Voters are Dumbfucks.
Ballot measures that would unarguably save bags of cash were soundly rejected by hundred million dollar hubris peddling campaigns.
They work because the voters are low-information, uninformed and proud of it in spite of the real-world consequences. Let’s go over 3 ballot initiatives.
Measure B
Every year, the LA tax-payers pay $100,000,000 in interest to commercial banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America because the city hasn’t chartered its own bank.
It could do this, as in literally save $100,000,000 and then give out small business loans and make about $75,000,000 on top of that. This administrative slight of hand comes at Zero cost and creates $175,000,000 a year. There’s hundreds of municipally run public banks in the world. This is exactly how it works. No municipality which has a public bank has ever voted to reverse it. Some have had public banks for over 100 years. They work.
Public banks have historically insulated areas against contagion effects from financial collapse, such as the public bank of North Dakota, which didn’t get hit by the housing crisis. By not being caught up in the speculative Wall Street gambling and doing traditional savings & loan instruments, the conservatively run public banks stay solvent amidst crisis.
Do you want this? Well too bad! You can’t! Voters rejected this amazing opportunity to get back literally hundreds of millions of dollars a year in taxes and secure the fiscal soundness of their city. Proudly inept incompetent voters, voting from the heart — who needs to think or read things when you have guts and emotions?
Proposition 10
If a city or community wants to enact their own housing rules because they have different problems than somewhere else, they’re currently restricted from doing so because of a 1995 piece of legislation called the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act.
The crazy insanity in housing prices can’t be legally addressed because this archaic 1995 legislation ties the hands of cities and counties from taking the necessary steps.
There were many extremely rich forces against Proposition 10. They got that rich by ripping off renters with outrageous rents. They take this massive war chest from absurd prices and mounted a campaign that cost as much as the average American would make in about 3,000 years. They’re filthy rich thanks to you and defeating prop 10 keeps the party going!
Blackstone, for instance, a real estate group that manages $471,000,000,000 dropped a couple million in the $74,821,182.34 campaign that uses American flags, puppies, frowning children, the disabled, old people, and veterans to keep the status quo, that is to say, to make sure that we as a society sit on our hands and do absolutely nothing about the housing crisis.
We also had Essex Property Trust, who owns 247 apartment complexes and has $12,465,000,000 in assets throw in their hat. There was also the California Apartment Association, a trade group of landlords and apartment owners who really think the world is better off staying just as it is. They put in $52,728,306.22.
Prop 10 had so much money from wealthy rent-seekers coming in they ended up with $12.6 million unspent.
Q: How did people controlling literally hundreds of billions of dollars in apartment buildings convince the renting voter to come along with them?
A: Classically constructed bunk ads like this
Real estate groups would not be campaigning against increasing their own profits.
If prop 10 really increased costs, thus increased profits, they’d be in vocal support of it. Why would landowners spend nearly $75 million to reduce their profits?
The reality is that it would decrease costs and decrease profits. But don’t worry, they have the exact opposite message also covered with this liberal looking senior:
They advertise the exact opposite messages and at the same time make it both against the proposition. It would raise and lower the rents, simultaneously! What magic!
Beyond the hysterically nonsense message, this is classic hoodwink advertising where they use what could be absolutely fictitious people to screw over the American voter. It could be total fiction as they have no obligation to having real people or real stories. They can claim whatever they want.
There are recent widely covered court cases which uphold the rights of political operatives to say whatever they want regardless of whether it’s true or not. The campaigners can say someone’s a veteran that they simply hired from central casting. They can put up a stock picture of someone who died 20 years ago, put a fake name under it and attribute whatever quote they please. This is their exercise of free speech according to the courts and there’s no problem with just making stuff up.
They usually don’t need to because it’s easy enough to find people who are willing to sell themselves out as political prostitutes to any cause if the price is right.
The campaigns usually only have 4–7 key people that you repeatedly see. That’s it. It’s the same lady over and over again. Think back the last time you saw a campaign. They don’t need a lot of people, just literally a minivan of them and they’ll completely sweep the American voter every time.
This minivan of people could be actors or political operatives. Everyone has their price and with $74 million to spend on the campaign, they’ll be able to find them.
For instance, here’s a nice manufactured ad
Although the place above looks like an apartment or house, it’s much more likely either a sound-stage or a complicated all-day well-funded shoot. How do I know? There’s a floodlight through the window, a giant professional camera reflected from the microwave and it’s using standard studio professional lighting:
Speaking of a hustle, the lady in it, Lexie Solorio beyond being a concerned apparently from what the ad implied, single mother with 4 children, has worked on a number of campaigns previously. In 2014, she worked against Proposition 46 which would have made medical doctors (and thus HMO and networks) more financially liable for malpractice and negligence. A nice $59 million by the health care industry went into defeating that.
She’s a for-pay political operative that gets hired by billion dollar groups to be the concerned multi-racial suburban mother, the one you can relate to!
Dumbfuck voters give into these basic primitive political hacks every time. It’s obvious and frustrating. Anyway, back to proposition 10.
We could try to reverse that stupid piece of legislation that ties local municipalities from 23 years ago. We could, but we won’t. Voters rejected this blindingly clear and obvious step that would empower local municipalities to be able to write their own laws.
