OK, so they have the media and the parties, we have the votes. The question is how do we get all these votes to work for us? The way they get the votes to work for them is by dividing us into little bite sized pieces that they can manage. What we have to do to get our votes to work for us is to overcome the divisions that they have imposed on us. And to do this, we have to open up and get to know the kinds of people we have been taught to fear and avoid. The first step is hard, but once taken it will be clear to everybody that we have more in common with our black or white or brown neighbors than we have in common with the corporate/oligarch segment of society.

Let's look at another division that is not based on ethnicity, but rather on geography. This would be the national vs. local division. The national division is carved up by parties and it has worked well for the ruling class. But why do we need two parties at a local level? Is there any reason other than to perpetuate the divisions. It has been an effective strategy for keeping out the third party candidates. You know, the fear that a vote for the third party is a vote for the other of the two main parties. To overcome this obstacle, we need to go beyond what the media tells us. The media certainly tries to look neutral in that they are only providing information about the candidates, but they are anything but neutral. The media might try to appear to not favor the Democrat or the Republican as long as the winner turns out to be the Democrat or the Republican and not someone else. With this in mind, we need to find a path around their bullshit factory and find a way to open doors in communities other than our own because when we can break the racial and ethnic barriers that divide us, we can defeat the forces that are behind those divisions and set ourselves free.

Breaking the racial and ethnic barriers that divide us on a national level is difficult because at this level, we are dealing with stereotypes and abstractions instead of real people. This is why we need to bring politics to a local, non-media level where we can relate person to person instead of stereotype to stereotype. In this time of hyper polarization, we need to shift the polar axis from conservative/liberal to rich/poor.

 

This is a class war. The conservatives vs. liberals polarization is nothing more than a distraction. A win for either side is a win for the oligarchs. The real issue in front of us is are we going to let the corporate world continue stealing everything that isn't nailed down, or are we going to take control and place limits on their behavior.

You want grant money to cover cleaning up and rebuilding neighborhoods, maybe there is a river that has been destroyed by industrial pollution that needs to be restored and a park built along its banks. Are you dismayed by the cost of an education with no guarantee of a good job. Free education will easily pay for itself through increased tax revenues when educated people start to work. Send people to congress who will support your projects and your lives to the point that they will see to it that your projects and lives are funded even if they have to take the money from the 1%.

We are watching a constant barrage of disasters in news reports from all over the world. The planet is telling us to start learning how to use what our environment has to offer by designing our homes to use natural energy and growing our food closer to home. This will require research and education, and again, will require that we have people in congress who will support funding these efforts. It is time to end the system where the corporations profit on our food, profit on keeping us warm in the winter and cool in the summer, profit on the roof over our head, profit off our clothing that seems to change style every few months. We can build a better world than the one we are currently stuck with.

The corporate/oligarch segment of society has been successful because they have been able to keep the political discussion on TV. How can we beat their strategy? We need to take the discussion to the streets and back alleys and country lanes and coffee shops and burger joints and concert halls and anywhere else people get together. Again, you are going to have to get together with the kinds of people you have been taught all your life to fear and distrust. They have been taught to fear and distrust you as well, but the fact of the matter is that you need them and they need you to create the kind of future we all want. This is going to be a giant leap of trust for everybody, but letting the system continue in its current direction is a leap into the abyss.

The ruling class's main weapon, which has served them well, is lies. Truth is a more powerful weapon, but how can you get the truth out? Put it out. You are going to need to put together a political club of some sort and invite everybody in your congressional district, that is interested, to participate. Maybe put together an open potluck picnic out in a park within the district. Or maybe schedule one a weekend and put it in a different part of the district each time. Throw in a few local bands and you are on to something. Give it a little time to build momentum. You have basically the school year to accomplish the organization phase of this, then during the summer, get the word on your movement out to your neighbors and prepare and introduce your candidates and get them properly registered as candidates in preparation for the run to election next fall. Something like this needs to be done in every congressional district across the country. As long as they can keep us divided, we will continue to lose. If we can pull ourselves together as a people, we will win.

The problem is not the size of government, it is who the government is working for. The push for smaller government and less regulation is a move to fascism because the corporate sector will fill the vacuum created as the government shrinks. What is really needed is a shift in focus where the government works harder on protecting we the people and on regulating them the corporations.

