Lest we forget.

[tim]

Seven years ago, about 3000 people died in a terrorist attack in the United States. Ever since, at least 87,000 civilians have died in Iraq in a war that the US started as a misguided attempt at retaliation or a cleverly calculated use of pretext. The war has met with little domestic protest, and in 2004, those who thought it was at least a little bit important to stop it failed to gather enough of a majority to elect a president who cared at least a little about ending the killing.

But let us put aside our past failures. This year, we have a chance to redeem ourselves. It would be wrong to say that anyone has absolute confidence that Barack Obama can or will end the war, but he is at least unbeholden to the corporate interests that keep the war going. And thus, we have no reason to believe he won't make a good-faith effort to stop the killing.

This is an area of moral certainty. If you're American, are you going to do everything you can to elect a leader who will shift our resources away from killing foreigners and back to healing our sick, employing our unemployed, cleaning our environment? Or are you going to assume that history is something that other people make and politics is other people's problem?

This is not the year for namby-pamby platitudes about how you should support whichever candidate makes you feel the warmest and fuzziest inside. If you're American, and you're not giving your time to talk to your fellow Americans about why they should support Barack Obama, then -- in a far inferior tack, but one suitable for those with crippling social anxiety or without physical energy -- you can at least write a check. If you can't write a check, and can't talk to people, then [nondenominational-deity] bless you. I'm guessing that's not so for most people reading this.

If you were going to tell me I should leave my politics out of this day, then don't. Leaving my politics out of it means leaving my politics out of it so that there's more room for your politics to fit into it.

To those of you who are eligible to vote in the United States: Nonvoters, McCain voters, I'm not asking you to defend yourselves and so I don't need to hear your defenses. Please, just go sit in the corner for a while and think about why you hate your country so much.

Comments

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I explained myself unclearly or misunderstood your point. I thought you said that limits on campaign contributions by businesses were useless because businesses could still pay to put up advertising for candidates. I said that that's why we have disclosure laws. If a business circumvents contribution limits by paying for advertisements directly, it's possible to follow the money and nail them for it. Did I miss the point or...?

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

J. Random Millionare is a person, not a business.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

Well, substitute "people" for "businesses" there, then.

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

Okay. My point is not that the laws can be easily broken, although of course that's true and irrevocable (what are you going to do, give the candidate a 15-yard, er, 20,000-vote penalty because a supporter broke campaign finance laws?). My point is (1) that these laws can simply be bypassed through independent speech, and therefore are largely ineffective absent comprehensive speech controls, and (2) that these laws have negative side-effects which you are ignoring.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

(1) Independent speech is cool, independent money-spending isn't. I don't see how a law that says (a) political advertisements must disclose who paid for them (which IIUC is what we already have), and (b) any individual or corporation can only spend X amount of money on political advertisements is a "comprehensive speech control". Free speech is one thing, expensive speech is another.

(2) I'm still not seeing the side-effects. You brought up the point about challengers to incumbents, but I think I answered that.

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

(1) So what you're saying is that you believe NARAL should have an effective advertising budget of $2500 a year? Or are you distinguishing political lobbying groups from corporations in some way that doesn't leave a giant hole?

(2) Where did you respond to the general point about incumbents? You said that we should eliminate the advantages of wealthy challengers by preventing them from limiting their personal campaigning expenditures, and I responded that that simply makes the incumbent problem that much worse.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

(1) Not for advertising that doesn't mention a particular candidate, no.

(2) We can't level off everything. I would much rather see incumbents ride on their reputations (and if it's a bad reputation, then presumably that makes it easier for a challenger, not harder), then see people buy elections.

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

(1) So NARAL isn't allowed to create voter guides? What about its membership newsletter? Is this a ban on all candidate-specific information, or just positive — e.g., can NARAL say that McCain and Palin have terrible views on abortion? What if it's purely factual information — can NARAL send something out detailing specific occasions when McCain publicly opposed blah? Who decides all this— will every NARAL mailing suddenly end up in court to decide whether it's sufficiently non-political?

