a. Discord Many people would claim that the current uprising of protesters lack a coherent shared vision.

And they are right in a very important sense. If you ask a few of us what we want our country to become, you will probably receive some radically different answers. Such a situation would seem to threaten our efcacy as a political movement -- how can we bring about a change in this country when we cannot even agree on what this country should become? But this criticism is wrong. The system has been gamed, the procedure has been rigged. For although every vote may be cast in good faith, moneyed interests wage a constant campaign to inuence the overall results. The fact of the matter is that money can be used to inuence political campaigns, and that every voter, no matter how well-informed and well-intentioned, is a point in a game played by advertisers, corporations, and highly paid political strategists. At some point, we have passed the threshold from simple advocacy into something much, much more sinister. There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to convince someone to think the way that you think, and it is a forgivable sin to bend the facts a little in self-interest. This is only until after you have crossed a certain point and the scale of your efforts transforms your advocacy into manipulation and your white lies into fraud. It's a sad truth that the universal and forgivable human weakness to compromise integrity for success is the very same weakness that leads the powerful to defraud the people out of an effective and fair democracy. It's an even sadder one that it has become almost impossible to obtain or maintain power in this country unless the compromise of your integrity is an everyday occurrence. d. A Weak-Minded Organism When you try to convince one person, or a dozen people, or a perhaps even a thousand people to think the way you want them to think, you're advocating for an opinion, which is something every person of conviction must do at some point. But at a certain point, a line is crossed, and freedom and reason boil away into statistics and money. People are free agents of reason at the same time that they are parts of a weak-minded organism. For while every person decides what justice is by thought, our society, a group of people, decides what justice is by the democratic process. This process is not thought, but is rather an amalgamation and simplication of the decisions of individuals. These decisions, while free, follow certain statistical patterns. Thus, by simply targeting an advertising campaign to excite certain parts of the voting block rather than others, or by choosing to highlight a certain issue for the sake of ignoring others, it is possible to inuence the result of an election. For example, a multi-million dollar advertising campaign to question a politician's stance on abortion doesn't make We likely never will be able to agree entirely on what America should become. Marxists, anarchists, libertarians, and plain old liberals; we likely won't even be able to agree on most issues of government. This is an absolute reality. But it is not the only one. For although we are in dissonance on many issues, we are in absolute consensus on one core belief: That the rich and powerful of this nation have massed absurd levels of wealth by manipulating the rule-making institutions of this country to their own advantage. This is the advantage that has widened the gap between the rich and the poor, that has weakened the post-bailout reforms to the point of impotence. This is the advantage that ensures that the political normal in this country remains churlish obstructionism concealed by a veneer of spray-on ideology, all for the sake of protecting the vested interests of big money corporate donors. This is unjust. b. The Vision of Justice in Democracy Most good people have an idea of what justice is, and they have a vision of what form our society should take to best serve that vision of justice. We often disagree on what that vision should be. There are profound agreements, but there are also irreconcilable differences. The beauty of democracy is not that it serves the vision of justice of any one man, but that it gives us a fair way to resolve these differences, and create a government that can both act as a whole while still respecting it's parts. This is because democracy employs a decision procedure to sum up the diverse wishes of the people into a single set of laws. Because of democracy, we have the ability to act in unison without complete agreement. But our decision procedure has been corrupted. What should be a fair way of resolving ideological differences has been rigged to serve the interests of the powerful. c. A Sad Lack of Integrity

any individual voter to do anything. But it does guarantee that (say) 80% of evangelical christians in that district will vote against that candidate. The individual voter is free, but the election is controlled. The will of every individual is like a drop of water that follows it's own natural path, but GE owns the dam, the levee, and the pipes.

The fact of the matter is, because the people follow these statistical and demographic facts, the actual decisions of individuals become irrelevant when someone is spending millions of dollars to excite voters in their favor. While the will of individual americans remains intact, the will of the people becomes horribly compromised. How representative can an election be when a multibillion dollar corporation can kill the political chances of virtually any candidate on their whim?

e. Freedom and Impossibility

We are faced with a daunting task. What we want is to change the rules in this country so that those who already have too much power have a great deal less. We can only expect to be handled, for those who benet from the system to attempt to coop our movement and channel the very anger and passion which threatens them into the usual devices, and attempt to use it as yet another tool to maintain power. Those who cannot be diverted they will attempt to disenfranchise, to ignore and to ridicule.

We have only one advantage, and that is the truth. Every attempt will be made to t this movement into the same old context, but as the demonstrations show, the American people are fed up with the same old context. They know that the system is broken. They know they are being gamed. They know that the current class of politician is made up almost entirely of shamelessly opportunistic political cowards, and that the rare exception is, simply by virtue of being honest, largely incapable of bringing about any signicant change in this country. If we keep our eye on justice, and stay focused on the goal of changing, no really changing the political system, and if we don't give up, We will win. If we make it politically expedient to be a decent human being and create a political system that rewards integrity rather than cowardice, they won't have a choice but to play along. They won't have a choice but to do the right thing.
x. Changes

1. Implement severe restrictions on the donations businesses can make to political campaigns. -We cannot completely ban the participation of business in politics. But we can make it a fair playing ground. We should impose a law to prevent individual or corporate donations to campaigns or PACs from surpassing $25,000, and we must greatly simplify campaign nance law to prevent corporations from abusing current loopholes or creating new ones. Everybody has a rst amendment right to spend money to voice their opinion. But we must enforce a limit to prevent these funded opinions from drowning out the voices of all others.
To Request a PDF of this pamphlet or an older version of this pamphlet, e-mail the author at scotthargarten@gmail.com, or download it at hypotheticallycorrect.wordpress.com. Comments, Criticism, and Complaint are Eagerly Welcomed. Sock it to me, baby. Feel free to distribute this or any copy of this pamphlet to any person you see t.

2. Greatly simply the federal budget and tax law to make it possible for anyone to understand where our money's going. -Although most laws and budget allocations are open to public investigation, the current budget is so complicated that it makes it impossible for any nonexpert to have any but the vaguest idea what their government is spending their money on. There is simply too much regulation to understand. This does not necessarily mean that the government must spend less, only that it must be possible to hold the government accountable for what it does spend. And if accountability isn't possible, than a fair and just democracy isn't either. 3. Boycott media sources that allow themselves to be manipulated by the powerful. -It is currently impossible to be a protable news source in this country unless you play by the rules of the powerful; access is granted to the cooperative, and advertising dollars are denied to the rebellious. Actively express your disapproval for sources that play along, and boycott those that excel in it. Until the media is punished for this sort of behavior, it will remain impossible to maintain integrity and be successful as a reporter. You're doing them a favor in the long run. 4. Correct the injustices of the current political system -Whatever those would be. One thing is clear: No matter what your political beliefs are, those in power will not permit that justice to be realized unless they see it in their own interest. And thus, unless things change, every vision will be either denied or twisted to serve the designs of an oligarchy of manipulation. Justice is possible, but only if we change the rules of the game rather then let ourselves be used as a part of it.

A Pamphlet Against the Strategic Abuse of the Democratic System by the Powerful

The Manipulation of Democracy

Scott K. Hargarten