We The People is a layer of pancake on top of divide-and-conquer. I pay extra attention when the divided start their infighting, because that comes down to the system doing its job. The ones benefiting when the divided start punching the other divided are of course the usual suspects, the well-connected, the ones benefiting from the usual setup that mutes all others.
One in eight Americans is African American. Three out of 100 Senators are African American and that is actually an all-time high. The system promotes racism not by emphasizing the others, but by denying actual representation.
More than half of us are women and we do not even have half of that half sit in all our seats. The system promotes the suppression of women.
The following example points to racism’s success, without even mentioning it.
In 1996, New Zealand changed its two-party system to incorporate proportional voting. The number of female representatives jumped by an incredible 47 percent in the first next new election. This shows real well how the district voting system discriminates.
— -
It is not about white people not understanding what racism is; it is worse. It is about the majority getting all the seats. This supports racism. This ingrains racism. Here is how it works:
This is us, to the left. We are segregated in districts where we have to battle each other for that single seat. This is pure divide-and-conquer.
Voting minorities of as large as 49.9 percent of the voters remain unrepresented. Fifty percent plus one vote can dictate the outcome to unrepresented voting minorities. It doesn’t matter if the voting minority is African American, young adults, women, homosexuals, the poor, socialists; when not in the majority, no seat is obtained. These large voting minorities are not represented to the level of their numbers.
To the right in the image above one can see the actual We The People system. As shown 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 that they handpicked themselves. All substantial voting minorities are represented in this better system. Example.
We can try to make our neighborhood be based on equality, but if the city is divide-and-conquer, we will never succeed.
— -
When San Francisco moved from At-Large to district voting, the ugly voting system became quite obvious. Prior, in the semi-proportional system also known as city-wide, they had 6 men and 5 women in the eleven supervisor seats. After the change to district voting, the city had 10 men and 1 woman in these eleven seats (nice twist: a black woman).
The Democratic Party did their best to fix it up over the years. Wonderful as the board may appear today, the Democratic Machine tried to quickly mask the divide-and-conquer system we have with applying a nice pancake layer of We The People makeup.
It may not come as a surprise why the system was changed to the more restricted version. The Green Party had become a popular party in the Bay Area in those days, getting some of the seats in the region. Today, they are gone. By moving back to district voting, the Democrats made sure that third parties wouldn’t get their seats. Today, all SF supervisors are registered Democrats.
All across the nation, at the local level, we do not have a two-party system; it tends to be a one-party system (that we don’t talk about).
— -
Let’s not uncover and discard the good parts of our society; let’s fix the ground rules that aggravate racism and ingrains discrimination of all kinds.
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.
As shown to the left, Federal and State governments received #A from the US Constitution and unfortunately they can use this to create themselves some leeway with #B.
Cities and counties are not even mentioned in the US Constitution, and so they must fully abide by the highest document of the nation.
States did not receive the power to hand over power to third parties within that then extends their right to ignore #B to the same level as the State.
Cities and counties must follow #B strictly as declared in the US Constitution. But as you can see in the same visual to the right, they assumed those powers that they do not have. They perpetuate the divide-and-conquer system to a level that is not allowed. They should have the We The People system in place, per the highest document in the nation.
Racism may never disappear from the face of the earth. But divide-and-conquer can disappear from the face of the earth, today, and that will be a wonderful day in our struggle against racism.
If we can honor each other through actual representation, and not through a system that functions like a basketball game, then we can all speak. We will then make decisions based on the actual majority and not on just the winners occupying all seats that themselves were chosen by a majority. District voting is an exclusive form of democracy.
We all believe in We The People. We should at least get We The People at the local level, a safe place to learn about the inclusive form of democracy.
