24 July 2011

video above: Keiser Report: Ideas for Revolution (E166)

via Avedon Carol, who writes,

Down in comments, CMike advises: "Max Keiser provides a minute or so of useless analysis but Stacy Herbert does spotlight a headline about "fair use" here which I found interesting."

snopes.com: Internet Petitions
www.snopes.com
Does signing online petitions serve any real purpose?


"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."
— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Obama Top Recipient of Murdoch’s News Corp. Donations?
uk.ibtimes.com

Political donations by News Corp., its employees and their families were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, with President Obama the all-time leading recipient, according to a report from the Sunlight Foundation.

I hear and read a lot of people on the internets talk about revolution, some seemingly flippantly and some not, some anonymously and some not, etc. At this juncture I wonder what would happen if people just stopped voting, especially in presidential elections. You'll never get everybody to stop, of course. I remember reading somewhere that in the last Soviet election somewhere around 12 percent of those eligible participated. If that happened here(damn unlikely at this juncture), I'm guessing either the big media portals would downplay it or show you man-on-the-street interviews with people who boycotted the vote, with an emphasis on the nuttier sounding ones.

But even if you could persuade 70,80 million or more regular voters to not bestow legitimacy on the process and just stay home, would that be sufficient? Then what? A jubilant scene as the credits roll, with soldiers and hippies dancing in the streets, and billionaires giving all their money away? I imagine not, however much we have been conditioned to long for those kinds of endings. And even if the first two things occurred the third thing wouldn't happen, as the billionaires will just hire a different group of soldiers.

Of course, this decline in voter turnout may happen anyway, without any persuasion involved. It would more likely be a gradual process that hardly anybody would remark upon.