The Last Days of American Democracy?

That's 9 days old. Is America over yet?

America: the world's first state to be in perpetual political and cultural decline since its inception

http://www.pressherald.com/politics/Supreme_Court_voids_overall_limits_on_campaign_contributions.html

this is crazy and seems so wrong to me

sorta like installing W as prez

I am always surprised at American trust of "the free market" and "business" when they seem to have only their own interests at heart. Like Exxon cares abotu your grandma?

American Conservative trust, you mean

what is conservative about business anyway? government can be conservative too! I don,t trust big business anymore than I know they want my money so they may help me a bit to get some of it. You know the Cock brothers are going to be on a spending spree now in congress

i believe it is the "koch" brothers iirc

gotta get that right cuz they $_$ so don't get them >,< as of now they're happy cuz soon it's 4/20 (weed smoking day).

We need to have a first day of American Democracy imo. Hasn't happened yet.

money = free speech right?

I guess democracy is just a silly populist illusion that works as an opiate for the masses.

even the noble Greeks did not allow a vote to their slaves

Why are people so afraid of the rich? its like tha time on Gilligans Island when they thought Thurston Howell lost all his money and they were afraid to tell him because they knew he'd be sad. Why weren't they just like "Hey fuckface ! You lost all yoru fyucking money you rich fuck! Not that it matter cause we're all on this fuckfing island anyway so fuck yourself!!"

The Electoral Integrity Project, run by Professor Pippa Norris and colleagues from Harvard and the University of Sydney in Australia, surveys thousands of election experts to assess the quality of hundreds of elections around the world. They are asked to rate how well district boundaries are drawn, whether voter registration procedures are adequate, and the effectiveness of campaign finance regulation, among other things.

Based on the average evaluations of the elections in 2012 and 2014, the United States’ electoral integrity was ranked 52nd among the 153 countries in the survey — behind all the rich Western democracies and also countries like Costa Rica and Uruguay, the Baltic states, and Cape Verde and Benin in Africa.

A paper by Professor Norris on these results, titled “Why American Elections Are Flawed,” describes the major problems with American electoral institutions, perhaps the most critical of which is partisan control over electoral institutions, which has subjected the integrity of elections to the distortions of a partisan lens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/business/economy/trump-election-democracy.html?_r=0

thought this was a new thread and clicked to fp its starter

gerrymandering, voter suppression and the electoral college have all been around for 200+ years now so my question is what's new that's bad

Shouldn't the bad be excised, no matter new or old?

-- capital about to be under less restraint than at any time since the 19c

-- methods of omnipresent surveillance and extralegal assassination unprecedented in history

-- black carceral state more populous than the slave south

-- black franchise being rapidly eroded after a brief flare of a few decades when it wasn't

-- no contiguous native land to conquer, depopulate, and repopulate instead of making things tolerable for the poor; no significant institutionalized labor power either

-- perpetual war on a "global battlefield"

-- imminent environmental collapse

-- a fascist game show host is president

-- what.cd shutdown

and no paper trail

what's new that's bad

It's a matter of degree, not of kind. Progress was made against gerrymandering and voter suppression over a period of time, by efforts such as the Good Government movement in the late nineteenth and early 20th century, a variety of Supreme Court decisions establishing "one man, one vote" as a legal principle, and by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That progress in now in regression and there is more gerrymandering and voter suppression than there was in, for example, 1976. It is the reversal of that progress that is new that's bad.

IDK, Trump's upset victory against a tenured representative of the Beltway establishment who outspent him 5-to-1 seems like an affirmation of a well-functioning democracy, not a symptom of its decline. Certainly his supporters read it this way.

And if you're looking to reform a low-integrity electoral body with extremely flawed outcomes, you can start with the DNC. Or do you not want that fight?

victory with 3m fewer votes is indeed an upset

an authoritarian populist leading a radical-capitalist party to victory by promising violent national regeneration to a coalition of the market-ravaged white lower middle class, affluent racists, and (eventually) the owners of the economy's commanding heights is an affirmation of a well-functioning democracy in exactly the same way a tingle in the arm followed by numbness and facefirst collapse into your food is an affirmation of a well-functioning heart

no argument about the dnc

IDK

- it me

otm