So here is the question for you, if you were an elected representative of your country would you give your vote or influence to bankers and oil companies? If so, and you clearly seem to despise that, why would you do that?
> There is no meaningful difference between a process I
> cannot influence and a process which could
> theoretically be influenced if I could put more
> time and money into it than I actually have.
The problem with that position is 'I', 'I', and 'I'. Is there no one else in your peer group that feels as you do? Maybe just one or two? Is there someone who is willing to be the person in office if you will help them get elected? Someone you can trust to behave in a way that you can respect and one which is free of external influence? Nobody took your ability to change the world away from you, you gave it away! Now take it back, if only in a very small arena. See if you and your friends can get one of you elected to a seat on the city council (or what ever the city's governing body is.) Have you ever tried? If not, why not? Sure being a city council person isn't going to change the world over night but it will show people what you are made of and it will show others what you stand for, if you aren't alone in that (and I don't think you are) they will come to your aide. You can inspire them to do that. All it needs is a willingness to day "I'm tired of the way this is run, I'm going to see if we can change it."
That is what I love about the Tea Party (not their politics but that they decided to do something about what they felt). In just under 10 years they have become a strong voice in national politics. Many of their members were brought into office by people just like you, passionate about what is wrong (in their opinion) with the way things are done.
Tell all your friends you are running for city council. I dare you. Tell them what you stand for and why you should be a city council member instead of the people who are currently elected. Listen to what they want in their city and try to visualize a better world. If not you, who?
I will never be in that position, because I will never have millions to spend running for office. I would have to sell out first, just to get the money to become an elected representative, and then what moral grounds would I have for turning my patrons away?
It doesn't really matter what I or anyone in my peer group thinks; as long as the war on drugs continues, none of us will ever run for office or have any visible role in politics. But it doesn't matter, because the tech industry offers most of us substantially more significant opportunities to change the world around us than anything we could accomplish if we wasted 10x as much time on the political process.
You're right that local politics is different; it is still mostly sort of democratic and amenable to change on the scale individuals and reasonably-sized groups can hope to achieve. But the scale of accomplishment available is correspondingly trivial, and the timescale is just as slow.
I don't see that the tea party accomplished much as a grassroots movement. It looked to me like the established political power structure successfully co-opted the grassroots tea party during the year after it emerged and has been continuing business as usual ever since, using the "tea party" brand to give their existing agenda populist legitimacy.
I am very much visualizing a better world and doing what I can to help create it; I'm just not wasting my time trying to accomplish that through some sclerotic, glacial, anti-transparent political process. I'm just working to create the organizations I want to participate in directly, helping build mutual aid networks, and supporting community values around resource-sharing and skill-sharing. Hackerspaces and co-housing and open source software, these are the kinds of projects where my efforts can actually accomplish something to help make the world a better place.
> That is what I love about the Tea Party (not their politics but that they decided to do something about what they felt). In just under 10 years they have become a strong voice in national politics. Many of their members were brought into office by people just like you, passionate about what is wrong (in their opinion) with the way things are done.
> A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.
> That a tea party themed PR campaign was proposed by Burson Marsteller back in 1992 is somewhat interesting, but certainly not surprising. And it in no way proves an operative connection between anyone.
> The other big find of the study is that the PR group Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), which back then, did work for big tobacco, split off and became Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks, which is now behind the Tea Party. But the fact is, CSE wasn't just funded by big tobacco. Like all these groups, they were funded by a whole host of big, right wing corporations. Here's just a partial list of CSE's corporate clients/supporters:
> The Tea Party idea may have been the brainchild of right wing corporate PR groups. But it was only possible with the help of the corporate television media. And not just Fox. Whoever pulled the trigger on Operation Tea Party has powerful friends. If Occupy Wall Street had had such friends, we'd probably be living in a different country by now.
One argues it was the brainchild of a PR group, the other argues the first group is wrong but powered by Right Wing Media.
Either way, the Tea Party but was astroturfed into existence by rich people.
"I" do not have access to billionaires who back my interests.
The problem is not getting elected but rather how the elections are structured. Pretending otherwise is simply perpetuating the system.
In my opinion, you are conflating cause and effect, but per an earlier comment I made it is incorrect for anyone to believe that their passions are not shared by others. And when those others have more money than time, that is how they "help."
If you run for office in the US, you will form an organizing committee. And you will put in your organizing documents the things you believe should be true about the world that aren't (this would be your platform) and because that is a public document, it will be published by the State or Federal elections commission with all the other platforms out there.
And you will be surprised, perhaps pleasantly so, perhaps unpleasantly, that your "agenda" or platform may line up with what some billionaire thinks is the right thing as well, or maybe they just want to use you to steal votes from another player in the race (this is politics after all) and you will get donations to your committee from weird sounding names like "Higgly Piggly Partners, LLP" which are people who generally want to remain anonymous and want to help you get elected. Some of those people might be billionaires. You probably won't know but it is always good to ask what they hope to achieve by getting you elected.
And there were a number of people who ran as Republicans in California found that the Koch brothers donated money to help their elections. Did it make them tools of the Koch brothers? Maybe some of them but certainly not all of them. And if some billionaire donated to your election campaign would you suddenly do anything they said?
Look no further than the county clerk in Kentucky to see that once you're elected you are really really hard to fire, even if you don't do your job. There is nothing that says you have to do the bidding of your donors, the worst that will happen is they won't support your re-election efforts.
Politics is people. Its people collectively trying to achieve a goal, some for themselves, some for the group. Whether you are in a company or a government or on an island competing for a million dollars, politics is the process by which negotiation, decisions, and change is effected. It is perfectly legit to say that you don't understand how it works, but it is incorrect to say that you cannot participate. And sometimes participation can lead to understanding which can lead to great things. But you won't know unless you try.
I've tried, all right; that's what led to the understanding that it is a waste of my time. Months of work on a marriage-equality activist group built up a lot of public support, and then the whole thing got co-opted by the existing political establishment. All the energy disappeared, the work was wasted, we were nowhere closer to achieving our goals. The wheels continued to turn, but very, very slowly. It was eight more years before marriage equality finally happened. I'm really glad I didn't waste all that time working on activism.
> In my opinion, you are conflating cause and effect, but per an earlier comment I made it is incorrect for anyone to believe that their passions are not shared by others. And when those others have more money than time, that is how they "help."
If its okay with you, I'll go with the people with doctorates in the field over your opinion on the internet.
Out of curiosity, how many academic papers would it take saying you are wrong before you'd believe me?
> If you run for office in the US, you will form an organizing committee. And you will put in your organizing documents the things you believe should be true about the world that aren't (this would be your platform) and because that is a public document, it will be published by the State or Federal elections commission with all the other platforms out there.
You seem to be operating under the delusion that I don't understand how it works. I do. That is the problem.
> And you will be surprised, perhaps pleasantly so, perhaps unpleasantly, that your "agenda" or platform may line up with what some billionaire thinks is the right thing as well, or maybe they just want to use you to steal votes from another player in the race (this is politics after all) and you will get donations to your committee from weird sounding names like "Higgly Piggly Partners, LLP" which are people who generally want to remain anonymous and want to help you get elected. Some of those people might be billionaires. You probably won't know but it is always good to ask what they hope to achieve by getting you elected.
No, I won't be surprised.
There was a good guy I know that tried this sort of thing, no billionaire would back him. In the end, people like me and his millionaire brother did. It amounted to nothing because enough "other people" funneled money into the election to "anonymously" send out mailers that implied his brother was a "Chinese citizen" and his campaign was funded by money from China.
Similarly, a councilman with platform similar to what I'd like failed to get elected.
How you ask?
Well, first they slanted the system to prevent the guy from getting elected. There was a court case that found the voting method violated the population's civil rights. They then found a guy with the same name and a different middle initial to split the vote. He's been used as a proxy in such votes before. He'd have won except for the 4% of people who voted for the wrong guy. [ Remember, the proxy doesn't actually do anything other than get his name on the ballot. So his contributions are basically payment for services rendered. ]
I could go on about all the other things money has bought that I've seen first hand if you like. Shall I?
> Politics is people. Its people collectively trying to achieve a goal, some for themselves, some for the group. Whether you are in a company or a government or on an island competing for a million dollars, politics is the process by which negotiation, decisions, and change is effected. It is perfectly legit to say that you don't understand how it works, but it is incorrect to say that you cannot participate. And sometimes participation can lead to understanding which can lead to great things. But you won't know unless you try.
No, Politics is money and the ability to buy people to do your dirty work for you.
No one is going to give me $3+ million to lie to people to win a single congressional seat. However, they are perfectly happy to do that for people who hold the sort of views. How much do you think the opposition raised? Less than a million.
But hey, money doesn't matter. The ability to hand a man a large chunk of money to run as a candidate whose sole job is to put his name on the ballot to confuse people [he didn't actually use any of his campaign funds to campaign, fyi].
But hey, prove me wrong. Go right ahead. Go find some nice district where there are some large incumbent players and run for city council against their interests. See how far that gets you. [ Hint: They'll hire a guy with a single character difference in the name, fund half a dozen candidates with larger treasuries than you. ]
Hell, I'll even tell you what happened to the last guy so you know what to expect.
I am really glad you invested some time and effort into making things better, and I'm sorry it didn't work out the way you wanted it too. But it sounds a bit like you're sort of "one and done" here on trying things, is that the case?
It isn't easy, and it takes a while to learn all the tricks that you have to be aware of, but anything worth doing is like that right? I hope you won't give up trying, learned helplessness is a terrible terrible place to be.
> But it sounds a bit like you're sort of "one and done" here on trying things, is that the case?
I listed two instances and offered to go on.
I don't see a value in posting my life story on HN given I prefer to be mostly just left alone.
> It isn't easy, and it takes a while to learn all the tricks that you have to be aware of, but anything worth doing is like that right?
The problem isn't "tricks", the problem is anyone who actually stands up to anyone worth standing up to doesn't have enough money.
The only real route to "success" I have is to make $5-10 million and being willing to spend half on being elected. No one is willing to spend that money on the congressional level.
That is what I love about the Tea Party (not their politics but that they decided to do something about what they felt). In just under 10 years they have become a strong voice in national politics. Many of their members were brought into office by people just like you, passionate about what is wrong (in their opinion) with the way things are done.
Tell all your friends you are running for city council. I dare you. Tell them what you stand for and why you should be a city council member instead of the people who are currently elected. Listen to what they want in their city and try to visualize a better world. If not you, who?