Octopus Overlords

Rip wrote:But there was a vote for those candidates to make them the choice for the Republicans and Democrats. Not to mention you are free to vote for a Green candidate or a Libertarian one or any number of other political parties that are in no way prevented by law from campaigning and being elected.

LawBeefaroni wrote:

Rip wrote: But there was a vote for those candidates to make them the choice for the Republicans and Democrats. Not to mention you are free to vote for a Green candidate or a Libertarian one or any number of other political parties that are in no way prevented by law from campaigning and being elected. The problem is that people misuse or fail to use the power of their vote. That isn't the fault of the system it is the problem of democracy and the people of a democracy itself.

No, it's a fundamental feature of the 2-party system.

People are loathe to risk "throwing away" their vote on a 3rd party, no matter how great, if it means the party they like the least will have a short-term advantage over the one they dislike less.

Rip wrote: Even if no one could contribute but $1 to a political campaign people would still make bad choices and/or fail to participate in the process. The biggest weakness of a government that gives all the power to the people is the people themselves. People have made bad choices and their government is reflective of that.

They would make their own bad choices, not someone else's.

LawBeefaroni wrote:People are loathe to risk "throwing away" their vote on a 3rd party, no matter how great, if it means the party they like the least will have a short-term advantage over the one they dislike less.

Each state has its own ballot access laws to determine who may appear on ballots and who may not. According to Article I, Section 4, of the United States Constitution, the authority to regulate the time, place, and manner of federal elections is up to each State, unless Congress legislates otherwise.

The primary argument put forward by States for restricting ballot access has been the presumption that setting ballot access criteria too low would result in numerous candidates on the ballot, splitting the votes of similar minded voters

Rip wrote:
It is only a throw away when a bunch of other people don't vote that way. If we have enough people that want someone other than those two we shall have it.

You can bet if those two parties piss people off enough THEY WILL vote for someone else. There just hasn't been anyone people agree with and like enough to change the status quo. That can always change. Ron Paul came pretty damn close to doing it. Ben Carson is another outsider that has managed to sway a lot of people. Rand Paul has quite a following across the party lines. I think the right person with a socially liberal and fiscally conservative agenda could manage it but it would take a lot of people realizing that their stock party favorite is just talking the talk and will once elected walk the same walk they all have.

LordMortis wrote: Wiki implies this barrier is by design but they don't link to a source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballot_access

The primary argument put forward by States for restricting ballot access has been the presumption that setting ballot access criteria too low would result in numerous candidates on the ballot, splitting the votes of similar minded voters

LawBeefaroni wrote:Instead what we see is Party A blaming Party B and Party B blaming Party A. We see a new party in the White House every 4 or 8 years, and we see entrenched incumbents and tight races making people feel like there is some kind of choice.

We have both kind of music, Country and Western.
We have a choice of beverages, would you like Diet Coke or Regular Coke?

malchior wrote:Based on a quick read they are building on someone's else methodology for ranking political influence and how different models of democracy map into them. Their innovation was approximating the influence of different interest groups into that methodology to track a wide range of political interests (almost 1800 different issues). One of the results was that they have good data (via extensive polling) on the American public's policy preferences and they believe that they conclusively found that it is little to no impact on policy formation.

GreenGoo wrote:
More/less votes isn't going to change whether a system is more or less representative of the population as a whole.

Rip wrote:
But there was a vote for those candidates to make them the choice for the Republicans and Democrats. Not to mention you are free to vote for a Green candidate or a Libertarian one or any number of other political parties that are in no way prevented by law from campaigning and being elected.

Zarathud wrote:I don't care as much about the number of parties as their leverage. Money is the ultimate leverage against an individual's vote.

That's why Citizen's United and McCutcheon will be disastrous -- the Supreme Court added more power to national parties who can convince rich donors to contribute the maximum to EVERY candidate and convince corporations to weigh in on elections. The discontent voters in your state can't organize against the wealthy donors in every other state or corporations. A few wealthy individuals and corporations can now intervene nationally to protect their interests. It's going to be a game changer.

Rip wrote:

Zarathud wrote:I don't care as much about the number of parties as their leverage. Money is the ultimate leverage against an individual's vote.

That's why Citizen's United and McCutcheon will be disastrous -- the Supreme Court added more power to national parties who can convince rich donors to contribute the maximum to EVERY candidate and convince corporations to weigh in on elections. The discontent voters in your state can't organize against the wealthy donors in every other state or corporations. A few wealthy individuals and corporations can now intervene nationally to protect their interests. It's going to be a game changer.

If it wasn't then it would be wealthy organizations, wealthy unions, etc. The only alternative is to make it so only individuals can contribute, only directly, and only a small amount. Or just make contributions themselves illegal and give every candidate identical budgets.

