WYSK: There funded by dark money PACS, but some good reporting has brought out these names: David Koch, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Mark Cuban, Harlan Crow, and Michael Bloomberg. Some of there members are most famous for stopping big bills. Joe Leiberman, for example, single handedly stopped the single payer portion of the ACA. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsen Simena kept the John Lewis voting rights act from passing, and famously kept the senate from repealing the filibuster.

    • Square Singer
      3•1 year ago

      Sadly it is just as easy to just squash the protest and be done with it. France has major problems with riots since a while. Mostly because of racism, police violence and inescapable poverty.

      So who does Macron blame for the riots? TikTok and parents who didn’t teach their children how to behave correctly.

      What does he do? Kart in more police with heavier anti-riot gear.

      Same with Russia, Turkey or Poland. People don’t like the government? No problem, just grad random people from the protests and send them to a gulag. The rest of the protesters will get scared and fall in line. Done.

      Sure, at some point a tipping point might come. Then you get a revolution or a civil war, and then the dice are in the air. Could be you get a new, super democratic government that tries to fix the system. Or you could get a military dictatorship. You never know.

      Sorry, I am pretty disilusioned by all this. Representative democracy just makes it too easy for populism to blind the electorate (“Don’t look at me, while I shovel lots of government money into my pockets, look at the evil immigrant over there!”), and there is far too much temptation for corrupt politicians to extend their power.

      And there are no real checks and balances in any system I have seen so far.

      E.g. the USA: Yeah, the house, the senate, the president, the surpreme court and all, they should separate the power and they should check and balance eachother. Problem is, the writers of the constitution totally forgot that parties could be a thing. And the checks and balances just plainly don’t work if all these offices are dominated by the same party.

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        Yeah, my last response was way too half-baked, I didn’t really put as much thought into it as I thought I had, and I didn’t like how close I was getting to sounding like I wanted violence (even though I don’t). So I deleted it, to avoid spreading these worrisome comments (to myself, anyway) any more than I already did. I’m not sure exactly how effective “deleting” really is on a federated network like this, which I’m very new to, and I also don’t want to annoy people by deleting comments after they reply to them. So I’m sorry for being annoying, if I have been, and hopefully I’ll have some better takes once I get more used to being on Lemmy.

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        That was an interesting video, and I either didn’t realize or it just didn’t “click” in my head that it was possible for FPTP to lead to wins with even less than 50% of the vote. Now that I think about it, I looked up the US situation on Wikipedia, and yes, in most states FPTP is used but it’s possible to win with a “plurality” (largest number of votes in the state or district, but not necessarily 50% or more)! The point about there being no advantage to getting more than 50% (of votes, not seats) still stands, and it still can be advantageous up till that point, but confusing plurality for “majority” (strictly 50% or more) still bit me. I’ll add a note to my original comment to reflect that. Thanks for the good link!

        • Square Singer
          1•1 year ago

          I really like TLDR news. They are good!

          Yeah, while you are at at, look up Gerrymandering. That’s drawing electoral districts in a way so that your own party gets ~55% in most districts, with the opposition voters bunched up in few districts, so that they ideally get >90% of the votes in these districts. In FTTP systems, every vote above 50% is lost, so that way you can make the opposition lose lots of seats.

          And that’s only one way to hack the system, when you are in power. Another option that is widely used is vote suppression. If e.g. the opposition voters tend to be poor, and tend to not have any photo ID (as is the case in many areas in the USA), then you can just introduce a law that makes it mandatory to have photo ID, so that many opposition voters cannot vote.

          Or you can make a certain level of English knowledge mandatory, to prohibit some minority groups from voting.

          And if you have a look at the US presidential election, this becomes more striking. The last time a republican actually won the popular vote was in 2004, when George W. Bush was re-elected. But even when he was elected for the first time, in 2000, he did lose the popular vote.

          The last time a republican came into the office winning the popular vote was in 1988, when George H. W. Bush came into office.

          If the US had a popular vote system, the democrats would have won 7 of the last 8 elections, instead of 4 out of 8.