While you are working on replacing the characters in congress, you should also consider replacing people at the local level with people who share your vision. They need to listen to you, not some centralized political or religious leaders. Your organizations need to be grass roots and local. You need to do your work entirely with person to person and face to face contact. The 1% has been successful because they own the media and have been able to keep all things political on their turf. For us, the 99%, to be successful we will have to keep our activities away from the media and under the radar. The 1% has been successful because they have kept us divided: Republican/Democrat, White Christian/everybody else, rich/poor, urban/rural, people who have a place to live/people who don't. The division we need to address is the rich/poor division. The other divisions are created as an offshoot of the rich/poor division. Those other divisions are created by the rich folk's bullshit factory and propagated in media to keep the rest of us fighting amongst ourselves instead of uniting against them. We have to overcome their divisive tactics if we are to succeed. It is not rational that 99% of the people would cede power to 1% of the people. The top 1% are focused only on their self interest. You need to develop this kind of focus. None of us will succeed unless we all do. We need to stop being just a country and become a people. That is the only way we are going to win the future.

We need to change the direction of society and civilization. I see QR codes as a valuable vector for spreading the word on what we are doing. I haven't used QR codes much, but I keep seeing more and more of them, sometimes in seemingly odd places. I am noticing that QR codes are used for a variety of purposes from how to fix your car to getting a download of music after a concert. It occurred to me that if they can tell you how to fix your car, they could tell you how to fix your society. Or at least help organize the repair.

I am aiming this message particularly at students - Middle School, High School and College for a number of reasons:

1.  Nobody in the political world takes you    seriously, or even knows that you exist. This is your chance to show them just how wrong they are.

2.  You have close personal access to every member of your community. You have parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and brothers and sisters in the community.

3.  You have the intelligence, creativity and energy to accomplish this. Getting a variety of demographics together, who appear to have nothing in common except mutual distrust, is going to take intelligence, creativity and energy.

4.  You have the most to lose if we continue on our current path.

 

5. You are adults and can do this without "adult supervision".

You are the perfect group to effect the change we need. Make no mistake, when you get this done, you will own it. You can do what is needed to prepare a future of your choosing. You can fly under the radar and organize this with a level of invisibility that would be impossible for someone who is taken seriously. This organizing will not involve money, just talk. You have the cover of school to do all kinds of activities. You have numerous competitions between schools which can give you an easy, quiet, path to your rival schools to find out who are the politically minded students from every school in your congressional district. It's time to get people together and make some mischief.

I can share thoughts on how to organize and prepare for the change we need, but you're going to have to do the work and I would expect that you will come up with your own thoughts on the subject of how to accomplish this.

I have put this site up to share my thoughts on where to start to change the political landscape in the United States. I would hope you will expand on these thoughts to suit your local situations. As politics exist now, we are burdened with Democrats and Republicans dominating the scene and making decisions that mostly have a negative impact on all of us. The government has been focused, for my lifetime (so far 76 years), on satisfying the needs and desires of the most wealthy segment of society at the expense of the rest of us. The corporations and oligarchs are doing very well and the rest of us keep doing worse and worse, but this is the way that zero sum games play out. It's time for a change. It's time for you to plan out your future, start making the world into what you want, then send the bill to the corporations and oligarchs who have the money to do this.

I am not suggesting a new national political party and all the bullshit that entails. That would make it too easy for the corporate/oligarch class to corrupt and take over like they did with the TEA party. We need to get money out of politics. Instead of using a shit ton of money to bullshit everyone to our point of view on TV, we should just be talking with each other and finding common ground that we can build into a platform for our candidates and send them to Washington to represent our interests. You need to look at how to rebuild and improve your community and you can't do that without community participation. You need to listen to what people are complaining about and incorporate solutions to those problems into your plans. You will need to pull all the communities within your district together and find your common ground. This should be easier for young people than for older people.

The problems we are facing are massive and have no solution under the rules as they exist. The rules have to change and to change the rules you have to replace the cast of characters that make the rules with a new cast of characters. You need to start making your own rules. You might make mistakes as this goes forward, but those mistakes can be corrected.  You can't possibly muck it up worse than the current cast of characters has. Assuming that your hearts are in the right place.

