, I vote for the candidate,” and up to now, they’ve mostly been lying.

Nearly everybody says, “Yeah, but look at the choices they give us…” as if we have no choice in that.lucy-charlie-brown-football

Well-over 90% of us keep doing the same stupid thing and never see the connection between bad choices and bad outcomes.

What’s really sad is that there are just as many great people as ever.  Many could be Founding Fathers (and founding mothers and/or non-binary whatevers) of a new and better age; learning lessons of the past and creating a better future.   

It’s just that now such people are pushed aside in favor of body-painted tribal savages and criminal clowns.  Too few ever throw their own hat into the ring, and yet love to complain.

So let’s snap out of that and finally use our votes as intended…as weapons of peaceful, orderly revolution, and end the rule of clans and tribes and gangs at last.

 

You wanna talk inequality?

As defined by Ind. Code § 3-5-2-30, there are two extremely unequal classes of citizens in terms of political and electoral rights, powers, privileges and immunities in Indiana:

  1. Those associated with the two private organizations called “Major Political Parties” (Democratic party partisans and Republican party partisans), and,
  2. Everyone else.

This violates Article I, Section 23 of the Indiana Constitution – “The General Assembly shall not grant to any citizen, or class of citizens, privileges or immunities, which, upon the same terms, shall not equally belong to all citizens;” and the equal protections clause of the USA Constitution’s 14th amendment – “No State shall . . . deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

So, today I mailed in my $400 check and complaint to the Terre Haute Division of Indiana’s US Southern District Court to seek remedy of this violation of both Indiana and federal constitutions.

Should I win the suit, the benefits would apply to all citizens of Indiana.  After all, the non-MPP-associated citizens now greatly outnumber those who get the special perks and immunities.  Many Hoosiers feel disenfranchised by a system they know to be corrupt and sold-out and bought-off long ago.  Many have stopped voting, and worse, stopped caring.  Most feel pretty helpless.  An increasing number are talking violence (which is pretty stupid talk if they won’t even change the way they vote!).

This is so unnecessary…

Attached is a public-distribution version of the complaint as sent to the US Southern District Court, Terre Haute Division.

Please start talking about the horrible, criminal, unsustainably bad political corruption we suffer.  Talk about this case, and everything that relates to the sellout of our nation by politicians and their owners who feel no pressure to change anything.

Remember; while our so-called approval ratings of politicians have dropped to an all-time low, incumbent reelection rates have risen to all-time highs.  It’s stupid to say we hate this mess with our mouths; then say we love it with our votes!

BWLadyLibThere is only one poll politicians and their operators care about, after all; and that’s the one on Election Day, when We The People foolishly keep reelecting and reelecting the same !@#$ crony system, same incumbent politicians and parties, over and over without any electoral clue that we’re upset about anything.

And courts are much more swayed by public mood than by law.  We need to change our sheepish, fuzzy-headed, misinformed and yet divided-against-ourselves mood.

Get madat the right people!

Write letters to the editor, break taboos, talk about it with acquaintances, express it in interpretive dance and music…we must get the message out that we have bigger problems than deflated footballs and absurd POTUS candidates…and that we can fix this one.

https://wedeclare.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/public-post-complaint.pdf
https://wedeclare.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/your-government-is-corrupt-very-very-corrupt/
https://wedeclare.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/two-party-system.pdf 

Discouraged voters may fuel the revolution…

By poll numbers and my own observations, it seems that an unprecedented number of people are waking up to the reality that the Ds and Rs are part of a locked-arm collusion against us.  Very few are yet willing to put in such simple terms, or act on that reality, of course.  In fact I’ve never seen/heard so many people say they don’t see any reason to vote anymore.  Many now understand that elections are to at least a degree and in some way, rigged, so they are thinking of staying home next Election Day.

OK.

That would mean the passionate few among us will not only have a greater, disproportionate effect on Election Day, but we also, in discussions with these discouraged voters, need to convince them of only three things; none having anything to do with messy and contentious partisan ideology:

  1. If you’d go and vote for the Two Party System again, then you’re right…you’ve got no fight in you, and you’d just be another drop in the bad guy’s big bucket. They own you.  But at least you don’t want to voluntarily approve them, so just stay home.  Let the rest of us try our might against this mess.
  2. The only votes that count for positive change, the only votes that could shake the world, are those against the status quo and for an alternative…any alternative…to the Two Party System. If you don’t see that, or if you aren’t willing to try, you really aren’t mad enough yet, or don’t yet see the problem.
  3. Voting is the power of protest, of saying NO, and of peaceful revolution. We’ve been wasting that power as if it were just a poker chip up to now; but we really could fire the bums on Election Day.  It’s just a choice.

Number one is the easiest.  But it should be invoked only on those who’re truly hopeless; the real sheep among us[1].  Sadly, they will be many.  Don’t worry; the passionate few always move destiny.  The sheep really don’t matter in social change.  They will follow when there’s a new shepherd.

Number two should be pretty simple, but it’s not easy to convince people that we’ve not even tried in the last century.  We’ve not just allowed the Ds and Rs to write illegal regulations granting them huge advantages over other parties and candidates; we’ve actually asked them to.  And they’ve used that advantage to entrench themselves against us.  So, yes, there is extensive fraud.  I know that and even proved it in 2004.  But if even a fifth of the people change their hearts and minds and choose to vote in favor of a new government, and if the powers that be try to fudge the elections to swing it their way once again, we’d all know about it.  And that would lead to new levels of energy and action.

Number three will be hard.  We’re tribal, cliquish creatures, after all.  We paint our faces at football games, for Pete’s sake.  But we’ve got to convince people that the corruption that they suspect is worse than they think, because it is.

They’ve got to get mad at the Ds and Rs, and vote that way.

[1] However, I must note that I’ve never been very good at determining who are the sheep, and who will become the next shepherds (it’s easy to spot the wolves).  I’ve observed that the educated, comfortably middle class are most likely to be wasted time; while the roughest, least comfortable among us are more likely the gems.  Angry young black men, redneck whites, poor illegal aliens who’ve been working hard to get ahead, may be a whole lot smarter and more aware of their surroundings than you think.  I’ve been favorably surprised many times by society’s untouchables, and I’ve almost always been sorely disappointed by the well-coiffed and well-heeled.