Which one do you propose?

Zarathud wrote:I hear Condi Rice takes a $150,000 speaking fee. Ron Paul demanded a $50,000 speaking fee to speak to CPAC in 2013. All of the politicians are taking speaking fees. And why you do hate capitalism and the thought of being paid for your time after becoming popular? [

Before Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1992, he earned a salary of $38,167 as Governor of Arkansas. Actually, his base salary was $35,000, the additional $3,167 came from a handful of speaking engagements he performed the prior year around Arkansas. His wife Hillary was the real breadwinner of family at the time, bringing home a salary of $188,547 as an attorney at the prestigious Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. In fact, Bill Clinton really only worked in the private sector for a grand total of two years his entire life prior to being elected President! As we all know now, Bill Clinton eventually went on to serve two terms as one of the most popular American Presidents in history. He also went on to become one of the most highly sought after and expensive public speakers of all time. Just how much money has Bill Clinton has made off speaking fees since 2001? An astonishing $106 million

“Today, some examples of those spinning the other way, taking media jobs after working for Obama. Ronan Farrow, who held several jobs in Obama’s State Department, gets an MSNBC show as does Joy-Ann Reid, who toiled in the press office during Obama’s 2008 campaign.

“The more common news media to Obama revolving door is just one more sign of the far from adversarial relationship between the two, where the Obama administration treats news outlets as free recruitment services and journalists look to the administration for cozy jobs where they can push their liberal views without the pretense of journalistic strictures.”

Candidates who spend their own money are called out on it on the campaign trail, and (at least in Illinois) often prove to be poor candidates. Watch for Dubin to beat perennial self-funded Obwereis soundly -- Oberweis is already trying to equate his $1.3 million gross income with Durbin's $280,000 because they're both millionaires.

Rip wrote:Either money is the ultimate leverage over individual votes or it isn't. Make up your mind.

Rip wrote:

Zarathud wrote:I hear Condi Rice takes a $150,000 speaking fee. Ron Paul demanded a $50,000 speaking fee to speak to CPAC in 2013. All of the politicians are taking speaking fees. And why you do hate capitalism and the thought of being paid for your time after becoming popular? [

I am more concerned with politicians being bought off by being paid after being elected. Clinton gets over $500K to speak. Not to mention cushy jobs that elected officials and longtime bureaucrats get cushy jobs or even worse media jobs to continue politicking under the guise of news.

Before Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1992, he earned a salary of $38,167 as Governor of Arkansas. Actually, his base salary was $35,000, the additional $3,167 came from a handful of speaking engagements he performed the prior year around Arkansas. His wife Hillary was the real breadwinner of family at the time, bringing home a salary of $188,547 as an attorney at the prestigious Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. In fact, Bill Clinton really only worked in the private sector for a grand total of two years his entire life prior to being elected President! As we all know now, Bill Clinton eventually went on to serve two terms as one of the most popular American Presidents in history. He also went on to become one of the most highly sought after and expensive public speakers of all time. Just how much money has Bill Clinton has made off speaking fees since 2001? An astonishing $106 million

There’s no question that the Republican Party has become a far-right party, significantly controlled by the Koch brothers and a few others. But the Democratic party has moved, you know. It used to be a center-left party — Truman, Roosevelt — it was the party of the American working class. I don’t think there are many people who think that is the case now. It is far better [than the Republican Party], and there are some great people in the Democratic Party who spend an enormous amount of time and energy fighting for working people, and I work with those guys. But I don’t think anybody would say, as a whole, that the Democratic Party is the party of the American working class.

So all of this speaks to the extraordinary influence of money in Congress. You know, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t think that there is anything that Wall Street does not want that will get passed here. It’s just not going to happen. Or corporate America, anything it doesn’t want, it’s not going to happen. In other words, there is not the political strength to take on corporate America or Wall Street. That’s just the simple fact.

So if you look at the grotesque distribution of wealth in America, in which the top 1 percent today own 37 percent of the wealth, and the bottom 60 percent own 1.7 percent of the wealth; where one family—the Walton family, of Wal-Mart—own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent; where the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, that smacks to me like oligarchy.

And what it is, is the worst level of wealth inequality that exists among major countries, and worse than any time since 1929, before the Great Depression. That’s wealth. And then if you look at income since the Wall Street crash [of 2008], 95 percent of all new income generated in America goes to the top 1 percent. That smacks to me like oligarchy.

And then, equally important, because of the Supreme Court decisions of Citizens United, et cetera, you now have a situation where the billionaire class can spend as much money as they want on elections. So it’s not only economic, it is now political. These guys can buy elections.