This is where the 435 "political clubs" comes in, this would be one for each congressional district. These clubs should be set up by Millennials and GenZ primarily. The media and mainstream parties encourage you to get involved in politics, but if you have any interest in politics, aligning with one of the national parties only puts you in a position to help push a national agenda that is mostly counter to your own interests. Don't fool yourselves into believing that there is any chance at all of you having any effect at all on the direction of the major political parties. They are top down organizations even though this is structurally wrong because the top has no idea of the challenges that those below face on a daily basis. Basically, we have to restructure our political alignments and put all the decision making at a local level where we are most aware of what needs to be done to make our lives better.

The first step is to seek out other politically minded people in your community. You might go to meetings of the worker bees of the major parties and poach some of their talent by offering them a happier ending. You want Universal Basic Income? Stack the congressional deck of cards in your favor. You want single payer, effective healthcare? Stack the deck. You want free education and unrestricted access to books and knowledge? Shit, they've been stacking the deck against us for longer than I have been around. Want to start cleaning up the environment? Elect some people who will listen to science instead of listening to bankers, preachers and think tanks. You are at the point where you need to clearly identify what you want your future to look like. Then we need to immediately start creating a path to that future. The future ain't what it used to be and we need to recognize that. All this wondering "who's gonna pay for it?" is pure bullshit. After you take over in Washington, the people with the money will pay for it. They made all their money from digging up or pumping out our resources, then selling them back to us. It is time for us to thank them for saving up all that money, but now we need it.

We need it largely to clean up the mess that they have made in the process of getting rich, but also to set up the infrastructure for our future. The infrastructure that we need for our future may be different from what we currently need.

Get as specific as you like in developing your thoughts of the future and don't dismiss any thoughts as being politically impossible. Make them politically possible by sending representatives who will represent you, instead of allowing your representatives to represent some pack of assholes flying around in their private jets. Find like minded people within your district and share your thoughts. Talk about what you need and listen to what they need. Form clubs so you can work together and press a coherent plan which will incorporate all your needs. As you put this organization together, look within your ranks to see who might emerge as leaders and who might emerge as candidates. They might not be the same people. You are not looking for people who want to go to Washington, but rather, people who share the vision that your community holds and would be willing to go to Washington to press that vision if there was strong community support behind them. As part of this process, everyone within the district who is interested should have opportunity to participate in a candidate selection process and arrive at a consensus. Once the candidate has been selected there are two possibilities on the subject of candidate presentation. One is to select the candidate in time to get the required signatures turned in to get them on the ballot. The other is to present them as a write-in candidate and keep the whole plan under wraps until you are ready to spring it a month or two before the election. Either model will require getting the candidate out in front of the people. For starters, I would have the candidate speak at all the high schools and colleges in the district. There are 107 in the district where I live. This movement is aimed at young people taking over the political process. Schools are where you will get volunteers to help spread the message by canvassing door to door. If you are considering the write in model, you need to look at your state's laws regarding write in candidates. Some jurisdictions require that write in candidates submit petitions to be considered as official candidates. The next date to consider is the close out for voter registration. Voter registration has to be a big part of this effort. There is no excuse for being over 18 on election day and not voting.

You can put a QR code in the back, side windows of your car or place it anywhere else where it might get noticed. You might be able to arrange for your school system recognize your political discussion clubs as an extracurricular activity. I assume that you will place a priority on education in any of your plans.

 

How do you organize yourselves to succeed at this? I have no idea. I will credit you with the intelligence and resourcefulness to figure this one out. If you have any interest in this, speak with your friends and send them links to this site. Find ways to reach out to other communities within your district. I could come up with detailed strategies that I am sure would not work. And the reason that I say this is that I don't know you. I don't know your district, I don't know the local social context in which you live. You do. I know that if you are in Wyoming or Texas, your reality will be very different than being in Colorado or New York and for this to work, your approach and plan will have to be tailored to your district and the various communities of people who live there.

Our political system is backward and busted. The people on top formulate policy and create issues on a national level then support media campaigns for candidates who will sell these issues to you at a local level. This is backward. We need to have representation that will actually represent us instead of trying to sell us a very stale vision of America. We are divided on a national level and the only way to break that cycle is to unite ourselves on 435 local levels and take all our local visions back to Washington and use that to create a new national vision. The role that young people will play in this change is critical. You have to get together with your peers and develop your vision and when that vision becomes clear, you have to show the rest of the community that your vision is a better solution to the problems you all face. You are not doing this for me, you are doing it for you. I am only suggesting a direction. You will have to find the path and once you do, you will be in the driver's seat for the next 50 to 100 years at least.