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Voting is the Least You Can Do

By Horace Coleman

These are the times that rent people's souls. Democracy has become demockcracy. Capital is the nation's capitol. Labor union is a dirty phrase; any one can teach better than a teacher.

Your civic duty isn't done when you've voted and paid taxes. According to Mitt Romney, 47% of potential Obama voters don't pay federal taxes and expect the guvmint to take care of them. Romney must not know 10 red states have the most residents who don't pay federal taxes.

Voting well means studying and understanding candidates, issues and trickily worded propositions well before you fill out the ballot. It might help to know where candidates' campaign funds and money backing or opposing propositions/initiatives come from. Or, whose dollars influence members of Congress and who they're likely to work for after they've left Congress.

Who actually benefits from the laws politicians introduce and vote for? Who really wrote them? Why are politicians' health care plans and pensions so good after only a short time in office? All civil servants are supposedly lazy, surly, overpaid and don't deserve what municipalities, counties and states contractually agreed to.

It wasn't benevolent employers who invented the 40-hour week, time-and-a-half for over time, two-week paid vacations or ended child labor and sweat shops.

Will you love feudal America as much as the USA has always loved cheap labor? Remember chattel slavery and indentured servitude?

This is the age of oligarchy (rule by the few), plutocracy (rule by the rich), theocracy (rule by those who know exactly what God wants and intend to make it happen ahead of schedule), crony capitalism uber alles and the new Robber Barons. Too many people seem to think anything left of the current Supreme Court is socialism, anything left of the FBI is communism. How will you like lowered service because of fewer municipal and state workers?

It's the age when unpleasant reality wants its bill paid and won't accept credit cards. It's time to put an end to political BS and national self delusion. It's time to become more acquainted with what you know than what you'd rather believe.

Get informed about things that concern you and fact check your findings. Find people with the same concerns; see what they're doing or plan to do about close to home conditions and places. Like your neighborhood, church, your part of your city or suburb, local schools, etc. Organize and educate yourself and others. Demonstrating is effective—sometimes. It draws attention or creates interest.

Try finding or creating a "power lever"—something or some one that solves or improves things. It isn't always money or friends in high places that create change. What can you do because of who or what's nearby?

We're a people who want instant results. Life's not like that. "Keep on keepin' on." "You can't do nothing in a minute and do it right!" No matter who wins the presidency or control of Congress, things will basically change slowly at best. Fashion styles often come from the top down or the bottom up. So do many ideas and much culture. To make a change in a society you often have to first change yourself.

I once took an almanac and found a number of items in which the US was not #1. Among them were life expectancy, per capita income and lowest infant mortality rate. We were number one in average daily calorie consumption! There are logical explanations for some findings. If you took the per capita income of a very small country with a higher than normal number of wealthy individuals, you'd find a high per capita income. Overall we do well here. But it's not heaven when some people and conditions make life hellish for others.

The business of business is not creating jobs. It's making a profit—and staying solvent. The founder of the company that originally held my mortgage knew the business was floundering. He made sweetheart deals with people in high places and overly touted unsound company stock. He sold his shares at inflated prices.

Then he sold the company to a prominent national bank now floundering because it had bought many bad loans. When the financial police caught up with him, he was given a huge fine. He promptly wrote a check from the millions he'd acquired and kept on working on his tan.

Here are some interesting facts about our current times and how we got here:

A CIA document acquired under a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that there were no WMDs in Iraq. That's right; Saddam Hussein didn't ship what he didn't have to Syria via sand submarine. A Pew Research Center study of income/income distribution for the last four decades showed that lower income earners increased 1% each decade, while middle income earners shrank from 61% to 51% of all earners. In the same time frame, upper income earners grew from 14% to 20% of all income earners. An Institute of Medicine report showed an increase in alcohol and drug usage in the military. Think two long wars approved of (and basically ignored) by people who love to shout "We're Number One!" or "USA! USA!" have any thing to do with that? Paper patriotism lasts longer than paper flowers but isn't as useful. President Bush was advised in a 2001 daily briefing that Osama bin Laden intended to attack the US. Bush played it off. "Less than 1/2 of 1% of the US population has been on active military duty at any given time during the past decade of sustained warfare." —Pew Research Center poll

The following information is from the The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesuita and Alastair Smith.

Political groups in ascending order of clout:

• The nominal selectorate (the voters—the interchangeables who have little real power as individuals).
• The real selectorate (the influentials: people who actually chose the candidate—powerful major political party members, super PACs, big money people, influential individuals [e.g. Grover Norquist], major corporations, industries, Wall Street / banks and lobbyists).
• The winning coalition (the essentials: the Electoral College which really chooses a president, the super heavy contributors, the "voters" you really need to get elected.

Changing the relative size of the two selectorates and the essentials changes policy and spending. Our politicians tend to appeal to the voters, satisfy enough of their needs and druthers to keep their votes while rewarding the people who made it possible for them to woo the voters.

Since money is the air, water, blood and food of politics, politicians often pay more attention to those who gave them money. But they must do something to please "the people." Politicians tend to promote policies and legislation that favor those who donated the most to them.

Politicians do a dance between attracting enough voters with the same priorities to put them in office and raising enough funds to run a successful campaign. Then they must satisfy the donors, cosponsoring and getting enough legislation passed they want and approve. Getting elected is a politician's first job; getting re-elected is their second job.

According to The Dictator's Handbook, leaders of democracies and dictatorships use five rules to get and keep power: keep the winning coalition as small a possible; keep the nominal electorate as large as possible; control the flow of revenue (e.g., taxes, tax loop holes, etc.); pay your key supporters jut enough to keep them loyal; don't take money out of your supporter's pockets to make "the people's" lives better.

Voting well takes effort. You have to work, hard and thoroughly, at vetting the candidates and deciphering ballot issues/referendums/initiatives. And, you have to follow up on the actual performance and effects of the people and things you voted for or against.

Voting is like maintaining a relationship, keeping your body or car in shape or belonging to a street gang. Periodically you're going to have to put a little work in.

People do what they think is best for them. What's best for one person may not be good for some one else. Which reminds me of an interviewee in a documentary about Arlington West—Santa Monica. The guy said, on camera, that the people doing the memorial were "traitors and should be shot." When asked if he'd ever done military service he said "I prefer someone else do my fighting for me." Many people prefer someone else do their "fighting" for them.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have the answer. Each has some good ideas. Radical GOPhers want a permanent Republican majority. Like Mexico's corrupt PRI party that ruled for more than 60 years and is back again. The Libertarian presidential candidate wants to abolish the Federal Reserve and the IRS!! Both certainly need reform. If you abolished either one though, what would replace them? The marketplace?

When the French aristocracy got totally out of hand and living conditions became intolerable for the masses, aristocrats where physically eliminated. No need to go that far.

We're seeing the rise of the Plutocrat/Robber Barons party. Robber Barons are blatantly greedy and corrupt. Plutocrats buy what they want and may have Robber Baron tendencies. It's time for another Reform Age.

Horace Coleman was an Air Force air traffic controller/intercept director in Vietnam (1967-68).