Mosquito Curtains Blog

Somehow, I just can’t align myself with either the Republicans or the Democrats. I am an independent voter. But What does that mean? We have no platform and our only agenda seems to be to balance between two polar extremes. We vote against who we don’t want as much as we vote for who we favor, but, I have an idea…

I had lunch with an Israeli professor at Berkeley when I was a student and we were discussing foreign politics. At one point he made the statement if the US withdrew support from Israel that the Arab nations would massacre the population. From my sheltered upbringing, I told him that I found it hard to believe that anyone could be that extreme. He made a very interesting comment, “It takes only a small fraction of the population to execise passion for an ideology, and the masses will either do nothing or get swept up in the passion similar to the dynamics of a mob.

25 years later his message still resonates with me but for a different arena. To get anything done in a group there needs to be a small kernal of passion. A large group can get moving if there is passion. The seeds of passion can be surprisingly small if it is determined enough. The 2012 election is ripe for an independent movement to make its debut in politics.

INSTITUTIONALIZED CORRUPTION

US politics suffers from institutionalized corruption. Polititians are playing by the rules, but the rules are fundamentally corrupt. Influence is purchased because elections are expensive, plain and simple, and I will not belabor the point. A polititian isn’t a polititian if he doesn’t get re-elected. We the people, listen to the outrageous rhetoric with no recourse but to shrug it off.  During election season, we sit around our TVs like we are watching a football rivalry between two college teams. We hear over and over, “We good, They bad” and it is sickening. To be a polititian there are certain practicalities and while everyone seems to be playing within tolerated boundaries, the rules of the game are flawed.

The polititians aren’t bad people, the system is flawed. But it is in no polititians best interest to change the rules since in the current system they hold a political seat. “What? You want to change the rules after I’ve just won my seat? Maybe the rules are warped, but I just won.”  Whenever rules change, someone benefits and someone loses. You can always expect resistance to rule changes. But what are we to do?

As an example, back in the 90′s it used to be that if a polititian didn’t use their campaign money, they could keep it. It was a real recipe for legalized graft. Polititians knew something needed to be done but it wasn’t in their personal best interest to do anything about it. The only way the bill passed was to “grandfather” existing polititians and restrict only new money. Not very sincere politics, but at least it got done.

AN INDEPENDENT AGENDA

I think that independents can rally around 3 general themes that I will discuss in greater detail on another post. The three themes are Productivity, Security, and Transparancy. Sounds like something that could be universally accepted, but you will find tremendous resistance to all three by highly motivated corruptors of the system. It will be worth reading and the conclusions will startle you.

HOW TO UNIFY AN INDEPENDENT MOVEMENT

Independents don’t need to elect their own candidates to get their agenda advanced. In fact it would be counterproductive to do so. When Ross Perot ran for president, he lwas a conservative with a change agenda and simply stole votes from George Bush Sr. A vote for Ross Perot paradoxically was a vote against a large portion of what he stood for.

Using game theory, imagine there are 3 gunfighters with the following accuracy, A=90% B=70% and C=35%.  All three are in a standoff. They fire one shot, and if any one survives, they continue until there is no more than 1 survivor.  Who has the best chance of survival?  When you do the math it is gunfighter C who has the least accuracy. Let the Republicans and Democrats slug it out and sling mud at each other.  Using this strategy, Independents are immune from attack. Imagine now there are 2 gunfighters and you have one 100% accurate pistol for sale. Get the idea?

Since elections are won by a narrow margin, a determined block of 3 million voters could easily have a sharp impact on the outcome of an election. The conservative base will always vote Republican and the Liberal base will always vote Democrat, but it is the Independent voter that will elect the next president. They just need to be organized. 3 million voters isn’t a majority it is 1% of the general population.

Now the question is how do you get 3 million voters to move in the same direction? I suspect that as few as 150,000 passionate individuals can get 3 million voters to move in the same direction. I will make the bold statement that 150,000 determined individuals can move this country in a different direction. We won’t have our own elected officials, we don’t need or want our own elected officials. We would be a defacto coalition party to whomever supports our agenda. In my view this is the only chance for real change in a system that is fundamentally corrupt.

Vote for the candidate most likely to advance the Independent agenda. If he or she doesn’t deliver, take every step to vote him out and try again with a fresh body. It won’t take too long to get the message across.

More to follow in future blogs: