Thread by @RealSteveCox

Neither party wants to address the root causes of any problem we face because they rely on these problems to campaign against each other. The best you’ll get from either party are ineffective laws that they’ll try to sell afterward as “helping”.

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But the goal isn’t to help us. The goal is to garner and maintain power for their party and its big-money backers.

To appeal to voters, they pass ineffective laws and then launch PR campaigns, while the problem they’re supposedly addressing remains unchanged.
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Example:
The Affordable Care Act was a handout to health-insurers, providers and Big Pharma, but the Democrats tried to present it as the greatest healthcare reform in history in order to garner voter support.

It’s only gotten worse since.
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This has been the pattern for decades. Another example:
In 1994, during the peak of Gun violence (the rate of gun homicides peaked in 1993 and has dropped by *half* since then) Democrats passed the “Assault Weapons Ban” despite those guns being used in about 1% of gun crime.
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Then they said “See? We’re helping!” But they also put a 10-year sunset provision in the law. Why?

Because it would allow them to campaign on needing to renew that law in 10 years. There’s no other reason. But it didn’t work. The ban expired in 2004.
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And in the years since the ban expired, gun homicides continued to decline until 2015. And “assault weapons” still account for a tiny fraction of gun homicides.

In fact, every year, fewer people are killed with any kind of rifle than are killed with no weapons at all.
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But this is how our system “works” today: Politicians take tragic events and use them to get good PR for themselves and their party. They benefit from tragedies so why would they ever actually want to stop these tragedies from happening?
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Unlike partisan politicians, I actually want to reduce/eliminate gun violence/gun deaths. To do that, we must:
Introduce a strong social safety net that includes universal (mental) healthcare, a drastic reduction in inequality, better education...
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Socioeconomic inequality is at the root of all crimes with victims. And it’s the *actual* reason we have far more gun homicides in the US compared to the rest of the “first world”.
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The source for this chart is an article in The Guardian from 2012 that broke down gun-ownership rates and gun-homicide rates for every country on the planet that released their numbers. The common denominator for gun homicides is *not* the number of guns owned...
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The US has by far the most guns owned per capita. But there are quite a few countries with higher gun-homicide rates.

100% of the countries with a lower rate of gun homicides than the US have stronger social safety nets and less inequality.

The opposite’s also true.
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Gun laws won’t do *anything* to reduce mass shootings. We’re way past the tipping point. There are far too many/much guns/ammo in circulation for prohibition to reduce gun violence.

But we *can* fix this problem by improving our society itself.
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And we should be improving society anyway because it’s the right thing to do.

The problem is, for reasons previously stated, the parties have no interest in actually improving our society.

We have to start voting both parties out.

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In order to address what ails our society, the duopoly’s investors need to start losing. And a since the same companies/industries fund both parties, the only way to take these seats away is to defeat both parties.
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Let’s start with California’s 39th district. I believe this will open the floodgates and get many more independents elected to congress.

And once that starts happening, the parties will be forced to change their behavior or go extinct.
CrowdPAC.com/c/stevecoxforc…
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@threadreaderapp please unroll.