Pictures of old ladies and veterans have led to the defeat of this obvious legislation. The low information voters, swayed by YouTube ads have spoken. You lose, I lose, we all lose!
Proposition 8
Medical costs are out of control in the US. We all know and talk about it. But what happens when people have the chance to stop this insanity and control the prices?
They say “Oh, no thank you! Please, go ahead, raise the prices even more!”
See above for Prop 49 for the first example. Second example is from 2016 with another price control measure in California, proposition 61, designed to reduce medical costs for veterans.
Remember, the taxpayer pays for the Veterans health care, all this would literally do is tell the medical industry that they won’t be able to rip off the taxpayer.
Q: How did they get the voters to go along with them?
A: They used the same tactics above. In fact, they used the same artists. The same firm even. Here they are doing the exact same thing 2 years earlier.
Prices would be collectively set like they are by insurance companies literally every day. Prop 61 would have empowered the CA Veterans Affairs Administration to be able to negotiate on behalf of the tax-payer like Blue Shield or any other insurance firm already does.
What happened? It failed of course. The voters rejected it, by a huge margin. Because they fall for the same tricks every time.
This time around, proposition 8 was going to cap the ripoff pricing of dialysis patients. I literally mean protection against ripoff:
…requiring dialysis clinics to issue refunds to patients or patients’ payers for revenue above 115 percent of the costs of direct patient care.
Basically this says “You can’t just charge whatever you want after the fact and then expect someone to pay”. Right now they can. It’s not only totally legal but it’s exactly what they do. This measure would have stopped that.
But no! By literally 2-to-1, the voter decided it was OK for the clinics to ripoff the patients as much as possible.
Q: How did they get convinced that this was the right move?
A: This should start to look familiar…
Here’s the thing. They use the same behavioral bullshit artist tactics every time. At a cost of $111,462,540.26, publicly traded health care companies like DaVita ($67,027,871.53 contribution) successfully convinced the voters once again that nothing should stand between the health care industry and their sweet sweet profits.
It worked. The day after the election their stock “popped” and the investors made a lot of money by screwing over dialysis patients.
Their $67 million investment got them back about $1,416 million on day one! A 21x return on investment and all they have to do is keep our health system broken and screw over the public with phony bullshit ads.
Not being able to compensate the boards of directors and C-level management tens of millions of dollars puts patients lives at risk with this dangerous proposition, somehow, I assure you! Anyway, you don’t want to do that? Do you?!
Here’s another frowning man, probably bankrupting his family with hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical fees and large amounts of sweet profit, won’t you vote to screw him over?
Same Game Different Name
It’s the same tactics every time and voters don’t ever wise up. They continue to fall for the same nonsense.
These are blatant, easy to spot, simple to execute nakedly run political stunts. They’re like some dad-tricks that only a toddler would ever fall for, but for some reason, people are utterly convinced by them every time.
There’s only one conclusion: Most voters are inept uneducated fools who flock to the polls and vote to give maximum handouts to greedy bastards who run the ads.
We get the democracy we deserve and the government we commiserate in as an output of our collective consciousness, which is clearly at about an elementary school level comprehension of how the world works. That’s why the congress-members are so unbelievably misinformed and ignorant. It’s a reflection of who we are as a society.
This infantile and docile regression into a society of lazy ignorant fools is how every imperialist empire that doesn’t succumb to invasion collapses. Right before the collapse of Rome during the crisis of the 3rd century they had emperors like Commodus, a vain and impudent man who was more concerned with statues being built that made him out to be a Hercules then in actual ruling. Instead of managing the great Roman empire, after a devastating fire, he was more concerned in assigning new names to the places, granting titles of nobility and erecting new monuments in his honor.
They let the empire languish, the polis became sloven and uneducated over generations as they forgot the lessons of the past and soon they had a year of 4 different emperors. It was the beginning of the end. Same thing happened to great corporate empires like GE, Sears, Kodak, Chrysler, and GM.
America is similar to late 2nd century Rome: An anti-intellectual culture with a proudly naivete public who has an absurd dedication to passive consumption and reaction. They are monolingual as a lifestyle decision, don’t know where places are on a map or what history is about or what’s going on in the world and that’s fine. They are confused about the past and just make absurd things up and go with them.
Words like liberal, leftist, communist, socialist, anarchist, conservative, capitalism, right-wing, nationalist, fascist — these, in practice, become effectively synonyms for the words bad and good. Intellectual author’s names get misappropriated with impunity under the mostly correct assumption that nobody within earshot has bothered to read the actual writings.
And even then, we aren’t allowed to challenge or converse about politics in American culture so such indefensible ignorance festers without anyone being socially awkward or facing rejection from peers. This is what a culture of protected sacred incompetence gives us. The only politics they hear is the echo chamber of a consumption media. It never matures to a conversation so it never gets challenged.
We are like the Tower Records, Borders Books or Blockbuster Video of nations, sitting on top of a crumbling foundation, committed to an ignorant arrogance, clearly getting played and undermined at every step but persisting on as blind fools, a collectivist version of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
Our politics is total hogwash and it’s what we deserve. We’ll continue to pay out the nose at Nordic level taxes for African level infrastructure until we get our act together, fix our society, up our political conscious and stop being such acquiescent complacent fools who fall for such obvious nonsense.
We’ve got a long way to go to fix this place.