And if the Koch brothers get their way, we will do away with all campaign finance reform. That is now the official position of the leadership of the Republican Party. Which will mean that the Koch brothers won’t have to waste their time doing independent expenditures; they can bring their team of candidates into a room and say, “Okay, you want to run for U.S. Senate in Kansas? Here’s your check for $100 million.” Here’s your check for $100 million, because it doesn’t mean anything to the Koch brothers, their wealth increased by $12 billion last year. So Kansas is a nice state. “Here’s a hundred million. And here is your platform. And here is your media consultant and there is your think tank to write your speeches. We’ll watch you closely, but here’s your check for $100 million and have a nice day.” That’s called buying elections.

we need a political revolution in this country and that’s not just rhetoric. What I mean by that is that we need—and a president certainly can play a very, very important role in this—we need a massive change in citizen participation and in political consciousness. There was a poll that just came out I think yesterday. Gallup tells us that… I believe it is 63 percent of the American people cannot name which parties control the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. So you have consciousness so low, a significant majority of the American people who are very concerned about what’s going on for themselves and their kids, they don’t know who controls the House and the Senate. They can’t name which party controls both bodies. You have what the political scientists tell us is a situation where in this coming election, 60 percent of the American people will not bother to vote. That means 70 -to-80 percent of low-income workers and young people will not vote. So before you can talk about changing America, you have to change the political consciousness and the way that people relate to the political process.

Now, there is a group that relates very strongly to the political process, [and] that is the billionaire class that is now prepared to spend many hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates to represent their interests.

at a time when the middle class is collapsing; when we have more people living in poverty than ever before and we have huge income and wealth inequality; when we are the only major nation on earth that does not have a national healthcare system; when we have millions of young people leaving college deeply in debt; when we have the planetary crisis of climate change; when we, because of Citizens United, have a billionaire class now controlling our political process, we need candidates who are prepared to stand up without apology representing the working families of America and are prepared to take on the billionaire class which controls so much of America. I think that’s absolutely imperative that that takes place.

What I have said is that I am giving thought to running for president. I haven’t made that decision. It’s a very, very difficult decision.

RunningMn9 wrote:Oligarchs are people too, my friend.

Kraken wrote:A wide-ranging conversation with Bernie Sanders. Worth reading in its entirety, but I'll pull the juiciest bits for those who don't have time:

There’s no question that the Republican Party has become a far-right party, significantly controlled by the Koch brothers and a few others. But the Democratic party has moved, you know. It used to be a center-left party — Truman, Roosevelt — it was the party of the American working class. I don’t think there are many people who think that is the case now. It is far better [than the Republican Party], and there are some great people in the Democratic Party who spend an enormous amount of time and energy fighting for working people, and I work with those guys. But I don’t think anybody would say, as a whole, that the Democratic Party is the party of the American working class.

So all of this speaks to the extraordinary influence of money in Congress. You know, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I don’t think that there is anything that Wall Street does not want that will get passed here. It’s just not going to happen. Or corporate America, anything it doesn’t want, it’s not going to happen. In other words, there is not the political strength to take on corporate America or Wall Street. That’s just the simple fact.

So if you look at the grotesque distribution of wealth in America, in which the top 1 percent today own 37 percent of the wealth, and the bottom 60 percent own 1.7 percent of the wealth; where one family—the Walton family, of Wal-Mart—own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent; where the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, that smacks to me like oligarchy.

And what it is, is the worst level of wealth inequality that exists among major countries, and worse than any time since 1929, before the Great Depression. That’s wealth. And then if you look at income since the Wall Street crash [of 2008], 95 percent of all new income generated in America goes to the top 1 percent. That smacks to me like oligarchy.

And then, equally important, because of the Supreme Court decisions of Citizens United, et cetera, you now have a situation where the billionaire class can spend as much money as they want on elections. So it’s not only economic, it is now political. These guys can buy elections.

And if the Koch brothers get their way, we will do away with all campaign finance reform. That is now the official position of the leadership of the Republican Party. Which will mean that the Koch brothers won’t have to waste their time doing independent expenditures; they can bring their team of candidates into a room and say, “Okay, you want to run for U.S. Senate in Kansas? Here’s your check for $100 million.” Here’s your check for $100 million, because it doesn’t mean anything to the Koch brothers, their wealth increased by $12 billion last year. So Kansas is a nice state. “Here’s a hundred million. And here is your platform. And here is your media consultant and there is your think tank to write your speeches. We’ll watch you closely, but here’s your check for $100 million and have a nice day.” That’s called buying elections.

we need a political revolution in this country and that’s not just rhetoric. What I mean by that is that we need—and a president certainly can play a very, very important role in this—we need a massive change in citizen participation and in political consciousness. There was a poll that just came out I think yesterday. Gallup tells us that… I believe it is 63 percent of the American people cannot name which parties control the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. So you have consciousness so low, a significant majority of the American people who are very concerned about what’s going on for themselves and their kids, they don’t know who controls the House and the Senate. They can’t name which party controls both bodies. You have what the political scientists tell us is a situation where in this coming election, 60 percent of the American people will not bother to vote. That means 70 -to-80 percent of low-income workers and young people will not vote. So before you can talk about changing America, you have to change the political consciousness and the way that people relate to the political process.

