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Societal Reform
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Video ... Unbreaking America - Divided We Fall ... (TPB ... This problem is real, but it is not the only problem.)
Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
Unbreaking America - Divided We Fall
4,226 views•Dec 18, 2019
Video Waves Channel
America’s political system has been hijacked to ensure those in power keep it. If you look at American politics and think everything is fine, this video is not for you. To the rest of us, things seem pretty broken. I mean, our Forefathers created a beautiful system and we live in a magical country. How the Hell did things get so bad? These days, just 2% of Americans trust our elections work how they’re supposed to. Congress has an approval rating of 20%. Our leaders are locked in partisan warfare and they aren’t fixing anything. And we’re angry. We’re angry at the system, at each other.
Our country’s getting poorer, sicker, more divided and our families are paying the price. We don’t even talk to each other anymore! America’s political system has been hijacked to ensure those with power keep it. And for the rest of us? Well, it’s not so good. I’m going to show you exactly how today’s political system is creating the problem, exactly how we fix it, and how the solution ultimately depends on you. This Venn diagram shows the relationship between an elected official doing what the people want, and their likelihood of getting reelected.
Ideally, they’d serve the people, and have a high likelihood of reelection, but a recent Harvard Business School report by Professor Michael Porter and Katherine Gehl show that the relationship looks more like this. They found virtually no correlation between serving the will of the people and getting reelected. In other words, if our elected leaders do their jobs, they’re more likely to lose their jobs. How is that possible? The report blames it on two privately held, gain-seeking organizations… America’s two major political parties.
In 2019, both major parties publicly threatened to blacklist candidates and contractors who veered from the party lines. They control the money, the debates, the primaries, they even draw their own voting districts. A full 61% of Americans want another option, but any third party or independent who runs is seen as a “spoiler.” So year after year, we choose between the lesser of two evils… Democrats. Republicans. In any other environment, a new competitor would swoop in to better serve their constituency – You hate your cable company? Here comes steaming – but the two parties have rigged the system to block competition.
But it gets worse… In 86% of House races, we now know which party will win the general election before it even starts. That means all of the competition is in the primaries, where as few as 14% of voters participate. And primary voters tend to be more partisan than those who vote in the general election. So the most partisan candidates win the primary, they’re virtually guaranteed to win the general, so you can guess what happens next. Over time, the parties move further and further apart.
This graphic shows members of Congress who worked with the other party to pass a law in 1953. The gray lines represent their collaboration. The more lines you see, the more times they crossed party lines to pass a law. This is how it looked in ’67. In ’81. Look what happened in 1995. And by 2011 it represents where we are today. Hardliners are rewarded. Collaboration is vilified. Congress is so gridlocked they can’t even pass the most basic laws to improve the lives of everyday Americans.
For the first time since the Great Depression, life expectancy in the U.S. is actually going DOWN, while it goes up in the rest of the World. We were once ranked top in the World for education. We’ve fallen to 27th. We can’t afford life-saving prescriptions, and medical bills are forcing families into bankruptcy. Almost HALF of American families can’t even afford basic necessities like rent and food. What I want to know is, how do we fix it?
You know, I think I’m getting a little carried away here. So, I’m gonna bring my friend Josh in, while I calm down.
Joshua Graham Lynn:
We need to take our government back and make it work for us. So much of what’s failing is a symptom of our failed elections. Look, this isn’t about giving the power to the right or the left, or asking Congress to fix itself, because frankly, they won’t. So, we have to go around Congress. And the good news is, in the U.S., states run elections, even federal elections – So when we pass election laws in a state, it affects the federal elections.
And get this, a Bloomberg news study showed that: throughout American history, passing state laws has been the key to creating massive federal change… And the law we need to pass? It’s called the American Anti-Corruption Act. It fixes the system so government can work for you and your family – not just a handful of special interests and political leaders.
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