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Is Vote Sizing a Class Issue?

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Yeap, sure is! There are other ideas of concentrating power floating around, which we explore in the what won't work and vote sizing formulas pages; but the version of vote sizing endorsed by the DEP on this website is one that judges people strictly according to their income.

Why focus on class? The first reason is that although corruption can make it next to impossible; class has the potential to be a choice. Everyone understands class, and it's a lot easier to evaluate than skin color or gender value.

Secondly, unlike so much of what's out there there is no cultism or tribalism in vote sizing. Vote sizing is no more an African solution than a Shiite, Sunni, French-Canadian, Canadian, Asian, Christian, urban, rural, women's, Jewish ...or any other solution. It applies anywhere people use money and votes - which is to say, everywhere. Rather than pitting one group against another, vote sizing recognizes that regardless of whatever affiliations we hold, we all need to learn to choose intelligently between wealth and power. (However, this doesn't mean that vote sizing is a one-world-government.) It's about time to get over our self-indulgent thoughts, grow up and realize that there are no we-good / them-evil groupings which can somehow end up resolved by attracting the attention of a higher power. Rather, there's just balanced vs. corrupt; and so we all need to find a way to sacrifice the wealth/power we don't want/need in order to live together. We need vote sizing because if nothing else, history teaches us that inclusion always works better than domination - and vote sizing leans towards allowing everyone - regardless of who they are or their class - to be equally heard.

A second issue that this brings up is the linguistic use of 'class', 'class warfare' and especially the word 'poor'. One criticism, frequently proposed by many people from the earliest incarnations of the DEP, is how we use 'poor' to describe people lacking sufficient income. While accurate, the word has a derogatory slant to it. People don't want to see themselves as 'poor', 'lower-' or 'working-' class. Add to this how the media completely saturates our environment with larger-than-life happier, prettier, healthier, wealthier people living absolutely fabulous lives - and we begin to completely reject ourselves and our class. On this site, at times, we have tried to dance around this problem by referring to poor people as 'poorer', 'underdeveloped', 'underprivileged' and 'resourceful'; but the stigma remains - that seen by the light of the church of consumerism - to which most of is belong - rich people are blessed, worthy, deserving... inherently good: while the poor are wretched, flawed, cursed, damned ... inherently evil and a danger to society.

The very word rich conjures up positive connotations - filling, interesting and intense; while poor conjures up the opposite - pathetic,  worrisome, stupid, lazy, burdensome and dirty.

With this perspective, it is a sin to be poor, and of course better to be rich. At best, poor people deserve our mercy; at worse scorn and contempt. Poor people are to blame for our problems, they drag everybody 'down', spread disease, don't care, don't do anything; poor people ought to be ashamed of themselves - while rich people, of course, should be respected, and proud of having so much as it reveals how much they're worth. So academia and editorial content is full of arguments of how we need to make more rich people, and to eliminate poor people. Rich people have all the answers - so their proponents feel free to interrupt, overtalk and basically berate anyone who suggests otherwise. However, vote sizing suggests the opposite - that rich people don't necessarily have all the answers, that both wealth and poverty can become problematic, and that being poor is not necessary a reflection of personal value. In order to prove the old definitions of what we are - like many other derogatory labels - we're going to have to take ownership of the word 'poor'; and turn it around so that it's no more and insult as rich is flattery. Vote sizing is all about offering each of us a choice - specifically a fair choice between wealth and power. If we continue to use the words rich and poor with the underlying connotations that we do, then the choice is skewed and ineffective. We need to see that our class should be a reflection of choice - not piety.

Finally, we need to ask ourselves: Who is rich? Who is poor? And most importantly, who exactly are the middle class?

If you ask most people in America what class they are, they say middle class: "I'm in the middle class". This to me is based on a notion of capitalism as a religion - and the more money you have in this religion the closer you are to God, and  the less money you have the closer to evil or the devil; and so it's kind of a sin to be poor. And that has been changed recently to be: the sin is to be working class. And so most people say that they're middle class. But a middle class person, if they lose their job, they don't have to get another job in order to keep their lives the same for nine months to a year, whereas a working class person has to get another job between 3-4 weeks or else it's wall-mart and fast food jobs for everybody...

They don't want to recognize who they are. And they're fooled, there's no real notion of what class is. For instance, what is middle class? Nobody knows what that is. They say: "I'm in the middle!" Well, okay, right, in-between Bill Gates and the guy who’s collecting bottles down on the street - but that doesn't mean that you're middle class, it just means that you're not abject poor or ultra rich...

Four weeks, for most people in America, of not working; means that their lives change radically. If you understand where you sit in the society, you understand much better where your interests lie. You understand who is on your side, and who is against you. If you indeed identify with the people who are oppressing you economically - not necessarily on purpose, not necessarily consciously - but if you identify with those people, but you are really not on their side, then you're actually becoming your own enemy... You're a working class guy if: you lose your job - you're in trouble. If you have a multiple fracture on your leg - you're in trouble; your kid won't be able to go to college. And, of course, more and more of us are being made into working class... We really need to change how we look at who we're voting into office and what we expect those people to do... That's a change in consciousness; but that's all you need in this country...

All you have to do is look who's in prison, or in the old folks homes. The other thing is that once you get old, most people in America have everything stripped from them: All of their money, then after that all of their dignity, then all of their hopes, and they're put into detention camps called 'old folks homes'. And they die there poor, and without any kind of awareness of themselves. And also the middle class and working class is a shifting thing. Most of the poorest people in America are either over 65 or under 18. This is what you have, and so what happens is that for your whole life you're impoverished as a child so that you don't get the right nutrition, you don't get the right education, you don't get the right knowledge, and then once you get old, it's everything that you made in the few years you got to work is taken away from you.

~ Walter Mosley, on The Sam Seder Show; Air America Radio, December 5th 2006.

This debate cuts right to the heart of vote sizing - the connection between wealth and power; poverty and helplessness. It's not that we want to eliminate class and force everybody to have the same amount of money; it's that we need to find a way to offer people a choice, and control, over their lives regardless of how much money their have. Vote sizing is the way to acknowledge and accept class without engaging in class warfare.