Hello friends! So I was thinking about how we don't have a functional government here in the USA (if college kids can walk in and fuck shit up and the people in charge stand around and pretend to be helpless about it, we do not have a functional government). And then I was thinking about how a minority of the population decide elections (assuming no cheating, which... ), and how we really haven't had much of a functioning government for a long time.
Statistics!
Total population of the usa: 346,596,280
The vote:
Harris 75,017,613 (21.64%)
Trump 77,302,580 (22.30%)
Literally any other candidate 3,189,732 (.92%)
Felons who can't vote (if you have been convicted of a felony, you are disenfranchised for life):
~19 million (5.48%) (their number is from 2017, I redid the % based on current population)
Under 18 who can't vote:
73.1 million (21.09%)
Immigrants who can't vote (more than half of immigrants can vote):
21,500,000 (6.20%)
That's 32.77% of USers who are ineligible to vote.
So add the voters + ineligible to vote, and you get 77.63% of USers.
That means 22.37% of USers didn't vote who could have. That's more than either Trump or Harris got. More people didn't see the point of voting at all, than who were inspired to vote D or R (or anyone else). And this is the second highest turnout in US history, second only to 2020, both in hard numbers and % of eligible voters, per NPR.
What does that say about our system? 22.3% of the population got their wish, in the second highest turnout ever. Not even a quarter of USers voted for Trump. More people didn't vote at all. More people are ineligible to vote at all.
And democrats can quit whining about us third party people and our less-than-1%-for-all-other-candidates:
Green (Stein) 881,819
Independent (RFKJr) 756,968
Libertarian (Oliver) 650,138
Write-in 444,797
Other 456,010
per https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php
...please note that RFK Jr and the Libertarians got more than Stein and the "other" category which would include the Democratic Socialists (but also anyone else). Dems always say that it's third party voters' fault when they don't win, that Jill Stein is stealing their votes, etc., etc. By their logic, those RFK/Libertarian voters are right wingers and by that oversimplification that the Greens and DemSoc's would go to the Ds and the Libs and RFK people would go to the Rs, the Rs lost a bigger chunk than the Ds did.
First-past-the-post voting sucks. The electoral college sucks. But we cave to it like ¯\ _ (ツ)_/¯ "it's the only thing we can do"?
This whole thing is a damn joke. And now an unelected billionaire and his college kid minions get to burn down the dilapidated, outdated, not-up-to-code infrastructure of what little government we have that actually did anything useful, while the electeds go ¯\ _ (ツ)_/¯ while they tweet about it and do shit else.
This isn't a functioning government, y'all.
And again, if it wasn't clear - I don't like Trump, but I don't like the democrats, either. Even if the dems take everything back in 2028, they won't fix everything Elon is breaking. They didn't undo everything Trump did in his first term. This isn't about Capitalist Party A and Capitalist Party B, this is about the system not working to do anything for normal people and society at large. This is about the system being set up precisely to do nothing for us, but give us the illusion that "we can make our voices heard" and be "represented." Y'all, no one in government is representing us. Yes, even your fave.
62% of Americans think we should have universal healthcare.
67% of Americans wanted Biden to join the international call for a permanent ceasefire in Palestine (as of Feb 2024, I couldn't find a more recent stat).
73% of Americans think teachers should be paid more.
The majority of Americans support social welfare programs, specifically: 79% of USers have favorable views of Social Security, 79% have favorable views of Medicare, 77% have favorable views of disability insurance, 76% have favorable views of Medicaid, 74% have favorable views of SNAP (food stamps), 71% have favorable views of TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), 71% have favorable views of unemployment insurance, and 67% have favorable views of public housing assistance.
But what is happening? Unless your name is Luigi, nobody is doing beans about healthcare in this country, the US continued to block resolutions in the UN and send weapons to Israel, Teachers are paid abysmally, and what little social safety net we have is being destroyed as we speak. These are just a small example of things that the majority of USers agree on, it's pretty centrist, and the government can't even do that to justify itself.
Saint Luigi, pray for us
And yet, with all this chaos going on, I've already seen people abandoning all hope, and even talking about "when the midterms come... ". The midterms. Like we can't do anything at all for two years, and voting is all we can do. Y'all. Do not give your power away. Do not roll over and let the government do whatever the fuck it wants with people's lives and act as though you are a helpless bystander to history.
Anyway, go sign the strike card at https://generalstrikeus.com/strikecard . The strike will be called when 11 million people (3.5% of the population is their goal, but yes, doing my math based on that current population number, 11 million is 3.17%, lol) sign up to strike. History shows that 3.5% is the number that gets it done, so that's why we are waiting until we know it will work. The last update I saw said they had crossed 250,000 signups.
Also, for the billionaire fandom: look up the definition of the word "avarice."
We are definitely in a bit of strange territory. On one hand there is so much blatant corruption that we’ve become numb to it all.
On the other hand the original systemic structure has been gamed so much that they bypass it quite easily (USAID being the recent enforcer for the CIA, despite them being told “you can’t do that”).
At this point - it’s pretty obvious that the people don’t call the shots across the world. A small handful of the ultra rich do and we are subject to their whims.
I long for the days of Jesse Ventura or Ron Paul and their type of corruption exposure. It was within the system not outside of the system.
I saw someone recently say something like, "Oh sure, we have corruption, we just call it 'lobbying.'"
Do you have a link re: USAID/CIA? That's a new one to me. I did a search and could only find one article from 2014.
I wish we had real journalism, like we need us some Woodward and Bernstein, but most of the media is owned by a handful of megacorporations and are just as corrupt as everything else.
Mike Benz did 2 amazing episodes on Joe rogan, one last week and one in October. He’s got more documentation than you’d ever be able to get from me in a few words lol. It’s 6 hours between the episodes but shit is it worth it to understand how insidious USAID is.
Thank you for that. I'm not sure what I'll do about it, but this was certainly a refreshing,rational read.
I don't work (long retired) and I'm not a joiner. I don't lend my name to causes I don't understand thoroughly. A little cynical on that count. But I like what you write, and agree with most of it (ex: there are many states where felons can vote).
Oh I stand corrected, I thought it was national, thank you for that link.
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It is because we don't have a functional government, that is why we loose confidence in them. Voting is no more interesting