Buying Votes, Version 4.1

To me history is fascinating.  I paid especial attention in school to the part about voting because it was a concrete example of what people will do for power.  It used to be that citizens could get paid for "voting early and often" by candidates and political parties.  There have been numerous attempts in various forms to keep certain categories of voters from participating in elections.  From exclusion to poll taxes and tests to simply standing outside polling places with baseball bats, intimidation both subtle and violent has been used. I contend that the same sort of tactics are being used in modern (within the past decade) elections. Nowadays, it's just a matter of keeping the money "in the family" and "paying" election officials, voting software companies, the media, and courts to get the desired outcome.  Am I comparing the U.S. government to the mafia?  Not entirely.  In this one way I am drawing a parallel between organised crime families and the major political parties.  Not intentionally, mind you, since I didn't even notice that similarity until just now.  Just as gangs originally formed to protect newcomers and minorities from attack, the U.S. government was formed to protect all citizens from all threats internal and external. On a side note, that's a pretty big job: "all" of the people and "all" the threats.  Can government protect citizens from themselves, their own ignorance and greed?  Gangs went bad and turned into mobs, instead of protecting community from actual threats they created extortion rackets; the U.S. government has been twisted in a similar way, it no longer looks to protect and improve the lives of citizens but merely to maintain the control it has established.  It is the intention of groups seeking power to use whatever means deemed necessary to both gain and maintain the appearance of that power/control.  Notice that I placed a couple of conditions in that last statement: "deemed" and "appearance".  It is not unavoidably necessary to use force to achieve a goal, rather it is a choice based on personal disposition.  Then, even after sacrificing honour and respectability, those who bully are not "in charge", they simply have a tenuous agreement with others that those people will do what the bully says and the bully will not hurt them overly much. What this points to is the same answer in each case: the others standing up to the bully.  This does not necessarily mean a violent clash or even dramatics, only that those people stand together and make it clear to the bully that their days of being bullied are over.  Admittedly, the difficulty in making this point is that I'm painting with a broad brush and not defining which politicians or parts of the government are being used to these ends.  It is a large topic to explore and I'm essentially introducing it here and leaving refinement and definition for later.


In closing, what I've brought up is that it is still not, "one person, one vote" but instead "one dollar, one vote".  This is an application of the golden rule of: he who has the gold makes the rules.