Direct Democracy Now!

Never satisfied with our so-called democracy I'm a tireless advocate of direct democracy, it's the only true democracy and no person should settle for anything less. We all agree with the base premise of democracy, that we all have equal power over our governments with our votes. When we vote for another person to "represent" us in our nations' capitol, we are relinquishing our democratic power to another who simply promises to do good and commit no crime. Unlike laws governing false advertising for commercial products, these individuals make promises they know they never have to keep. But it's a leap in logic to accept that anyone would represent everyone, or everyone of their constituents. In our current system our "representatives" actually represent the more powerful interests and corporate donors with very rare exceptions. The banks, corporations, and other wealthy individuals and organizations have turned the tables on representative democracy, they simply use it as a tool for subverting democracy.

So here we are the day after the 2010 midterm elections, a multi billion dollar game of musical chairs. There's scarcely a single candidate, proposition, initiative, or ballot measure, that was not decided by corporate money. Many politicians who actually did fight for their constituents went down this round and the corporate money is what took them out. And those who won in spite of the corporate money against them were forced to raise their own contributions at an exhausting rate to try and keep up with the bottomless well of money going to mostly republicans and now tea-baggers. This was arguably the most expensive election in world history with a number of wealthy individuals trying to buy their own seats of power with their private wealth, and those people still received corporate money in the millions of dollars.

Politics is always about money, when politicians are not raising funds to keep themselves in power they're the ones who hold the nations purse strings. They really don't have power at all without our tax dollars, all they can do is direct money here and there, fund and defund. They don't do a very good job of directing funds and we the people (whose money they're spending) suffer as a result. When so many things like healthcare and education languish due to lack of funds, how can we justify spending billions upon billions of dollars to decide who gets to go to Washington? There is nothing in the basic premise of democracy that suggests that politicians are required for democracy to function, and in modern times it makes even less sense. The concept of politicians is based in the class system of ancient Rome, it made sense when aristocracy wasn't such a bad word. The idea that the wealthy land owners naturally had more rights to power is entrenched in our own democracy with the wealthy house of senators and it's subordinate house of common representatives.

Propositions, initiatives, and ballot measures are a form of direct democracy though there are some design flaws in their implementation. But it is possible to design a true democratic system that allowed for every political issue to be decided by a majority of people instead of "representatives" or "politicians." Those who debate this usually cite the time, energy, and intelligence required to process this information, often saying that the greater population is just too dumb to deal with the heavy responsibility. Some fear that we the people in an uninformed moment might make a collective wrong turn, as if politicians are somehow safe drivers of our government and never steer us wrong. If we can train teenagers to drive on our freeways despite their IQ, we can train those same young people to read a ballot and check a box. Most ballot measures are no more confusing than reading a menu at a Chinese restaurant, which for some may seem overwhelming I guess.

We now live in an age where our technology has made massive treasure troves of information available at the touch of a button. Information is not always true and accurate but our currently budding generations are natural born researchers who already have trusted news sources and know how to cross reference and do basic fact checking. Todays teens are on track to be the most informed twenty-somethings our planet has ever known, and they're ready to rewrite the old programs and upgrade the old hardware. We've been running democracy 1.0 for way too long and the bug issues have slowed our processors to a snails' pace. We want democracy 2.0 asap, if we don't fix these bugs the entire planetary ecosystem will collapse and we will have a hard time explaining to our grandchildren why. The sad truth is that there are democracy scammers out there and they have already ruined everything, they want democracy to fail just like the spammers want your computer to fail, or secretly be enslaved to a master computer.

I look forward to the day when I vote and see no names on the ballot. I want the tough choices to be mine, not a politicians. If I don't feel compelled to vote on an issue I simply won't vote for that issue and let others decide it. But it's futile to vote for a person who may or may not make decisions I agree with, do things I think should be done, and not do the things I want to stop, like war. I also long for an end to the Federal government and nationalism as we know it, I want local autonomy in every nook and cranny of the planet. Democracy is destined to destroy any semblance of empire if it's allowed to do it's thing. But in our current electoral system democracy is stalled, stymied, and sabotaged by the corporate clowns who own it. They have the tables totally slanted in their direction and still they are not satisfied, they are working to make democracy weaker every day, we must be ready for a real fight if we are to ever have true democracy on Earth. Patrick Henry said "Give me liberty or give me death." I say Give me direct democracy or kill me quickly.