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> How on earth would voting actually solve something like this? By removing from power the corrupt officials who colluded with JPM and other large corporations
by zapita 7y ago
> How on earth would voting actually solve something like this?
By removing from power the corrupt officials who colluded with JPM and other large corporations to steal stimulus money from small businesses?
JPM benefited from corruption of the political process. Corruption is enabled by minority rule. Minority rule is enabled by citizen apathy, like when people start saying that “voting isn’t acting!”.
By voting en masse, we as citizens get to 1) hold corrupt officials accountable, and 2) strengthen the democratic process by making it more representative, and therefore less vulnerable to corruption in the future.
As a side note: in my experience, people who say things like “voting is not acting, you need to do more!” are not reliable voters, and not reliable activists either. On the other hand, the most proactive voters tend to already know what else they can do. Electoral activism leads to broader activism.
TLDR: start by taking voting seriously.
- rblatz 7y agoIf you don’t like chocolate ice cream, and you are given the choice between two different flavors of chocolate ice cream, picking the other chocolate flavor isn’t a solution.
- 317070 7y ago> As a side note: in my experience, people who say things like “voting is not acting, you need to do more!” are not reliable voters, and not reliable activists either. Well, sorry if I take the above personally, but here is another datapoint. I almost literally said the above in the post you quoted. I have voted in every election I legally could do so. I have run as a candidate in a number of elections. I have even organised groups to running for elections. I did broader activism and have organised a number of activist lawsuits. After a run in with the police I had to tune things down a bit for my family. > Electoral activism leads to broader activism. It does both, really. It is a rung on the ladder, a lot of activists start there. But it can also have the effect of soaking up a lot energy from existing activists, with very little real consequences. There is a balance. Political activism, civil activism and judicial activism also have a space and can have a better trade-off between energy invested and concrete consequences.
- mumblemumble 7y ago> By removing from power the corrupt officials who colluded with JPM and other large corporations to steal stimulus money from small businesses? Bluntly, I think that this is a polyannaish idea. The best pop culture representation of how US politics works is the Simpsons one where Kang and Kodos ran for President. The choice presented to the American public is rarely a choice between a corrupt politician and a non-corrupt one. It's much more typically typically down to deciding which corrupt, power-hungry individual spews the platitudes, half-truths and lies that you think sound the nicest. Yes, we should still vote. But voting is not a panacea. The real province of democracy is grassroots organizing. It's probably never enough, but the US Constitution and 200 years of supreme court decisions around it have (tacitly, if not explicitly) made it so that that's the only piece of real political leverage available to those of us who don't have enough money to purchase actual political influence.
- zimpenfish 7y ago> is rarely a choice between a corrupt politician and a non-corrupt one 2008? 2012? Can't say that I've heard (m)any corruption allegations against Obama. 2016? I mean, I don't think a single charge of corruption or malfeasance ever turned out to be true for Hillary Clinton, has it? Unless you mean "corrupt" in the sense of "non-pure" and, yeah, 99.9$ people who have enough money to be politicians are distinctly "non-pure". Now if you want to get the money out of politics, it'll need consistent Democrat gains at every level down to local council for the next 20 years to move SCOTUS left and undo all the dark money idiocies of the Roberts' court.