Now, there is a group that relates very strongly to the political process, [and] that is the billionaire class that is now prepared to spend many hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates to represent their interests.

at a time when the middle class is collapsing; when we have more people living in poverty than ever before and we have huge income and wealth inequality; when we are the only major nation on earth that does not have a national healthcare system; when we have millions of young people leaving college deeply in debt; when we have the planetary crisis of climate change; when we, because of Citizens United, have a billionaire class now controlling our political process, we need candidates who are prepared to stand up without apology representing the working families of America and are prepared to take on the billionaire class which controls so much of America. I think that’s absolutely imperative that that takes place.

What I have said is that I am giving thought to running for president. I haven’t made that decision. It’s a very, very difficult decision.

Kraken wrote: You can see that we went off the rails in the Reagan administration, recovered slightly under Clinton, and then lost it completely under Bush (although control of Congress is more relevant than the white house).

Depressing any way you slice it.

GreenGoo wrote:I think the key part, the clever part, is that it has the bottom coughing up its wealth willingly to the top.

GreenGoo wrote:I think the key part, the clever part, is that it has the bottom coughing up its wealth willingly to the top.

It's probably easier in a corrupt country to simply take what you want if you are in a position of power, but then you'll often end up with your head on a pike. This way...well. Are you a socialist? No? Then get to consuming.

Kraken wrote:

GreenGoo wrote:I think the key part, the clever part, is that it has the bottom coughing up its wealth willingly to the top.

True, but this graph is about income, not wealth. The top doesn't need the bottom anymore.

Hilton left his seat five minutes after takeoff, even though the "fasten seat belt" sign was still on, authorities said. Another flight attendant said Hilton rose from his seat at least 20 times during the 10½-hour flight, court documents said.

Read the federal complaint (Warning: profane language)

When Hilton became enraged because a flight attendant was following him, he shouted several times that "I am going to f------ kill you!" and used other vulgarities, court papers said.

Passengers became frightened and disturbed, authorities said.

Hilton yelled several times, saying "I will f------ own anyone on this flight; they are f------ peasants."

hepcat wrote:The little shit is having his lawyer tell everyone that it's the fault of ambien.

Wealthy tech founders and the automation of middle-class jobs are often blamed for increasing concentrations of wealth in fewer hands. But, a 26-year-old MIT graduate student, Matthew Rognlie, is making waves for an alternative theory of inequality: the problem is housing

Defiant wrote:

Wealthy tech founders and the automation of middle-class jobs are often blamed for increasing concentrations of wealth in fewer hands. But, a 26-year-old MIT graduate student, Matthew Rognlie, is making waves for an alternative theory of inequality: the problem is housing

https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/ ... 2a3b423e0c

Last month, the Bank of England issued a report that must have made Fed chairman Ben Bernanke squirm.

It said that the Bank of England’s policies of quantitative easing – similar to the Fed’s – had benefited mainly the wealthy.

Specifically, it said that its QE program had boosted the value of stocks and bonds by 26 percent, or about $970 billion. It said that about 40 percent of those gains went to the richest 5 percent of British households.

Economist Anthony Randazzo of the Reason Foundation wrote that QE “is fundamentally a regressive redistribution program that has been boosting wealth for those already engaged in the financial sector or those who already own homes, but passing little along to the rest of the economy. It is a primary driver of income inequality.”

The reason is simple. QE drives up the prices of assets, especially financial assets. And most of the financial assets in America are owed by the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans.

According to Fed data, the top 5 percent own 60 percent of the nation’s individually held financial assets. They own 82 percent of the individually held stocks and more than 90 percent of the individually held bonds.

By helping to reinflate the stock market in 2009 and 2010, the Fed created a two-speed recovery. The wealthy quickly recovered much of their wealth as stocks doubled in value. But the rest of the country, which depends on houses and jobs for their wealth, remained stuck in recession.

Zarathud wrote:So would you agree that the federal government should have used fiscal policy instead of monetary policy? Paul Krugman has long argued the limits of monetary policy and that government spending on infrastructure projects was the preferable policy option, despite the opposition of the Republican party to "increasing the deficit."