Thank you for your article. When we sow divide among the divided, the rich laugh behind our backs. Change the divide-and-conquer system to a truthful We The People and we all win.
We are segregated in voting districts and we fight each other over that one seat. That is classic divide-and-conquer, and it makes everything worse. The poor are more poor than the poor in the We The People systems.
I studied political systems back in the day (2006) and found the following about wealth distribution and the system in place:
District voting (column 1) and proportional voting with an empowered president (column 3) fared potentially worse for the poor. In the district-voting column, I highlighted the US, coming in at below two percent for the bottom ten percent of our society. One can say that is an outcome befitting divide-and-conquer.
Compare this to the systems that do well, proportional voting (no empowered president, column 5) and the mixed system of both (no empowered president, column 4), and the bottom ten percent in those nations easily get twice as large a slice of the national cake than our poor. These systems are We The People.
In the US we do embrace the ideology of We The People and because of that we also get some legislation put in place that is We The People indeed. But when push comes to shove (particularly toward the poor and you know who I mean), divide-and-conquer wins the day.
This is us, to the left. Voting minorities of as large as 49.9 percent of the voters remain unrepresented; they don’t sit at the tables of decision making. Fifty percent plus one vote can dictate the outcome to unrepresented voting minorities.
To the right, the actual We The People system. As you can see in this example of a city council with eight seats, almost 90 percent of the voters are guaranteed that their vote translates into a representative they handpicked themselves. There are no substantial voting minorities unrepresented in this system.
The good news is that the US Constitution is already demanding the We The People system for cities and counties. Here is a visual.
A: Federal and State governments are given powers and freedoms.
B: The 14th Amendment demands the better system put in place.
Federal and State governments received #A from the US Constitution and they can use this to create leeway for themselves involving #B.
Cities and counties are not even mentioned in the US Constitution, and yet they must fully abide by the highest document of the nation.
States did not receive the freedom or the power to hand over to third parties within freedoms or powers to the same level as the State got from the US Constitution. It must be described in the US Constitution which governmental levels have US Constitutional freedoms and powers.
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Since the 14th Amendment is declared in the US Constitution, it prevails in the dispute who gets this power at the local level: it is the US Constitution itself.
Cities and counties must follow #B strictly.
The better system is not based on divide-and-conquer; it is based on We The People.
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We can change our bad system today, at the local level.
We can hold the feet of our local representatives to the fire and demand our Constitution-given better system — today. It’s the law of the land.
Thank you for your article. It is very important that we combat poverty because it is demeaning, it destabilizes us all and it pushes us to emphasize our differences instead of bringing us together where we all agree.
