Tristan, it’s a writing style difference — even if not ALL politicians do this, the vast majority do, and those that don’t are still subjected to such an environment which affects their ability to operate effectively — i.e. the nature of a Darwinian environment is that everybody is effected. This is all implied, but yes let’s not belabor this point . I can now tell that you’re not a troll.
Yes the political system is not setup to allow anything other than this behavior, and yes it would be great to get money out of politics. However I’m sure you realize deep down, that this is pretty much impossible, at least not in the short term. And in order to even get a seat at the table, you need money, otherwise you are IGNORED and there are not enough regular people in politics to do a damned thing about that. So for now we’re stuck with it. For those who haven’t had the privilege and experienced the nightmare of working on public policy, it’s all about bodies — that need to get paid. So it’s a simple math equation regarding who has the most money. Policy is created in myriads of public and private meetings, which require attendees, people to follow up, to coordinate deals, etc. One of the most striking feelings that you get after a while of working in this environment is that it is a herd (driven by monied interest). Your last vestiges of a childhood view that somebody is running the place, some logical group of people who exhibit a responsible stewardship is blown out of the water. This is NO wise person, no responsible group making sure the discussions make sense. Everybody is assuming that somebody else will do that, kind like when everybody thinks somebody is going to hit the ball in volleyball and nobody does and it just falls on the ground without anybody even trying.
And I suppose you can’t blame people because for most people working in politics, it’s not their job to make sure it all makes sense. They are being paid by their company or sponsors to do a job. There are exceptions like AOC who gets her power from the people, but she’s one of the few exceptions. Regardless of what one thinks about her, hopefully we’ll see more people who derive their power from the people and not by outspending their opponents.
And even the good people working in the system, for example, in administrative law, can’t handle what’s happening. For example I was at a hearing on solar energy deployment in California and the utilities sent in about 25 lawyers, and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)sent in 2 young inexperienced lawyers, and there was me. The 25 lawyers threw monkey wrenches into the discussion talking about all kinds of irrelevant horseshit, and I couldn’t get us back on track, because I was all alone. The EDF people were largely useless because they were meek and inexperienced. I was pissed off at the judge and his assistants for letting this charade go on, and went up to him ready to give him a piece of my mind. When I walked up to him, the totally unexpected happened. He thanked me profusely for coming and told me that him and his aides were so overwhelmed with the workload just following all their procedures of fairness, and didn’t know the economics, science and engineering which I knew, and he practically begged me to keep coming. The problem was I wasn’t getting paid and literally couldn’t afford to keep coming back time and time again. He even tried to get some budget to have the State of California pay me, but he couldn’t get it. There was nobody to support me in any way financially or emotionally — and it wasn’t for a lack of trying. People liked to talk and talk about how much they care, but when it came to reading articles, commenting, posting, sharing, and giving a little money nothing happened. So I quit after two years of trying to figure out how to make a go of this. I’m not independently wealthy, I needed to make money to put food on the table. There you go. It’s incredible how many people don’t understand this environment and don’t want to, they just want to bitch and moan.
“Organized greed is more effective than disorganized democracy” — by about a thousand fold or more.
