I've always wondered how you make politicians keep their promises. It seems that politicians are like movies: you buy the ticket, then you see the movie. If you don't like the movie, that's tough. You're stuck with having bought something that you don't want, and there is absolutely no way to get your money back if the product is bad.
Politicians are the same way; you elect somebody, and then you find that the person you elected is totally different from the person who was campaigning. All the fancy promises are totally turned around, and suddenly find that you're engaging in very expensive wars that you don't want, losing privileges that you as a citizen were promised by the same people, and in general getting screwed by the people you've put so much effort into electing.
How do we get around this? How can we make sure that the politicians we've elected stay true to their promises after they are elected?
There's an old proverb, "buying a pig in a poke". Here's what it means:
Pig-in-a-poke is an idiom that refers to a confidence trick originating in the Late Middle Ages, when meat was scarce but apparently rats and cats were not.
The scheme entailed the sale of a suckling pig in a poke (bag). The wriggling bag would actually contain a cat (not particularly prized as a source of meat) that was sold to the victim in an unopened bag. The French term acheter (un) chat en poche (to buy a cat in a bag) refers to an actual sale of this nature, as do many European equivalents, while the English expression refers to the appearance of the trick.[1]
A common colloquial expression in the English language, to buy a pig in a poke, is to make a risky purchase without inspecting the item beforehand. The phrase can also be applied to accepting an idea or plan without a full understanding of its basis. Similar expressions exist in other languages, most of them meaning to buy a cat in a bag.
Electing politicians, most of the time, is like buying a pig in a poke. That is to say, you think you're buying something, but you're really buying something else. And that something else that you're buying is something that you're stuck with for the next several years, perhaps more. In fact, that same politician can be elected on lies several times in row, with credulous voters actually believing that that person is going to fulfill his promises, when in actuality this person is being paid off handsomely by people who have much more money than the voters do. This should be illegal, but it isn't.
Take the example of Mr. Lieberman; he's taken more than $1 million for the insurance industry, and so he's effectively bought by them. they have so much more money than the voters do that they can buy anybody in office. Where are the voters going to come up with $1 million to throw Mr. Lieberman's way? It's all very well to contribute to Mr. Lieberman's opponent in the next election, but that's not going to help the health-care crisis right now, and 1 million bucks in this guy's pocket speaks a lot louder than some election in the future when he will just lie himself into office again. And he's not the only one; when I see the goings-on in the Senate, I wonder how many backroom deals are struck, even by so-called "honest" politicians. At this stage, I'm starting to believe that they're all massively on the take, and I really want to sweep them all out of office.
This is just one obvious example of the problem that we face as voters. We elect somebody, and then we see this person turn around and do exactly what they promised not to do, while suppressing things that we wanted them to do. And this is not just a trivial problem; many people's lives depend on these politicians.
Now, I'm not advocating violence against these people, although sometimes I get so frustrated that in the darkest part of my heart I do wish that that would happen. I really prefer to have things settled without bloodshed, but sometimes when I consider the fact that tens of thousands, if not millions of people will die because politicians are corrupt, I get very angry.
Now I don't have a solution to this. I don't know how we can make politicians hold to their promises, because even in one term a politician can make himself a couple of million dollars from some company that wants legislation to be shoved through that does not benefit the people. This happens every day, in almost every country that I can think of, and it's gotten to be a real disease. If I were a politician, I would wonder whether some of the people that I am screwing might not get angry enough to "take matters into their own hands". Here in the United States we've seen plenty of that, unfortunately. And even more unfortunately, it's usually the wrong politicians that get shot. So violence is not going to solve this problem, and I really don't know what we can do to keep politicians honest, and to force them to fulfill the promises that they made when they were running for office. Unfortunately, right now there is absolutely no way to keep these people honest, and we're seeing the results of that right now, with two wars based on lies, the health care crisis and the fancy dancing that's going on around it, and so much other legislation that is not for the people but truly against them and their best interests.
I welcome any comments that may suggest how we can solve this problem.