Reply #38: No, it's called going backwards, just not quite as fast [View All]

[starroute]

The last time I thought this country was going forward was in the early-mid 70's, when a certain amount of environmental legislation was being passed and when Watergate led to more controls on the CIA, freedom of information, etc.

Since then, nothing at all positive has come out of the federal government, and many things I value have been consistently hacked away. The only difference between Democratic and Republican administrations has been that the process is somewhat slower under Democrats.

For at least 20 years, I have been arguing with my husband that it is still worth voting for Democrats as a form of damage control. But damage control only matters if you have hopes of eventually turning things around within the existing system, and I no longer have any such hope. I may still vote for the Democratic candidate in 2004, but it will be only because Bush scares the shit out of me -- not because I expect any actual change to come of it.

I think durutti's analysis strikes to the heart of the matter: as long as corporations have ultimate power over our society, so-called electoral democracy can only be a farce. We citizens are in roughly the position of a high school student government -- we may get to choose the color of the prom decorations, but all the real decisions are out of our control.

However, I've never able to get seriously enthusiastic about socialism. Putting that much power in the hands of the government seems risky to me. I'd rather start by disenfranchising the corporations -- take away their personhood, force them to be primarily answerable to their local communities (in human and environmental terms) rather than to management and shareholders, put creative work on an open source basis instead of a personal-profit basis. But none of that will ever be possible within an electoral system that the corporations themselves control. One way or another, it's going to have to come from outside.