My point is that any organization that wants to distribute information is invariably going to spend money doing it, and that you are basically proposing to destroy the freedom to create large organizations that express any sort of real political opinion. Worse, you are doing this purely out of a misguided belief that the only people cutting large checks to political candidates are evil defense contractors.

(2) Incumbents have a huge name-recognition advantage, and the only way to even try to overcome that is with exposure, which you are massively limiting a challenger's ability to gain — I mean, even a candidate's gas money when canvassing neighborhoods is a campaign expenditure that must be carefully accounted for.

[etb.livejournal.com]

you are doing this purely out of a misguided belief that the only people cutting large checks to political candidates are evil defense contractors.

Now catamorphism thinks I'm an evil defense contractor? Dammit.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying I have all the answers, just that the current system is unacceptable and that letting people or organizations buy elections the way they currently do is not a fair, free or neutral option.

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's convincing evidence that elections are being "bought", though. In every purported example of that I've heard, it comes down to the loser's partisans being completely incapable of accepting that reasonable people might disagree with them, and so they lay it down to corruption or unfair influence or votes being counted according to the officially agreed-upon standards rather than the standards that they just invented which work in their favor.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

...well, that's the point where I have to conclude that we must just come from completely different universes so far as information-gathering goes. I kind of thought it was a given that most elections since 1980 or perhaps before have been determined more by lobbyists than by the will of the people, and trying to come up for a source for that right now would be like trying to come up for a source for my belief that water is wet.

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

Yeah, if you're sold on that, we might have to just call the conversation off at this point.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

Maybe I made a mistake by focusing on elections rather than policies. But how do you think we got the brain-dead set of "intellectual" "property" laws we have now? Or limited liability for corporations? Why do you think we're one of the only two developed nations that doesn't provide health care for all its citizens? Or why didn't we adopt halfway decent environmental regulations once it became obvious to scientist that humans could effect global climate change? How do you explain any of those things, if not by the fact that people paid for them?

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm certainly not denying that a lot of policies seem bought-and-sold, and lobbyists clearly have a ton of influence. I do think that the situation is more complicated than mere corruption, though. For example:

• Copyright law is so bad largely because there really wasn't a coordinated effort to lobby counter the entertainment industry until the last 5-10 years.
• Unlimited liability for corporations really can lead to bankruptcies that, well, put a lot of people out of work.
• The U.S. private medical/pharmaceutical industry really does drive a lot of the world's medical advances.
• I don't think there's a single country out there which has adopted meaningful environmental regulations to counter global warming, because nobody knows how to do it without crippling industry and radically changing lives.

None of these are the last word on these subjects, of course, and I'm not at all denying that industrial/corporate lobbying played a role in the bad policies we have now. But I do think it's important to understand why we're in the state we're in.

[catamorphism.livejournal.com]

Sorry, still not buying it:
- Copyright law -- you're saying "things are corrupt because people took a while to start organizing against the corruption", right? So... there was corruption to start with.
- Liability -- perhaps I'd believe this statement if it was just as vigorously supported by labor unions as by corporate lobbyists.
- Health -- if we stopped making *any* advances in medical research and started providing basic and equitable care for everybody, the standard of living would go up. Thus in a sense, we don't need anything that the US has that other countries don't have. (And by "we" I don't mean you or me, I mean the people who actually need health care and aren't getting it.)
- Environment -- crippling industry don't mean a thing if we aren't going to have a place to live 100 years from now (again, not "you" or "me" but...) and of course lives are going to change radically, because the American upper-middle-class way of life is unsustainable. We're certainly not going to figure out what those meaningful environmental regulations might be if we're afraid of those things. And I don't think it's the people who work at 3 shitty jobs to make ends meet and lead miserable lives as it is who are afraid of things changing.

Certainly neither you nor I has the last word, but I am unlikely to be convinced that these are not, to repeat myself, areas of moral certainty.

[rjmccall.livejournal.com]

Oh man, yeah, we should stop.