shanen's Journal: It's still about the economy, stupid, but...

Yet another c&p for Slashdot, though this one should be sufficiently self-contained to avoid the complaints about insufficient context... Rather against my better judgment, but I'll even click the "Publicize" option, though with a twisted preface and even twistier epilogue:

Preface:
If you love freedom, please vote!
If you don't believe in elections, then why should you bother with voting?

We now return you to your regularly scheduled "It's still about the economy stupid, but..."

It's still about the economy, stupid, but... It's now just the economics of buying votes for minority rule in the USA. All of the political campaigns are just smoke and mirrors to confuse folks.

Totally obvious to the sufficiently casual observer, but I haven't seen anyone put it together this way, certainly no one with a big soapbox. Maybe you can send me a URL? But there are only two sides to the modern federal election racket in America, one for the House and one for the Senate.

On the House side, it's all about the gerrymandering. Mathematically simple redistricting with two complementary phases. In phase one, the "good" voters are picked to make the largest number of safe districts, while in phase two the "bad" voters are picked and packed into the smallest number of sacrificial districts, "The better to waste the naughty voters' votes, Child." If you're in a "safe" district, then you might hope they didn't calculate the safety margin carefully enough, so you can imagine your vote might matter. After all it is theoretically conceivable that a larger than expected number of voters might suddenly vote differently and overwhelm the safety margin. But if you're in a "sacrificial" district then it's like hoping all of the air molecules will randomly leave the room. "Ain't gonna happen." Can't pick your so-called Representative after the Rep picked his voters!

On the Senate side, the game of controlling the Senate is about focusing on small states with fewer voters so the election riggers can buy enough votes. This is a bit trickier, but here's a simple way to think about it. Being free and voting on that basis takes work. Wannabe free voters have to do research to figure out what the truth is, and the work keeps getting harder, but the voters are spread out on a spectrum of how much work they are willing to do. In other words, some of the voters won't check anything and are easily fooled, and those are the first ones the election riggers buy targeted ads for, gradually working up the scale until they have bought enough votes. They don't even need to fool most of the voters some of the time. The election manipulators just need to fool enough carefully targeted swing voters on Election Day, and they got themselves a senator!

So who's paying for the redistricting to control the House and buying the ads to move those swing voters behind the picked senators to control the Senate? It's people with lots of money to invest in politics. For example, in 2021, the majority of the voters controlled less than 3% of the wealth. The exact number was 2.6% for 50%, so if you bump it up to 3% of the wealth you're talking about a majority of the voters with no money for ads. Yeah, the poor folks can still vote, but they don't have the discretionary money to rig the redistricting or to advertise at the swing voters needed to win the elections, so no wonder no one actually cares what most voters want.

And the result is that Congress has approval ratings around 20% while almost every incumbent is reelected every time. Representatives who actually represent a minority of the voters control the House of so-called Representatives and it's even worse in the Senate, where the mechanism of the game is hard coded into the Constitution.

In conclusion, the voters are right to think their votes don't matter. Ben Franklin was too polite to answer "It's a Republic until you lose it." Or maybe Ben's was just an optimistic "if"?

Given my conclusion, why did I bother to try to vote? Civic duty and ritualism, but I don't think it mattered. Almost certain that my vote has finally been cancelled. But the punchline is that I was gerrymandered at the first level until this year, when I was moved into a sacrificial district. Continuing with my ritualism, I am fighting to find and fix the error, but that's probably precisely what the election riggers want. If I do recover my franchise, that will probably interfere with restoring several other votes that might have actually mattered in districts that were only gerrymandered at the safe level.